Rochelle's Blog ::: Subtitles Included

I’ve been called an “Apple Whore.”

I’ve been accused of having a chip implanted in my neck by Apple.

Biased. Yuppy. iDork. You name it. Most of these teasing accusations are from my Microsoft-centric counterparts, that us Apple folk tend to tease just as relentlessly. It’s just a fun part of working in a diverse IT environment.

I am what I am. And so it’s no big surprise that I am already pining after the new iPad. I can’t believe I’m going to have to wait until April.

I heard a recent piece on NPR about tablets in general. The idea is that in the “future” these slate like devices will simply lay about your house. As a technologist and a lazy person, this vision of the future obviously thrills me.

This will be my carry everywhere device. No more paper for notes, when I don’t want to lug my laptop to and around work. The laptop can stay home most days, unless I have to give a presentation or code remotely on campus.

So the weekend is coming to an end.

The weekend after a three day weekend is always so shockingly short. I swear, I just got off work and here I am preparing for tomorrow.

This one was a good one though. It started on Friday when I took Callie to the Vet and they put another bandage on her tail. They said she could wear it for two weeks this time and then she might not have to wear the cone when she goes bandage-free!

Well this blissful state ended a little abruptly for both her and I when I came home tonight to find her Jets-colored bandage on the floor completely in tact, as if she slipped it off disgusted with their loss. She herself was just chilling on her favorite blanket. She started to lick at it pretty good, so I was forced to put the cone on her…

She gets bummed out wearing the cone, and that bums me out pretty bad. But this could be for the best. I’m thinking that it’s somehow meant to be, because this is really what the Vets wanted to do in the first place. I’m wondering if they put her bandage on in such a manner so that it would slip off easily and we’d be forced to do the truly right thing! The tail needs air, and we’ll just have to deal with our sweet little girl living in her Elizabethian cone.

After the Vet, I went to Best Buy in an effort to get NetFlix streaming on my TV. I had lots of options. Could run a DVI->HDMI cable from my laptop. Could get a PS3. Could get a capable Blu-Ray player. Best Buy did not have the cable, so it was between the PS3 or Blu-Ray.  After lots of internal debate, I ended up getting the Blu-Ray. It was half the price, didn’t require a disc from NetFlix to do initial setup, and I just don’t really play games that much.

You may be asking yourself, why not wait for the Wii NetFlix option that is coming soon? Well, there’s a bit of an urgency since I’m trying to catch up a friend on Lost before the new season starts. And the Wii version won’t have HD capabilities. Plus, I’m a bit excited for Blu-Ray. I bought Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on Blu-Ray, and I can’t wait to watch it!

So overall I’m glad I got it. It was really easy to setup, and now I have a whole new gigantic option of viewing options whenever I want.

On Saturday I did a ton of cleaning (again), including some de-cluttering that I had planned on doing ever since last week’s big clean up.

Read more about that and see before and after pictures over at The Simple Sisters.

Today, my dad and Cathy came up for a visit. The three of us, along with Marissa and Johnny, went over to the Great Indoors, which was a little bit like torture (I’m a renter and I have no real money to speak of), and then had a fun lunch at Panera (yum!).

We talked about how I love to teach people lessons. Okay, more like my family made fun of me for that. They called me George Bluth from Arrested Development.

If you’ve never seen Arrested Development, it’s the episode called “Pier Pressures.” I wish I could show you a clip, but alas, I couldn’t find one.

Anyway, I came home and did computer-y things, and plan to curl up with my Kindle tonight. I never did share my Kindle skin experience. I do love it so! It was really easy to apply and I think it looks so cute!

I was having a hard time thinking about what to photograph tonight, so I asked my Twitter followers for suggestions. Well my friend Meredith from Seattle (@blizzardbella) answered, “how about your CD collection?” Coincidentally, I had just read a post on Tumblr about a teenage kid that just bought his first CD, because he’s come of age in the iPod era. So strange! Sadly, I can’t remember the last CD I actually bought, since I also download all my music. Therefore, it’s quite easy to see that my CD collection is pretty much filled with albums from the 90s, which might just come in handy for my 90s party that I’m having in September.

The 90s called. They want their CDs back.

Post script…today is my brother’s 29th birthday! Happy birthday Andy!

