A few more great FL pics to share....

And my top 3, in no particular order......

We're Back!

We're back from the honeymoon and we had a fantastic time! As it turns out, following the hurricane around the Caribbean gave us great weather; I think it rained for about half an hour very late one night, otherwise, it was sunny with a nice breeze. The only downside was not making it to Grand Cayman. Their port was closed and it was too dangerous to use tender boats. The first two pictures are from Labadee, Haiti, which is basically an island off of Haiti that is owned by Royal Caribbean. The last picture was taken in Cozumel, where we did some shopping and got some lunch at a great restaurant. They had the hottest house salsa I've ever had! We also made port in Motego Bay, Jamaica, but I took those pictures with a waterproof camera so I don't have any to show. The ship was great as well. We caught all the shows (including an ice show!) and of course had an awesome dinner every night.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, here's Nick leading the Soulja Boy at the reception... (from a personal camera, if the professional video is better I may swap it out)

Its the end of the world!

Will this be the next y2k?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,420062,00.html

Excellent

Well you knew this picture would get on the blog sooner or later. A truly glorious end to a great party. Allie and I couldn't have had a better time with everyone. I have some other random pictures that I uploaded here. Everyone please post what they have also. I know there were lots of good group pictures taken.

Eric and Christina, thanks again for a wonderful weekend and we wish you all the best together. Be sure to post some pictures of your cruise ship sailing through the hurricane.

master of the master

So I have nearly finished my upstairs cabling. The following is from the wiring of my master bedroom. Due to my ridiculously stupid attic, I ended up pulling the baseboards up and routing behind them.

Here is the first run poking through the back of my master bedroom wall.

The pulled up baseboard then continues through a closet and into the hallway.

A shot from down the hallway shows the extent of the removed baseboard.

Here the cable has made the long journey through the trough.

A close-up of the start.

And of the end (where it disappears is up into an interior wall where I have attic access).

One side of the tunnel I had to make behind the door frame.

And the other side of said tunnel.

Here's a shot of the near-finished product. Here I have just loosely put the baseboards back into place. What remains is to fix them into place (using friend's nail gun), caulk, and paint. The remainder of the finish work will have to wait until we get back from FL.

And finally the finished plate.

All that remains is the plate in the living room downstairs. Luckily, this drop was a good proving ground and a similar technique will let me do the downstairs without too much more effort.

I am also happy to report that as of right now, I have no reason to ever go back into my attic. That is unless I decide to completely fill that sweat-box with blown-in insulation :).

Our First 5-K!

Amanda and I ran our first 5-K race in the Canes Cross Country Classic this past Labor Day. I did some mild training for about a month, and Amanda did next to no training, but she manages a damn gym, so she doesn't need any training. We ran it at a blistering 12 minute mile pace, finishing somewhere around 400th place. My next goal is to run the Gasparilla 5-K in 25 minutes this coming February.

On the Storm

We have survived our first Louisiana hurricane, and right now I am in the safest city on earth because we evacuated our entire city. I have to say when I agreed to help with the evacuation I am glad I was on this end, where the drunks and crackheads got one last shot of whatever they were on before we put them on a bus. I have never seen so many drunks at 6am since college. If the city could stay like this forever I do believe we would win the award for greatest place on Earth, because from what I understand Mickey likes the nose candy so suck it disney land. The evacuation plan was to go to the ghetto with city buses and tell everyone to get in, some people didn't even know there was a storm coming, they just thought it might be nice to ride a bus. Jilly my dog enjoyed the storm because the frisbees flew on their own without me having to throw them to her. I may post some pictures tomorrow when I go out on storm surveys, but I am going to try and work like crazy so they release me for Eric's wedding. Cristina may have to assist bringing all the evacuee's home, but I tried to convince her to pull a southpark and make flyers that shreveport has the best crack, and some of the people decide to stay. I did get to watch the Gator Game before the craziness broke loose and I must say we look pretty scary.

cabling update

we got four more drops done today (two plates on either side of my back bedroom)... this is about the extent of the drops that are done in a reasonable amount of work (i.e. up through wall, across attic, down into patch-panel). the four remaining will take a bit more work... the last two upstairs are in the master bedroom which -- in k.b. home's infinite wisdom -- is completely sealed off from the rest of the house. there is essentially attic space above my master that i cannot get to. the final two drops will be downstairs in the living room. the main challenge here is the downstairs part. more updates to come (hopefully)...

