ardenstone

Sorry for the lack of updates folks, but I’ve been doing some contract work for the University of San Diego (helping implement their Banner system, we’re doing Online Registration at the moment). It’s a fun project, but the hours have been a little brutal. Only one night without any sleep, but others have come close. Last week I worked a hair under 100 hours, which is a new personal record. Things are starting to slow a bit now and I’ve actually seen Christy again which is nice. Unfortunately I’m still getting to work at 5:30am so my sleep schedule is a little whacked out.

The upshot to all of this is positive income! So of course I spent some of that and purchased a bottle each of Tori Amer and Pimm’s #1 the other day. I’ve now finally tried the Pimm’s Cup which is indeed refreshing. I’m looking forward to drinking more. I wanted to splurge and buy a bottle of Laphroaig 15 year which is my favorite scotch, but BevMo didn’t have any. I really need to find a superior liquor store in San Diego, but so far no luck. There’s always shopping online at Hi-Time Wine which has a delightfully ludicrous selection.

Right, time for bed.

In the spirit of last year’s birthday card, my wonderful mother sent me another blast from the past. Because I enjoy public humiliation, and am in my final crunch before graduating so am not writing any posts of substance, I’m showing it to you.

Christy prefers the title, “How I Shaved His Thick Skull”. We took some photos during the cutting process, so might as well post them here. Unfortunately we didn’t have another camera person, so no action shots of Christy, even though she did most of the work.

All of the thumbnails can be clicked on if you really need a closer view. The last photo of my hair pre-shaving. It’s pretty much just straight out of the shower at this point, so a mess. I should be chopped off!

We start off with initial hacking via scissors.

Christy’s demonstration of what I would look like in a mohawk. Tempting to stop right here, but we tarried on.

Getting shorter… We started with the scissors and would later move to “buzzing” with the beard trimmer. I’m not the hairy beast (on my back and shoulders) that these pictures may indicate, that’s pretty much all cut hair.

Look, a shaved monkey! I actually kind of like it at this length. Something to look forward during the inevitable “put it back on!”

At this point we’ve switched to the beard trimmer. Christy was a little nervous about using it without the guard, so I did some testing to make sure it wouldn’t tear up my scalp too badly. The guard clogs after about one stroke so just wasn’t useful.

Stubble!

Some of my ex-hair.

With a little glue we can still fix it!

I jumped back in the shower, added some shaving oil and gel and then did the final shave by hand. Christy did most of the back, which is handy because there’s a few moles that way.

The final product a few days later, the same day shots are in the last post. No more helmet hair!

Guess What?

(more…)

Ok kiddlies, gather ’round the campfire for an exciting yarn about internet links and procrastination.

{sound of crickets}

Shocking. Anyhow, the other day Tavern Wench added me to her list of links. Of course, as soon as she did this, I changed the location of this blog (my sense of timing is a well oiled machine). Now, if you haven’t already visited her, I’d highly recommend you go there now and read a talented story teller recount tales from the bar industry. In addition, you can find a myriad of drink recipes, and easily kill the rest of your day (week?) in a most enjoyable manner.

But we’re here to talk about me. I noticed she’d added the link because WordPress has this feature where it notes incoming links. This is total nerd gold, so of course I poked around to find that it’s using Technorati. Now, Technorati’s been around a while and I’ve heard a few folks who really love it. Mainly it seems more status symbol than useful site, but perhaps that’s just because I haven’t really explored it. Anyhow, I go and search for “Ardenstone” and get nothing. After some mucking about, you need at least “ardenstone.com” to get that one link. Either way I’m not included in the “Blog Directory.” Now this upsets my inner nerd a little.

So I go to add a link. Except you can’t unless you register. I just went through process of trying to figure out which of my 900 registrations link to the old address for this blog, so that just isn’t going to happen. The other thing I can do is add a little link back to Technorati, which its search engines will find and I’ll be flagged a blog (or something). Except this is the first time I’ve been to Technorati for months, so why am I going to direct my 3 readers there? So instead I look at their popular search terms, and see a lot of rubbish except for Violent Acres which I’ve never heard of and ends up being just the sort of blog that gets all the other bloggers in a tizzy. And loves it so adds fuel to the fire, and queue endless circles. Isn’t the internet awesome? Of course a I read too many articles (it is a fun blog) and end up a couple of links later at Inkscape which is an open source SVG editor. This keys off an interest of mine and I’m tempted to download it because vector graphics rocks, and so does free & open source software. This is when I come to my senses and decide that none of this is helping me get done what I want to do today. So instead I spend fifteen minutes writing a blog post about it.

