Picture Location Problems

Posted on by Jordan

I just got word from Heather a few hours ago that we cannot take pictures at the art museum like we had hoped. The museum was going to be a pain to schedule, and I had some doubts as to how awesome the inside was really going to be for pictures, but its still disappointing to loose it as an option.

We looked at the Durham Western Heritage Museum as a picture option, but they also have a lot of hoops to jump through, and really lack anything compelling other than a few old benches. There are some really majestic things there, but they are all 80+ feet off the ground, therefore unhelpful in picture taking.

Our only remaining option now is the botanical gardens. The gardens have some really really neat areas that would make for awesome fall / spring pictures, and given a nice day, some cool winter pictures too. They have an indoor area, but we don’t yet know what the post-Christmas theme in there will be. It may or may not be a nice picture backdrop, and the indoor space is somewhat limited there anyway.

It would be nice to have a few more options for indoor picture locations in Omaha, but so far Heather and I haven’t come up with any. I think there have to be some local hotels or something that might have a fairly ornate lobby. I suppose we don’t need that much, how many people look at the background to a wedding picture? Still it would be fun to have something really cool to use.

If readers have any ideas, feel free to post them in the comments 🙂

-Jordan

The Pedestrian Bridge

Posted on by Jordan

Sunday night Heather and I decided to go for a walk, as we seem to be running a surplus of amazingly nice fall weekends right now.

Unfortunately, we were a little slow getting left to go for a walk and it was getting dark, making the neighborhood we were going to walk in sort of a bad choice. Our hastily composed plan ‘b’ was to head downtown to investigate the walking bridge over the Missouri river that we had heard people talk about.

Our first problem was we had no idea where the bridge actually was. The only directions we could remember was that you “can get to it from the ConAgra park.” About half the park is closed at night, so we walked a long ways around the park, going the wrong way hoping to find an open gate. We could see people walking along the path across the main lake, so we were pretty sure there was some way in. After giving up on our initial search, we saw the bridge peaking through the trees! The only problem was we had been walking in completely the wrong direction for over 10 minutes, and the bridge looked to be about 4 miles away. We also had no idea how to get to it still.

We walked across a few streets, under some bridges, and across a set of railroad tracks, finally getting ourselves onto the proper path to get to the bridge. From the path we could see that none of the obstacles mentioned in the preceding sentence were necessary, as there was a cool raised walkway that let you hop straight from the open half of the ConAgra park onto the path we were now standing on. I would recommend using the raised path after dark, our path was a little sketchy, and lacked sidewalks for about half the way.

All that got us only part of the way to the bridge, but at least we could really see it at this point. Sadly we didn’t bring a camera, so you are on your own to find out what the bridge looks like, but it is fairly cool in the dark. we walked across the bridge, discovered that you cant see much looking off the bridge in the dark, and that there isn’t anything on the Iowa side right now.

Heading back we found, for the second time that night, that the view retracing our steps was a lot better than it had been going out. You get a rather amazing view of the Omaha downtown at night when walking back from the Iowa side of the bridge.

Before heading home we spent a few minutes setting in the dark watching the big fountain in the lake at the middle of the ConAgra park. It made for the perfect way to end the evening.

you really can’t complain about having a day that broke 60 degrees, was as beautiful as Sunday was, and that you could set on a parkbench without a coat on, when it comes this late in October. I just hope this is a sign of weather to come, and we aren’t using up all our unusually temperate days before the wedding. It would be nice to get one of those freak 50-degree-plus days January 24th 2009 😉

-Jordan

With Apologies To My Mother

Posted on by Jordan

So this is a somewhat embarrassing statistic, but what good is a blog if you don’t post this kind of thing?

I was clearing out and sorting through a lot of the storage in my room last night, preparing for the move that’s coming up here soon. I ran in to a surprising amount of stuff that I haven’t used for over a year. That was a little sad, realizing I was storing all this stuff I had no use for, and then I found the irons.

Yes I said “irons,” as in plural, two to be exact. Both of them in mint condition, never been used, one still in its original box! I think my mom gave me one of them when I moved to college EIGHT YEARS ago, and the other she probably gave me when I got out of college. Its not to say I never ironed anything, I am pretty sure I used one of my roommates ironing stuff once back at my old apartment!

The moral of all this is that you can’t blame my mother if my clothes always looked a little wrinkled, she tried!

I told this to Heather last night, and she said she was pretty sure she had a new iron, still in the box somewhere in her apartment… so I am in good company I guess 🙂

-Jordan

New Toys

Posted on by Jordan

Heather, for some reason, didn’t want me to bring the huge ugly table I am using for a desk now over to the apartment when I move.

as I mentioned before, we picked up a new desk to replace mine. Its a lot smaller, which would be a problem for my current situation, but Heather also thought I should replace the CRT monitor I have been using. I had sort of been planning to get rid of that monitor for a wile, but it was still working fine, so I couldn’t quite replace it. With Heathers encouragement, I ordered a 24 inch LCD monitor from Newegg.

