Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

It was a busy day today, met some of the North Texas Netscum for breakfast at Mama's Daughter's Diner, then headed over to Competitive Cameras to see if I could find a more convenient bag for carrying the camera around D.C. in May. Thankfully, I did. I've now got a SlingShot 300 AW and amazingly enough all of the gear fits in it. I'm happy that I found something that looks like it'll work out. After that I went up to Homebrew Headquarters to pick up ingredients for a batch of wheat beer and some corks and a corker so that I can finally get the mead bottled. Looks like that's going to be next weekend's project. It was a pretty successful and productive day.

Merry Christmas from Peoria. It's been a fun day, especially watching Reese open his presents. The little guy made out like a bandit, picking up a bunch of Hot Wheels car sets, a Leapster, some games, a glow-in-the-dark solar system, and more. I got a couple DVDs, one an old Japanese samurai flick and the other on all-grain brewing. Just a nice day celebrating Christmas with Reese...

Today's my birthday, and while it's been a bit slow and quiet because I've got a really early flight to Illinois tomorrow morning, I did do some present opening. The most interesting one was Liquid Bread's Oxynator. I'm going to try it out on my next batch of beer!

Because his birthday fell in the middle of the week, we took Reese to Chuck E. Cheese's for his party. He had some of his friends show up and played lots of games. It's definitely not my favorite place, too much noise and chaos, but the service was good and he really enjoyed him self, so all is good.

There are pictures over in the gallery.

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/

Joi, Reese, and I went to see Transformers today at one of Rave's DLP theaters and I've got to say that I was really impressed. It was the first DLP movie I've seen and the improvement in picture quality was very much noticable. I'm going to aim for more movies in those theaters in the future.

Reese went to his first T-Ball practice today. It was a lot of fun to watch, especially if you like organized chaos. A bunch of 4 and 5 year olds does not an organized game make.

He did well on keeping his eye on the ball and fielding, but we need to work on his batting a little. But that's what practices are for.

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413267/

Reese and I went out to catch a showing of Shrek The Third today, and while he enjoyed it, I really couldn't get in to it. It seemed to me that the jokes were just too predictable and it just didn't have the magic of the previous two installments.

Reese enjoyed it, as did I, and it's definitely good for a matinee or a rental.

Link: http://www.fieldmuseum.org/

Reese and I drove up to Chicago this morning to spend some time at the Field Museum. He's really gotten in to dinosaurs lately so getting to see Sue in person sounded like a great idea.

The museum is wonderful. There's a lot more to it than a single T-Rex skeleton. They've got a lot of good exhibits, such as one about African life, another covering the last 4 billion years of the earth's history and biodiversity.

It was time well spent, and if you're in the Chicago area you really should take the time to visit it.

I'm out of work until Monday, when I start the new job. When I left Nokia I had to turn in my phone, and since I hadn't been carrying a personal phone, instead relying on the company supplied one, I was feeling a little disconnected. I stopped by the local Verizon store and got myself a personal phone and plan. Anyone who wants the new number should just e-mail me.

I decided to go with a Motorola RAZR V3. It's a lot smaller than the Nokia Communicator I had been carrying and that's fine with me. I like the size and form factor. There's going to be a learning curve because I've been so used to Nokia's phones, but that's no big deal. The nice thing was that getting my phonebook updated was completely painless. The Mac's iSync application has native support for the RAZR so it really was no more than connecting the phone, configuring iSync, and clicking sync.

Sound quality is good, I've got vibrating alerts again, and I've even gotten my ringtones moved over.

Today was my last day, and was definitely a bittersweet experience. I'd gotten really comfortable with what I was doing there, but it wasn't a good comfortable because I wasn't being challenged any more and was getting moved in to a career path without much chance of advancement.

There's a lot of stuff I'm going to miss, especially some of the people I've been fortunate enough to work with. But there's a lot that I won't miss, especially the friction between teams and rampant communication problems. That being said, I've got a place in my heart for Nokia, it's a great company to work for, and other than my frustrations with the IT portion of it, would recommend that anyone apply for a job there.