Productivity 101

Wow, what a productive day it's been.  I'm still sitting at work, but now the market is closed and so I can finally take a breather.  I was going to blog this morning about lack of motivation and how I have a hard time getting motivated to get anything done.  I decided, however, that instead of just blogging about it, I should go ahead and get to work on what I wanted to get done.  I'm very glad that I did.

I really do have a hard time getting motivated to get things done, but I've managed to show myself today that I can.  Head down, headphones on, music going, and work flowing.  It was pretty cool.  I've still got stuff that I can get done, so I'm going to head back to working on it.  I have to keep the momentum going, or else it's all over.

Shot of the day (night?) - 4/4/09

This is one that I took last night. I've seen several photos of the moon that have just blown me away, it amazes me how much detail some people can get with just a simple camera. I wanted to give it a shot. I definitely can't get nearly as much detail with my lens selection as some others can, but I was still pretty surprised. It's cool how you can actually see some of the texture and terrain.

This was shot at ISO 640 on my D80. It was shot at around 210mm zoom (315mm equiv on a 35mm camera) with a 1/400th second exposure time at f/8. It's nothing spectacular, but it was still surprisingly cool to me. This is just cropped to get rid of a bunch of black sky -- this was the original image size. I took out all the saturation, as the white balance was giving it sort of a yellowish hue that I didn't like. That's it, I left all the curves and contrast and such alone. Pretty neat!

Sunday Morning Blah's

So, it's Sunday morning, and here I sit. Another day in front of the computer. I actually don't have much of anything planned for today. I'm heading down to my dad's to have lunch with him later this afternoon, I believe. He was pretty sick all of last week, and I felt really bad for him. I've been worried about him like crazy since he had a stroke several months back. Even when he gets sick, I'm always worried that it could be something more serious. It turned out not to be this time, thankfully, and I think he's feeling a lot better. So, that's the plan.

I don't really have much to add. I slacked off this morning and didn't go with Laura to church, because we were up so late last night cleaning tea up. We made a gallon (or so) of tea for dinner last night and drank some (1/3 or so) of it. Laura was trying to pour herself a cup last night and apparently spilled it all over the place. She spilled most of the rest of it, it was all inside the fridge, on the floor, everywhere. We ended up having to take apart the entire fridge (just about -- all the shelves came out) so that we could clean it all up. I felt terrible for her, because she's a very clean person, and having that everywhere must have been driving her nuts. Everyone spills every now and then.

So anyway, we were up until probably around 1:00 and then when the alarm went off at 6:40 or so this morning, it was just not time to get up yet. I ended up staying here and slacking off. I feel a bit better now, so that's nice.

That's about it -- slack Sunday. Does anyone else have any fun plans?

Shot of the Day - 4/3/09

We'll give this a shot. Since "my thing" for the time being is my new DSLR, and photography and stuff, I'll try to post a shot each day that I either enjoyed taking or that has some sort of story behind it or something. Who knows how long it will last, my interests seem to change with the seasons. :P

Anyway, this one was one of the first few that I took with the new D80 that I feel really came out. I was chilling out on the front porch for about 20 minutes with the camera pointed at the bird feeder. The sunlight was pretty nice, as it was around sunset and the light was direct (from the left side of the photo). I was able to get the capture with a quick enough shutter speed to eliminate any kind of shake. Nothing special about the shot or the birds, but they were pretty cute. I liked it because it came out nice and crisp.

Trip Back in Time

I always say that I enjoy going back and reading all my old entries.  Since I've been moving everything over here from LJ, I've been going back and re-reading all my old posts as they've transferred.  It's crazy how much times have changed.  It all got me thinking, if I could travel back in time and change any one of my decisions, would I?

Maybe I'm just an overly optimistic person, but I really don't think that I would.  I'm a believer in the butterfly effect of the chaos theory, and so any one small change that I would have made would have drastically altered my life.  Let's do a for instance -- say I wish now that I'd done better in school (I don't, just pretend, here).  I could say, "I would change my decision to start playing quake so that I could spend more time working on school work."

Granted, this would be no small change in my life, as that single decision to start playing a video game has shaped who I am today.  Sad?  Maybe.

Playing quake sparked my interest in computers and the internet as a whole, and led to my decision to learn all I could about computers.  Not only that, it was my poor performance in school that led to my attending VCU.  (No offense to VCU, It's a fantastic school -- I just couldn't get in any other school had I wanted to, with barely a 2.0 GPA coming out of high school)  I actually had to take a semester off before going to VCU because I wasn't accepted when I first applied.  It was a karate instructor of mine that was an associate Dean at VCU that was able to help me get in after that first rejection.  If any of those decisions had changed, my life would be totally different.  I wouldn't have started my first semester in the Art school, I would have gone straight to Computer Science or something.  I wouldn't have transferred to a different school my second semester.  That was my wife's first semester.  That semester, we had two classes together, and I really got to know her. I wouldn't be living where I am, or working where I am because I wouldn't have been in the same places at the same times.  Everything would be different.  

Who's to say whether that's a good or a bad thing?  I'm certainly not going to try to make that call, but I'm very happy with my life today, and I know that any change I would make would drastically alter where I am today.  Thinking about things like that also makes me realize that each and every decision I make today drastically alters my future.  

Just something to think about.

Bear with me

Please bear with me over the course of the next few days (hopefully), as I'm porting all of my old Live Journal posts to Blogger. I much prefer the interface of blogger and have grown tired of the slow UI that Live Journal uses, and so I'm transferring all of my entries over.

Blogger has a limitation to only allow 50 posts per day (and I now realize that this one isn't going to go through, as it's 51, so I'm actually writing this yesterday), and I have roughly 261 entries that need to be transferred over.

Props to Linux Lore and their application (http://linuxlore.blogspot.com/2007/09/livejournal-to-blogger-or-blogger-to.html) that makes this as seamless a process as possible.

Edit: It actually did let me post after verifying that I was an actual person. Excellent! So this post is actually today! Also, I started from the "beginning" and I'll update with the rest of my posts in the days to come.