Technology groove

This week flew right by, and I think I can thank having a honest-to-goodness workweek for that. No big fights, no real drama, and no struggles with technology. In fact, I totally hit a groove this week. I didn’t struggle over code, troubleshooted little problems, updated some forms, and even helped a friend out with Facebook. With that groove though, also came my usual “ramp up,” as I call it. Find me on a Monday or Tuesday and I’m slow at everything. I typically use those days to have meetings, establish what I’m supposed to be doing and then the real execution of my work happens on Thursdays and Fridays. By the end of the day on Friday I’m really putting the pedal to the metal on a lot of projects. Regardless, I like how my week works out and I especially like that the weekend got here really quickly.

Father’s Day

I mentioned last week that I was going to build a new website for my dad’s law practice as a Father’s Day present. And that’s exactly what I did last Sunday. I think it turned out all right, and has just enough flashy stuff to catch the eye. I used very toned down and subtle colors. I guess it was just the mood I was in. The next version will be bolder. He’ll be coming up to visit me on Sunday and I can’t wait to show it to him!

Here's the mock up.

Still spendy

A while ago I wrote about how spendy I have been lately. And clearly you can tell by the televisions and Wii that I’ve gotten, that indeed I’ve been spending some of my money. Sadly, I’m still craving more. I want to book my Europe trip so badly, and I might be getting a new car. I must be crazy, but sometimes you just have to pull the trigger. The timing is perfect and that’s harder to come by then money.

The sun and the pond

Minus the tornadoes that have wreaked some havoc here, I must say that I have enjoyed our June immensely. It’s rained almost every day and it’s been quite cool. I love it! Since I spend most of my summer days inside an office working harder than I do the rest of the year, I’ve fallen out of love with hot summer days. And I’m a serious wuss about hot weather. Well this week it’s warmed up here and the sun is out and bright and it’s getting drier and drier. Before everything dies and turns brown like it usually does I wanted to make sure I could capture it. A lot of my co-workers had told me how beautiful the pond on campus is right now, so I took a little stroll there today and snapped a few pictures and sat around people watching for a little while. It was a nice way to take a break today.

Varsity Pond

Mexican food

It’s Friday, and if you’re around me on Fridays you will notice a pattern. I want Mexican food. It’s ingrained in me, thanks to eating Mexican food nearly every Friday of my childhood. And even though I had Mexican food a couple of times this week, I will still get it tonight. I just can’t resist. And you should see how I budget points for it. I would rather go all day eating the bare minimum so I can fit it in. Yum!

So on that note, I’m going to wrap this up and get some burritos. This weekend you can expect:

Welcome to an installment of Random Friday!

Technology madness

As the week winds down, I can look back and say that, without a doubt, my week was one long dance with technology. Whether it was getting my new TVs set up, launching this new blog, rebuilding my work computer, and installing new software to test and document for my job, it was just all technology, all the time. At some points it was like a perfectly choreographed mambo, at others it was like a mosh pit. It’s looking pretty likely that I’m going to end the week on a slow dance, where I remember how much I love that unreliable, yet irresistible force of nature that rules my life.

Palladia, Pandora, Persnickety

I go through music phases. Sometimes I’m all about music and other times it’s background noise. These days I’m all about it. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that with my brand new cable package and television that I’m mostly watching and listening to music through it. I thought I’d be all about HBO and the other premium channels I got, but what I’ve really enjoyed is concerts on Palladia. For example, the past two mornings I’ve had a Coldplay concert from Japan playing while I get ready for work. It’s been great!

I also bought a year subscription to Pandora so I could have a desktop client and skip the commercials. I love Pandora. My channels of the week are Death Cab For Cutie, Lady Gaga, and Everything But the Girl.

Nuts (literally)

I stupidly keep buying butter crunch cashews. Yeah. Not smart for a girl on a diet. But these things are good! Almost always I keep my portion down, and for a ¼ cup there’s about 3 points. Not exactly good in terms of budgeting points, but definitely worth it in terms of taste.

