Chris Lewis

Miles Driven: 1,100+
States Visited: 3
Seeing tons of cool sites: Priceless

Earlier this month, Cressie and I took a trip out West. On the trip, we went through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, visiting Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, Valley of Fire State Park, Brianhead Ski Resort, Zion National Park, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, and Red Rocks Canyon. If you want a nice overview of our trip on a map, check this out! If you want to see the pictures, they are all here and the highlights will slowly be added to Flickr. For a more in-depth description of the trip, read on!

These days, it seems like every job opening is posted to the web, and without the proper tools, sifting through all of them can be extremely time consuming.  When I was job hunting, I came up with a great system that made finding the relevant jobs I cared about very easy, and all it required from me was checking my RSS feeds daily.  I’ve posted the system that I used since I’ve had a couple of people ask me about it – I hope it is helpful to anyone looking for a job (Note: I am not looking for one currently, I’ve just finally gotten around to writing up the methods I used)!

Every year for the past several years, I have gone on a cruise known as The Rock Boat. This is a week-long cruise where approximately 30 bands are on board, and there are concerts every day from about 12 noon until 3am.

This year I had not been planning on going – I chose instead to use the money for the my 10 day trip out West to Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, and skiing at Brianhead (we are leaving for this trip in less than 2 weeks!). The past few weeks leading up to the cruise I had a lot of people trying to talk me into going.

Update – see end for update

Recently, while looking at my Comcast Bill, I decided to look at their current offerings. To my surprise, I ran across the “Digital Double Play” package. For only $66 they offer their Digital Cable package with Channel 1 on Demand, plus High Speed Internet. My current package is Limited Basic Cable ($18.95) with Performance Plus Internet ($52.95) for a total of ~$70. (As an aside, it is a total rip off that they tack on a $15 fee for not doing cable. When I signed up, I just wanted internet, only to find that there was a $15 charge per month for having “only” internet. My choices were to pay $15 for nothing, or $18 for limited basic)

For the uninitiated, the Eye-Fi memory card is a SD memory card with wireless capabilities built in, allowing automated uploading of your images as you take them without requiring a connection to a computer. You simply walk to a hotspot or a wireless access point you have registered with and your images are uploaded to the web for you.

With that being said, here is the problem:

My Macbook Pro was purchased in spring of 2006. At the time, I decided to choose the one hard drive Apple offered that was 7200 RPM – specifically, the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB drive (ST910021AS). Over the past year or so, I found myself constantly running out of disc space, and decided it was time to do something about it. I decided upon the Western Digital Scorpio drive – a 320GB drive that is 5400RPM (WD3200BEVT).

Upon first look at the new drive specifications I was a little worried, as I wasn’t sure the effect dropping down from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive would have on my systems performance.

This site has been basically non-functional for about a year and a half…way too long! So, I’m slowly re-building it up. So far the only content of any usefulness can be found on the sidebar.

You can see what music I’ve been listening to with the Last.FM widget, and see some random postings/comments around the internet with the FriendFeed widget. You can see the most recent images I’ve posted in the “Flickr recent photos” section. Finally, if you want to see my full Flickr gallery, click on Photography then Flickr Photostream.

I also have a self-hosted gallery (Photography -> Gallery) which I’m going to slowly work on loading images into – just a warning though, I have a lot of images so it will take a while! And shortly I hope to have that gallery fully integrated into the site, but for now the way it works will have to do.

Here’s to hoping I keep this up and running (and hopefully with fresh content) fairly frequently!