I have to take a moment and point out how awesome it is to have a fiancee who talked me into buying new stuff for my computer. It makes me smile every time I think about it.

I was a little worried about the monitor as some reviews said things about the color being a little off, or having a lot of dead pixels. Newegg won’t replace a monitor for color temperature issues, and it takes a lot of dead pixels to warrant them replacing the monitor. I un-boxed a shiny new monitor (and it really was shiny) last night, powered it up, and…

No dead pixels!! In addition to the lack of dead pixels, the colors seem true from what I can tell. My only complaint so far is that the stand leans just a little bit. It might just be because the desk isn’t quite level, combined with a little bit of flex in the stand, but one side of the monitor is about 1/4″ above the other. I probably wouldn’t notice that, but its a rather large span so its easier to see.

Actually using it is… interesting, its big enough I don’t feel like I can see it all at once. I am sure I will get used to it. I also realized that I don’t have any video clips hi-res enough to really challenge the monitor, and that my set of desktop images simply wont work when stretched that much. I guess I can’t complain too much, there are worse problems to have 🙂

-Jordan

100 Days…

Posted on by Jordan

The wedding is just 100 days away now.

That seems like such a huge number, but I am sure it won’t have seemed that long by the end.

On the bright side, I think Heather and I have gotten nearly everything taken care of for the wedding. Heather and her mom deserve most of the credit for that, I really haven’t done too much. All the same, its exciting to feel like we are ahead of the game for planning.

Now if the day would just get here 🙂

-Jordan

Prepping The Apartment

Posted on by Jordan

As some of you may know, my current roommate is getting married soon, leaving my without a place to live.

The plan Heather and I came up with was for me to move into her apartment, and for her to move in with her grandmother for the 3 remaining months until we are married. Heather wanted to have a few things ready before the move, primarily a desk that wasn’t as ugly as the table thing I have my computer setting on currently.

We stopped by Nebraska Furniture Mart Sunday, looking for a desk. Checked “Mrs B’s” the “scratch and dent” section of NFM. from what I can tell they don’t actually have much stuff there that is truly damaged, so much as maybe odds and ends of discontinued items, and just their more discount oriented products. We found a desk that would be about ideal, the proper size, and color almost as soon as we walked in. They had two of them, one that had a somewhat obviously backwards brace holding up the keyboard tray. That wasn’t a big issue for us, because to actually fit me comfortably at the desk, my plan was to remove the keyboard tray.

On our way over to find a salesperson, we stumbled onto mattresses. Heather and I had decided to just use the mattress she had in her apartment for the time being. we hope to not be in the apartment too long, and a bedroom set would be high on the list of things to buy once we moved into a house. The problem with the current mattress is that it has a feather pillow thing giving it most of its padding, and I am slightly allergic to down. We asked about mattress pillows in NFM, they didn’t have any but the sales person pointed out how cheap a mattress alone was. We picked out a new mattress for a price that was within $40 of what I was expecting to have to pay for a new pillow cover.

back to the desk… we lead the same lady that just sold us the bed back to the desk area to add that onto our order. I pointed out the assembly problem it had, and asked if we could get a discount. She took 25% off the desk, and we had all the furniture we needed to fully outfit the apartment for a *lot* cheaper than ether Heather or I expected.

moving the new stuff in, and the old mattress wasn’t the most fun way to spend the rest of our Sunday afternoon, but it was really satisfying to get that taken care of. I am almost looking forward to moving the rest of my stuff, it feels like I will be moving into a “home” instead of another apartment.

-Jordan

Nebraska City

Posted on by Jordan

Saturday Heather and I went to Nebraska city.The idea was to see an orchard / pumpkin patch or at least experience some authentic fall atmosphere.

Our first stop was at the Arbor Day Farm, which consists of a place to buy food (“pie garden”) a large apple sorting system, sales area for apples and apple-biased things, Nature  trails, and other Arbor Day related activities.

The apple-sorting and cider press (all somewhat historic I think) they had there were all dormant. I *think* they fire that all up during the “apple – jacks” days or whatever the festival is called. We decided to have lunch before checking out the rest of our options. Standing in line with twenty people in front of you all buying apple pie, with ice cream, or maybe just an apple slushy, made ordering a hamburger seem like a healthy choice. Eating them, they didn’t seem especially healthy, but they were pretty good burgers.

