Punt!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made it back from Florida!

In the next day or two I hope to get a nice summary post up, but I am still recovering from the trip.

This post is mainly just to say I don’t see any hope of getting the gallery hosted on this site ordered properly in a timely manner. Having admitted that fact, I just pushed the entire Picasa gallery online, neatly side-stepping the entire issue.

The gallery can be found here

I plan to have a link to those off the main site in a day or so too.

For people wishing to order prints, I hope to get a handful of the best pictures from the wedding hosted here, in their full resolution glory, for that purpose. In the meantime, I can always e-mail them out if somebody knows what they want.

-Jordan

A Milestone Of Sorts

Posted on by Jordan

Not too much to post about today, but I wanted to observe that, according to site-meter, there have been over 1000 visitors to heatherandjordan.com!

given the number of ways browsers can be hidden from sitemeeter, its not a hugely meaningful number, but interesting none the less.

also, Heather and I got the picture DVDs burned over the weekend. Now we just have to figure out a way to mail them safely. I also uploaded the entire CD worth of pictures to the website, but as I feared the order is a colossal mess, and we are still trying to decide what to do. Plan A would be to re-order the pictures in the gallery, plan B is to cull the album down to a handful of our favorites so they aren’t so painful to sort.

I will keep you posted 🙂

-Jordan

Finished A Few Things!

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so its going to be a short list… But I am still excited about it.

Over the weekend, Heather got the finishing touches on the picture CD that has been in production for months now! We still have to burn copies, but having the pictures all together, edited and in order is a huge step. I hope to upload them to this website soon, but may end up settling for a Picasa web album as I know Gallery is going to mess up the order of the pictures. I don’t really relish the thought of fixing the order one-by-one in their clunky web interface when there  are over 500 pictures in the album.

The second item is my car loan! Its an amazing feeling to be done paying that off. Heather and I were planning to aggressively work on that loan, as per the Dave Ramsey school of thought, but we were afraid it would take much longer to actually knock anything out. We are very grateful for the generous gifts people gave us for the wedding, allowing us to get a huge head start on that.

-Jordan

Mid Week Updates

Posted on by Jordan

I went to the dentist today! I really don’t have much of a story to post. Its odd though, I went almost six years without going to the dentist, and when I finally went in had a grand total of two cavities. Six months later, I go back in and have two more cavities. The worst part is that I eat so much less of the kinds of things that would encourage tooth decay now. The only consolation is that the cavities were declared “minor” whereas the ones I had before required hours of grinding to remove.

In less dental related news, I feel really guilty about not having pictures posted on the website yet. Heather nearly had the photo set for the CDs ready, and I was going to load the same set to the website. Unfortunelately somehow I broke the smoke and mirrors that Picasa uses to do its “I auto-save as you work, but don’t write out to disk until you click save” as you edit pictures. Lucky for us it only damaged something like three pictures. Between that and the sheer number of thank you cards Heather still has to author, enthusiasm for the photo project has been pretty thoroughly sapped. I still hope we can get something started on that before the end of this week.

-Jordan

Decorating

Posted on by Jordan

Heather claims that we are *done* decorating the apartment now. That statement comes with the implicit disclaimer that once she gets wedding pictures ordered, we will get to take down all the frames on the walls and load them with new pictures.

Not to say that I dislike the decorations we have, or even minded putting them all up, I just didn’t realize we needed so many.

decorating

That’s me, hanging one of a number of stars we just recently added to the walls in our bedroom. The decorations look good now, and will look great once we have pictures of people we actually know in the frames! 🙂

As of this past weekend, I finally found a home for every last wedding present. The weekend before that, I spent a fair amount of time hiding cables and computers. Before I got married I honestly couldn’t think of a reason you wouldn’t want over-sized computer cases, and who cares what color they are, as long as they have good airflow and the internal layout is easy to work with. As it turns out, huge blue glowing PC towers are offensive to the apartment decor. Also, the idea of CAT-5 cable running to all corners of the apartment was a tough sell, I did manage to hide it pretty well. Maybe Heather is just graciously ignoring it…. I wont ask 🙂

I am still trying to track down a replacement TV connector for an NVIDIA 7800, and our media center will be hooked up and running on the TV. Heather has the decorations looking amazing, sans pictures, and we don’t have huge piles of sutff in the corners! It seems like we should have people over to visit just to see how nice it is now, but a two bedroom apartment can get pretty crowded… So I won’t invite everyone over at once 🙂

-Jordan

Tech Notes

Posted on by Jordan

I have been looking into all kinds of data synchronization tools as of late. My primary goal has been to ensure downloading a camera onto one computer in the house would result in the pictures being available to the other computers.

In my looking around I found Live Mesh Not really the tool I was looking for, because it keeps a copy of the files on an online server. I am really excited about using Mesh to keep a folder synced between my work machine and home for keeping notes handy, getting pictures where I can grab them for blog posts, etc.

Back to the home network, my primary tool is SyncToy. It’s not the most user-friendly tool, so I don’t think Heather will adopt it as something she manually uses, but I have been able to schedule sync jobs from my machine. I hope to have Heather’s Vista laptop doing the same soon. There is a rather large side project involved, where I get to manually merge two huge photo collections before I can actually turn this thing loose with live data.

