Saturday, after staying out a little late the night before after picking up my camera and going to judo, a few friends and I decided to go out for drinks and eat sushi for dinner, aka an awesome chance to try out my new camera

Osaka is delicous, it’s actually one of my favorite places to get sushi at. But before we get to that we take a little detour. On the way up to Osaka, we get a phone call from Daphne, saying she has to work late. FOR AN ENTIRE HOUR!

Sarah and I take this opportunity to get some delicious iced beverages at the Zen Tea House while we waited.

After we ate at Osaka, we decided to take a little walk to help our food digest and to use up some time before heading out to Sergio’s World Beers. On the way, we saw this old house in very sad shape.

After our walk we headed down to the bar where we partook in some delicious beverages. it was hot so a Radler was totally in order

Sarah found this adorable beer hidden in one of the fridges. It was quite good actually.

Mary decided to take a shot and try one of the Fruit Ale’s on draft, it was a Strawberry Ale. Oh man, that was good! Very sweet! We stayed for a while chit chatting about this and that and eventually went home, I took a nap on the drive back :3

Sunday. Mary and I decided to meet up at Berheim Forest to practice with our cameras (Mary has a D90). We walked around taking pictures of all sorts of things.

These geese were protecting their goslings from other geese trying to steal the food people were throwing at them. Geese can be VICIOUS!

Typical, insect doing something with a plant picture. Also, <insert camera talk about blurriness and focus point here>.

Mary. I don’t care what she says, I like this picture After Bernheim we went and ate at Saigon Cafe, which was delicious! I’m really glad i got introduced to Vietnamese food, it’s so good! Then it was off to Heine Bros for some coffee before the trip home.

Once i got to my parents that evening I played with my camera some more, mainly taking pictures of the dogs.

Nero begging for food. Can’t you tell? He hasn’t eaten in minutes!

Papa just wanting attention. Who can resist those eyes?

One thing i’ve noticed is that Nero and Papa are very photo conscious. They’re quite good at looking at the camera and being adorable.

Homer on the other hand, couldn’t give two licks about cameras being pointed at him. He’s too busy making sure there aren’t things that need to be sniffed or chased in the yard.

Yay me!

Ok, so, now for some updates as to what I’ve been doing. About a month ago I started P90X, which is a pretty intense workout program. Since then I’ve slacked off, since I’ve also picked up Judo on Monday’s and Friday’s. I’ve been going with some friends, and it’s quite enjoyable (besides the conditioning portion of the lessons, that’s always quite.. exhausting). So, right now I’m only exercising twice a week. I’d like to get that back to at least 3 times a week. I think we’re (the friends I’m doing Judo with) going to try and do something on Wednesdays. Maybe Yoga, or some sort of stretch routine.

I’ve been pretty busy with work too. This weekend will be the second weekend in a row where i have to work on saturday, and the third weekend this month. It’s not too bad because i get days comped, but it does suck that i can’t sleep in on Saturday This Saturday will be extra strenuous. We’re doing our scheduled monthly release, which means i get to be at work at 3am and work until everything (our software) is out in production. I should be home sometime between 9am and 10am. So that means i’ll have a few hours to sleep before Brew at the Zoo! I’m sure we’ll all have a blast

After a 3-ish month hiatus I’m playing Eve again. I always come crawling back  I’m taking it slow this time, only playing for an hour or so a few days a week. But it’s fun to talk to all my old friends, even that crazy nut borked

I also have plans to work on my car again. I think next up will be the valve cover gasket and VANOS. That’s going to be a weekend project I think, and the next few weekends don’t look like i’ll have enough time to do it. I also have to find a fairly inexpensive VANOS (maybe from DrVANOS?).

Either way, I think I’ll be busy-busy for the next few weeks. And it feels pretty good.

Boy, was i ready for saturday though! I guess my body was still used to sleeping for 10 hours every night. Instead i’ve been up by 7am everyday and out the door by 7:30. Yesterday i finally got to sleep in a bit, lounge around in my PJ’s, and then finally in the afternoon leave the house. Josh and I went up to Louisville so Josh could test drive a Infiniti G35. A very nice car! After that we went and ate pizza and drank beer at Za’s where we met up with some friends, one of whom neither of us had seen in years! After pizza and beer we went and saw Daybreakers, which was ok. It’s nothing to rave about, and I feel the previews mislead the audience to thinking the movie was something else. But exploding vampires are always nice.

Tomorrow starts week two! Hopefully nothing will go wrong, and the roads will stay clear!

I’ll start with a quick recap of my previous post. Zach and I have been job hunting for the last few months, since the end of September/beginning of October. We’d even enlisted the service of some recruiting firms — TEK Systems being one of them. We had some meeting with our recruiting representative — or whatever they’re officially called — and talked about why we wanted to leave our current job, what we’re looking for in other places of employment, what kind of qualifications we have, etc, etc. Along with that we’d also put our resume’s up on job searching sites like Monster and Dice, and we even applied at some local positions online. That choice bared fruit in what happened next. iPay Technologies got in contact with both of us, as we’d both applied for some of the positions they had posted. We had our phone screenings, we even got interviews! Meanwhile back at work, nothing seemed to change. We’d told our management months before that we were job hunting, and now we’d told them we were interviewing with a company. They still didn’t seem to be doing anything — like collecting resumes or putting feelers out.