After lunch, we headed out on the nature trail they had, taking our time to enjoy thle amazingly beautiful day. The leaves were just starting to turn, so everything smelled like fall. The temperature was in the high 70s so we didnt really have a crisp day, but it made spending a long time outside really pleasant.

Before leaving we made a stop for some pie, because well, it was apple pie at the Arbor Day Farm. Pretty good pie, not as good as the pie Heather and I made, at least while it was fresh from the oven. Fresh from the oven pie is hard to beat though, so maybe that’s not a fair contest.

We left the “farm” and headed to an orchard. The orchard was running hay rack rides out from the parking lot though their pumpkin patch and actual orchard. We hopped on one of those, and had a nice, if somewhat slow ride out to see actual apples growing on trees. They also had a large vineyard, with grapes still on the vines. We had gone to the orchard with a vague plan to buy apples, but then realized we didn’t really need a huge bag of apples. In hindsight maybe we should have gotten a few just because, but we went home empty handed.

Heather and I really enjoyed the trip, and judging from the weather today, we may have caught one of the best possible days to make the trip!

-Jordan

Wires and cables

Posted on by Jordan

With only three weeks remaining until I move out of my current apartment, and having a free night last night, I undertook to reduce some of the computer-parts mess that was in my room. I had one small-ish plastic tub full of things, two extra computer cases with almost functional computers inside, and an entire drawer of my dresser full of wires and spare parts.

** editors note: this is probably not the most interesting thing to read, sorry 🙂 **

I started with the cases, stripping out all the parts that looked useful, wound up with:

  • 3 IDE hard drives of unknown size
  • 6 sticks of PC133 SDRAM of mostly unknown size, a few marked as 128 meg sticks
  • A 16 meg TNT2  AGP video card
  • 2 PCI ethernet cards
  • An AGP video card of unknown stats
  • A PCI sound card

After a minute of though I realized nothing was worth the storage space to even salvage… most of that stuff is so far beyond obsolete I couldn’t use it for anything. I suppose somewhere there is someone looking for those parts to keep an old system running, but that’s not me. (and if that person is reading this, price out what $500 will buy you in new hardware, cry, then put in your newegg order)

Then I moved on to the plastic tub, it was mostly full of empty CD cases, converter plugs, case screws, anti-static bags and IDE cables.  I have been storing the CD cases from my freshmen year in the dorms as I recall… after 8 years without needing them I think I can part with them. the IDE cables are rapidly becoming useless, but I kept a few. There was some DDR memory in there, but again I have no idea what size the 2 sticks were, or why they are setting there. I have vague memories of mothballing some memory that came out of an unstable system, but I can’t remember if that’s what this is or something else. Couldn’t bring myself to toss the DDR, and the bags of screws will be sticking around, I always wind up needing one or two more than they ship with a new system. (unless of course they always short me on the same kind, and then I just have a huge collection of the wrong screw)

Last, but not least, the drawer full of cables! It turns out I had about 20 basic computer power cables, probably 100 feet of S-Video cable (in 6′ sections), and enough ethernet cable to rewire my entire apartment network 3-4 times. I tossed out all but 2 of the S-Video and power cables, but couldn’t bring myself to part with any ethernet cable (its only been in storage for 1.5 years, I might still need it!)

In the end I managed to compress my entire computer junk storage into the single plastic tub, and threw out well over 50 pounds of computer-related junk.

On reflection, a few notes:

  • Storing more than 2 spares of anything is just silly
  • I need to label things that go into storage
  • Hard drives, even when installed into a PC should have their size and date purchased written on them
  • All driver disks should have a date, and what computer they go to written on them

hopefully I can prevent myself from getting that much stuff piled up again, but at least if it has labels on it, sorting will go faster the next time 🙂

-Jordan

Shoeboxed

Posted on by Jordan

Just saw a link to this service: Shoeboxed. They offer to help deal with the mess of receipts most people ( ie me) end up with.

I am not saying I am sold on the idea, but I think it might be worth looking into. Plan ‘B’ would just involve being diligent about putting all receipts into the computer, but my past history with that hasn’t been so great.

-Jordan

Pumpkins!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I invited some friends who just got married this summer for supper and pumpkin carving last night.

 

Its really fun to hang out with recently married couples, they can commiserate on wedding planning hassles, and how long the engagement feels. Not that Heather and I would ever complain about any of those things 🙂

The pumpkin carving was really fun! Heather picked up 2 little carving kits for the pumpkins. Those were well worth the $2 or whatever they were… the little scraping spoons were short-handled with a good kind of tip for getting the slimy stuff out of the inside of the pumpkin. The gig-saw blade things they included were pretty handy too, let us do some fairly delicate things on the pumpkins without too much hassle.

I was pretty happy with mine, and I think everyone really had fun carving the pumpkins! 

**Heather: Edit added the pictures!

-Jordan