I turned WinRar loose on Heather’s primary picture collection (there is another one of pre-college pictures), and after a little over an hour of compressing, the .rar was roughly six gigs. That’s just the backup in case something horrible happens when I start merging pictures later this week…

Once that is all up and running, I think there are some cool Windows Home Server plugins that would do web-albums with a lot less hassle than what I am running on this website. I will have to look into that. Not to say its really hard to use Gallery… no I take that back… I don’t find it hard, Heather always gives up because it takes a lot of fiddling with things to make it play nice when you are setting things up or adding pictures. Here’s hoping the WHS plugin will be nicer 🙂

-Jordan

The Kansas City Reception

Posted on by Jordan

The last wedding related event is complete!

And what a fun event it was! I haven’t had time to get any pictures cleaned up to post, but wanted to get a post up anyway…

Heather’s parents did all the work to put together a reception for us in Kansas City. The timing was about perfect. Five weeks after the wedding, Heather and I had time to recover, but were still kind of in the wedding mindset I think.

The only negative was the weather. I suppose you could argue we got lucky with the wedding, but it was still annoying to have the only snow in months land on KC the day we were expecting people to drive in from all over to see us. Fortunately, the snow wasn’t too bad, and to our knowledge, nobody had any trouble outside of having to drive slower.

The event itself was kicked off by loading roughly 30 Gutschow friends and family into a bus, and driving to the location of the restaurant. Heather had expressed some skepticism as to the necessity of a bus before the event, but it turned out to be a really fun addition to the day. The mood on the bus was a lot of fun, and it gave a few more minutes to see people before the official event.

Once on location, Heather scrambled to finish up an epically long slide show of wedding pictures wile I configured a projector to display it. We managed to have everything ready before the official star time.

Once things got underway, everything kind of became a blur. It was so nice to see everyone, and I still cannot believe how quickly time passed. We never had time to talk to anyone as long as we would have liked, and probably failed to get around to everyone we should have. The number of people there was amazing, considering the snow, and the fact that many of the attendees had also been at the wedding. Heather and I were amazed by the dedication and support people showed towards us.

After the official event, we rode the bus back to the house, for more time with family (mostly Gutschow, but my parents and a few others came too!).  I can’t say as I really enjoy being the guest of honor at any event, but it was laid back enough to be rather enjoyable.

Heather and I cannot say how grateful we are to our parents, for everything they did to make the events surrounding the wedding, not to mention the wedding, come of better than we could have ever hoped for. We are also glad its over, as fun as it was, this past weekend left us both exhausted 🙂

-Jordan

note: The slide show from this event will be the core of a web album in the making, coming “soon”!

Other Projects

Posted on by Jordan

While I have been messing with computers, Heather has been decorating… A lot. Our apartment is really feeling like a home now. One of the really cool things she has done was to find a way to display some of the cards we got from the wedding.

img_0964

Using the same glue that was used for the pictures decorating tables at the reception, Heather covered the top of her desk with portions of cards. The resulting surface was anything but smooth however, so we purchased a slab of plate glass to cover the desktop with. it looks really good.

The other major project Heather has been working on is a huge collection of pictures from the wedding. That is basically done, and was previewed at the KC reception over the weekend. It now falls to me to get those lined up to go onto DVD’s and up on the website, but that should go quickly as soon as I find time 🙂

-Jordan

The Media Server

Posted on by Jordan

This isn’t probably the most interesting post I could put up, but I still haven’t pulled the pictures off my camera of Heather’s project 🙂

I have a Windows Home Server running in our apartment! I had planned on it just being large network storage location, and knew the Windows Home Server setup let you do a few cool things. As it turns out its really amazing what it can do, automatic imaging of entire computers for one thing! I haven’t really had time to get it fully configured yet, but I have been really excited about it so far.

now for a little bragging:

server_space

2.37 terabytes! Chances are I will find a way to outgrow that somehow, but it will take a while 🙂 For now the only things setting on the drive are the daily images of Heather’s laptop,  a few MP3s and all the pictures I wanted to backup off my computer.

It looks like I will be able to map a drive from both Heather’s laptop and my PC to have Picasa work off the server, allowing Heather or I to download our camera once and have the same working set both places, also means a picture edited on one computer will be in the new state for both. I think its going to be really awesome! I may find out Picasa hates working off a network drive, or something like that, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it 🙂

-Jordan

One Month

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have been married for one month now.

After one month we have basically figured out how to run a household together. It still feels like we have no time to do anything after work, but it’s been nice to have life slow down a little.

Both of us have been keeping busy with little projects around the house, and I hope to get some pictures posted up here soon to document those. The posts are so much more interesting if I include a few pictures 🙂

Speaking of pictures, we have a DVD containing our wedding pictures finally! Heather has been hard at work sorting and modifying pictures to get a master list of our favorite pictures from the wedding. Several people have asked about ordering pictures, I would recommend not getting them from our photographer’s website (as would our photographer, she just posts them there so people have options). We should soon have pictures hosted here that you can download in a high quality format and print at a photo printing website such as MPix. We have full copy right to the pictures, so any place should be able to take care of printing, although a place like Wal-Mart will probably hassle you a lot.

If you don’t want to mess with downloading the pictures, we hope to get DVD’s cut for people containing all the pictures. I am sure we can make a few more as people request them!! 🙂

-Jordan