About a week later, Zach and I had another phone interview with someone else from iPay, and the next day there was an offer letter in our inbox. At first we thought the amount they were offering was a monthly salary until Zach noticed it was bi-weekly! So needless to say, we told our boss that we’d both found a new job, and we’d be starting there at the beginning of January. We then accepted the offer letters. Now is when things start getting interesting.  We told our bosses that we’d go through all our projects and document everything and write up abstracts on the projects themselves — we did this not because we were told to, but because it was the right thing to do — and we’d even screen any people they found as possible candidates. All these actions were done out of kindness and professionalism.

One Friday Zach calls me to tell me what he’s just overheard, management talking about how horrible we were, how none of our projects ever worked how they wanted, how all the reports were always wrong, how apparently we were just big pieces of shit! Even though it was Zach telling me this, I could feel that flame of anger building inside of me. We were going to help these people out, find them replacements for our positions, and they’re going to stab us in the back? In the big picture i shouldn’t really care, as i have a new job already lined up, and they’re expecting me after the new year. But just to hear what people really think of us after working with them for almost three years.. it just hurts. I thought some of those people were good colleagues if not friends. So in response to that action, i moved my final day of work up to yesterday. I still did everything else I’d promised, documenting code, writing overviews of our projects, going over submitted resumes. But i wasn’t going to work there for another few weeks in that kind of environment. I also wanted to cash out all my vacation time in one paycheck, heh. That’s almost 2 1/2 weeks of pay on top of my week of pay this week. Should be a nice paycheck indeed.

Now i can’t wait until my first day at my new job. I’m kind of anxious and nervous, but i think it will be a big step in the right direction for my career.

Last week I got an email from iPay Technologies. They wanted to do a phone screening for their interviewing process. I accepted. I had my phone screening on Thursday, and Friday morning there was another email in my inbox stating they wanted to call me in for an interview. Zach went through the same thing. And now we both have interviews with them. Good thing they have two job positions open , maybe we’ll be the ones filling them. The only thing i’m concerned about right now is the compensation. They never said how much or what range the pay would be. I’m hoping they’re not going to try to hire me for what I’m being paid now.

Depending on how the interview goes, I may or may not be giving my boss a two weeks notice here in the future.

In other news, my dad got his M1 Garand. It’s beautiful! I could only imagine lugging that thing around through a combat environment though. It’s quite heavy. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to go shoot it! I kinda want one now. ^_^

Over the weekend I played lots of Left 4 Dead 2. I’ve finished all the campaigns on normal, and am now working on some of the achievements. The game really takes the feeling you get from when you first played Left 4 Dead and refines it. The chills, the excitement, the freak outs. They’re all there! There were a few times where I actually yelled/screamed like a little girl! The new zombies really do add a whole new dynamic to the game, by not letting you take advantage of the tricks that you could in L4D. The new melee weapons are also awesome, there’s nothing like beating a zombie over the head with a guitar or frying pan. And Realism mode.. oh so awesome.

I also finished reading Helix by Eric Brown. It was a good read. It really sucked me in, which is probably why i finished it in two days (or so). The characters were really believable, and the environments were well detailed. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s into science fiction and likes a story about a mission gone bad, crash landing on a strange alien structure filled with thousands of different alien races.

Work has been pretty stressful these last few weeks. Not so much the workload, more so the constant inability to achieve consistency.  I like being able to have my boss give me a task to complete, which i then complete and return the results. What i don’t like  is being told to do something, spend a week or so on this task, just to have it thrown away because certain people don’t like the results (not because they are wrong, but because they didn’t show the high numbers they were unrealistically expecting).  So basically i’ve been throwing my work down the drain no matter what i do.

whatever though. I’ll just do what they tell me to, collect my paycheck, and not take any initiative on anything since it never pays off anyway.

Last week i was pretty sick, I guess I’d caught the flu sometime the week before and it then went active the night after Halloween, I guess the constant temperature change from going in and out of bars was enough to lower my immune system so it was susceptible to attack. I spent the next week in bed pretty much. Sunday through Tuesday were pretty much a blur of half-consciousness, headache, and sleep. I stayed home on wednesday too just to make sure i didn’t get sick again. Thursday i went to work and wished i’d stayed home. And then there was the weekend again. I took it easy this weekend and stayed home. Friday and Saturday were just filled with chilling on the couch and watching TV shows and Anime. I ended up reading an entire book this weekend too. The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove wasn’t too bad. If you’re into that kind of story. It was a little hard to wrap my head around a world where the ancient Egyptian gods were real and the whole world was ruled by them. Other than that though it was a good read and worth the 7 dollars or whatever i spent on it.

On sunday i went to the range with my dad to shoot stuff down range. It was lots of fun, even though i’m still not a fan of his rifle Kicks like a mule! Instead of going to Knob Creek like usual we went on Post and used French Range. It was a lot nicer than where we’d shot before and fewer rednecks too!  We also shot my dad’s new ERMA, i think it’s a KGP-69. It needs some cleaning, and probably some parts replaced, but it was neat to shoot something different.