I love the internet.

We’re back in sunny San Diego, and happy to be so. It was delightful to see our friends and family, but Ohio really is a gloomy place this time of year. We had a great time over the holidays, and much thanks to the many kind folks who hosted and entertained us through a whirlwind ten days.

I ended up sneaking a few hours of walking around Columbus a couple of days before our scheduled arrival (during a trip from one set of parents to the other). Wandering about in the chilly, grey, familiar streets made me smile and the gloomy, urban isolation was much needed. Columbus is a remarkably easy city to live in, and certainly as we cast our minds forward to what happens after grad-school (now less than a year to go!), it is by far the strongest midwestern option. There are a surprising number of really good restaurants, bars, art galleries and fun things to do and consume in a small, walkable area. We have friends there, and family two hours or less in either direction. The housing prices are also reasonable, which translates to ridiculously low in comparison with here. These are all attractive.

On the other side, Columbus is just so small. It seems a little limiting, and dear lord do they get a lot of grey days. Even when the sun shone, it was weaker than it is here. Obviously, San Diego is going to win the weather comparison with most places, but the larger city is non-trivial. Our apartment right now requires driving to anything interesting, and that’s a big negative. There are some neighborhoods here, and moving into one of the few seems a necessity. Southern California is really addicted to its cars and urban sprawl, things that really get on my nerves. I spent today (my only day here and between classes) limited to what I could walk or bike to since I don’t have a car and didn’t get up early to take Christy to and from work. I had plenty to do here, so the main problem with this was getting a hair cut at the only local option, one which speaks mostly Vietnamese (the diversity in this place is great) and when that is put together with me being fairly clueless as to how I want my hair to look, the result is the shortest haircut I can remember. I snapped a photo, which is the one thousandth shot I’ve taken with this camera (the first was taken 2006/06/30, so that’s about about a thousand in six months):

It’s good to be home. Happy 2007, everyone!

While my fellow MBA students are rejoicing in being done with classes, I am grinding out one last gigantic project. Our adviser sent out a, “congratulations on finishing, now enjoy your holiday!” note that about caused me to jump out my window in exasperation. If you are contemplating being a full time student at an MBA program, especially any MBA program that considers itself somewhat competitive, let me let you in on a little secret: you will have no life until you are done. You see, there’s this thought that some of the value of an MBA program is to test, push and develop your time management skills. One of my professors described this as, “giving you more work than you can possibly do on your own.” Now, this isn’t because it’s hard work, although there is a lot of challenging material, especially if you’ve never taken statistics and haven’t thought about economics since high school (<ahem>). It’s simply that the mass of work thrown at you is intentionally vast. Consider yourself warned.

As such, when you do show up to your first semester all happy and positively oozing with confidence and eagerness, for the love of all things holy do not take an extra class. My girlfriend barely knows who I am anymore. It’s a good thing I have no friends in this city, because I certainly couldn’t meet with them on any regular basis. One of the main reasons for this is that my extra class (yes, the one you really, really shouldn’t take) was a web design class that I enjoyed a lot. More than the vast majority of my MBA classes, frankly. This isn’t a huge surprise, I’m a computer nerd so this is sort of what I do. However, it was also a ton of work. The professor had no difficulty in assigning lots and lots of practice, all of which I think is the best way to learn these skills and none of which I really had time for. Especially the last project, which consists of a website either built from the ground up or re-designed, a paper discussing what choices were made and why, and a presentation. The site is done, and I just finished the first draft of the paper. All 52 pages of it. For a three credit class on top of my “real” classes. Midway through the semester, I heard that 10 credit hours was full time. I later heard that 9 graduate credit hours is considered full time. I’m taking 19. This is why I am a complete moron.

For those of you with free time to do things like read and listen to music, I recommend browsing Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2006. I’ve only looked at the top 10, and have already realized some bands I like actually put out new albums recently. I’m going to listen to so much good music. In 2008.

My mother makes wonderful homemade cards. This one arrived today featuring somewhat younger versions of my sister and I. That kid on the right totally didn’t expect to be enrolled in an MBA program on his 30th birthday.