Sibby

My sister, Marissa, is my best friend. I love her more than anything in the world and I love to live vicariously through her. This month and next she’ll be doing an internship at the local newspaper. She’s been assigned to write features stories. This includes exercise features stories. So she’ll be trying out all of these different workouts across the city. Already this week she went up into the foothills for a two-hour yoga session and lunch, and she attended hip-hop aerobics. How fun, right? Maybe if I weren’t in the midst of working out four days a week, I wouldn’t find that nearly as appealing, but I think that’s rad. I was especially jealous of the yoga session. She invited me along, but I had another leadership seminar…booo!

Father’s Day

I constantly struggle when it comes to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. The flowers I got my mom turned out to be a total disaster (long story, and not blog worthy), and my father is even harder to shop for. He’s not very serious about the holiday so we get a lot of slack, but I still want to do something nice for him. So, I decided to redesign his law practice website for him. Now that the blog redesign is done, I’m itching for something new to do in my off hours. So this weekend I’m going to try and get that going. I’ve got some great ideas for it.

Have a great weekend everyone! Check in on Sunday and you’ll probably see some Project 365 layouts.

Phew! I finally made the blog transition. After some technical challenges and a huge bout of impatience, it’s finally all done. So here’s how it works. Posts have been categorized based on three of my blogs:

• Nine*Poems is categorized as “Life, Love, and Nerdiness Posts”.
• My Project 365 (calicoknitter.wordpress.com) is categorized as “Project 365 Posts”.
• My weight loss blog (rochellieberry.wordpress.com) is categorized as “Rochelle*Berry Posts”.

These links can be found near the top of every page.

I’m feeling very rejuvenated by combining my blogs and I plan on posting much more often. I hope you enjoy it!

So I’ve gotten some new TVs, and I’ve upgraded my cable package. I’m now one of the cool kids. At least on the surface.

Wanna guess what I’ve watched thus far in beautiful HD?

(Here’s a hint, it’s not what the cool kids are watching).

There’s been a little of this…

Yep, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Not even the first one, the sequel.

And way too much of this…

The Bachelorette.

So tonight I tried to get a little cooler and watch this.

Nine Inch Nails, Beside You on Palladia

But then I remembered it’s not 1997 anymore.

So I switched to this (read, I was sad NIN was over and wanted more concert and this was all I could find).

Apparently, this is O.A.R.

So pretty much the only “cool” thing I’ve watched, which I don’t think was actually in HD, but looked killer nonetheless on my new 1080 upconverter DVD player was this.

Lost, Season 3.

That’s right, LOST. The 40” television with a very high quality picture only makes LOST creepier. Especially when you’re watching this particular episode.

The one with the paralyzing spiders and Paulo and Nikki get buried alive.

And just because I feel like it, and I’ve also been watching this since the NIN concert ended, which is on YouTube and not on my beautiful new TV.

FAIL.

Even though the weather was just incredible today, I decided to spend most of my day in my office. Yes, on a Saturday. I wanted to rebuild my work computer, update it’s operating system, and just have a fresh start. It’s about two years old and definitely needed it. I also swapped hard drives, so I’m now using the 500 GB, versus the 250 GB hard drive as my startup disk. Besides rebuilding my computer, I also worked on my new consolidated blog, which should be up around June 14. When the time comes, I’ll be decommissioning this blog at this location. Don’t worry though, if you like these posts and you’re someone who has commented, then I’ll be sure to send you a link to my consolidated blog! If you have never commented before, but you want to keep following these posts, now’s the time! Comment below and I’ll get in touch with you too.

I upgraded to Leopard and got Design Premium CS4.

So MacWorld happened recently and one of the announcements was Google’s photo management software Picasa is now available in Beta for the Mac. I’ve had my eye on it for awhile and was always sad when it was only for Windows. I’ve heard such great things about it!

Special note: last fall I took a lot of pictures of myself to use for different photo editing projects, this blog, and just for fun.

Well so far it’s lived up to the hype. I have it on both machines and it’s lovely. I have so many tools at my disposal, like iPhoto, Photoshop, Memory Manager and the like. So far this seems to do all the right things and it’s just way easy to edit photos. Sometimes I like to use Photoshop and get in there really good. Other times though it’s just overkill. Picasa has a bunch of helpful tools that aren’t entirely dumbed down.

Before

After

It’s got some fun and easy features like Collage and Movie.

But my favorite part is how it synchronizes to web albums, which makes sharing really easy.