HOOOORAAAAY

For college football starting today and NFL starting next Thursday!!!!!!!!

GO NOLES AND BROWNIES BABY!!!!!!!

NICK>>>>>rory

Nick D

Mmm, Beer!

Just bottled my second batch of homebrew beer, this time it's a British Pale Ale, the most popular beer in the world! Hopefully *fingers crossed* it will be ready to drink when you guys get to town so you can give it a try.

Registered

Eric,
Where are you registered?

and it begins...

Started my latest home project which is wiring my house with CAT-5e for Gigabit home network. The final network will have a total of 12 drops in 6 rooms. A buddy of mine who has a house in the same subdivision (same floorplan) went halfsy's w/ me on materials and labor. My house is the guinea pig.

Here's the access to the devil's den. Crawling around the attic in the dead of summer in Tucson isn't exactly fun but it has to be done.


Here's the first drop we did. Picked up everything from www.firefold.com. All told damage was $102 per person which is a far cry from what it would cost to get someone to do this for me. Plus, where's the fun in that?!


Keystone jacks on the first drop. These little guys make finishing the wires a breeze.


The first jack buttoned up. The jacks lie flush with the plate and everything looks beautiful :).


A little snap down one direction of the devil's den.


and the other direction. Not much sense of scale in these pictures but it is hella tight.


The second plate in the loft. Opposite wall from the first. This one went super easy.


This is the one place where I had to cut the drywall. The attic access stops right at the leftmost stud. So we had to drop down into the wall and punch through to where we had cut the hole for the master plate. I kept the drywall pieces and I'll end up re-screwing them back in and patching around them once everything is done.


Close up of four drops making their way through the drilled studs.


An intermediate shot of the master panel.


This is where all the drops are run. This master panel will then serve as my patch panel where I intend to run two subnets. One subnet will be my regular internet access and will have my xbox, laptop, and one nic of my desktop. The second subnet will host my MythTV frontends and backends.

Well that's what we accomplished the first day... will try to remember to snap more pics as more progress is made.

I figured y'all would like this.

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Expert Angler

This past week I spent some time on the Jersey shore with Allie and her family. Logan is always posting his pictures of giant whales caught on his boat, so I couldn't think of a more appropriate place to post this. We only caught little tiny fish but it was a lot of fun and I drank a lot of beers in 4 hours. Isn't that what fishing is all about?

To Groomsmen, RE: Rides

I've been asked a few times about getting to the wedding, and more importantly, getting back from the reception. Since I need all of the groomsmen together before the wedding to get ready and take pictures, I think it would be best for me to pick all of you up in the morning and take you up to Christina's brother's house to get ready. That way I'll have my car up there to head out after the wedding, and no one will be stuck there drunk with a car. After the ceremony, we'll take the limo to the reception. Following the reception, the worst case is you catch a ride home with your families, at the mercy of when they want to leave. A better situation in my opinion is if one of you can convince your date to be a DD, drive a large suv type car up there, and drive everyone back to NW B-town. I think that's a pretty solid plan... feel free to post suggestions.

PS - Let me know if you've been fitted for your tux in the comments.

Bahamas pics

Sorry, I got back and forgot to put these up.

Blogger Babies

Is anyone else freaked out by those baby pictures on the blogger dashboard?

Happy birthday Jae! (And Alex)

Jae...welcome to a very boring age of 26. Alex...you are one year closer to 30:)

We'll celebrate in Sept!

A drinkers paradise

I am planning a trip to New Orleans for Halloween. The modern holiday of Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (Irish pronunciation: [ˈsˠaunʲ]; from the Old Irish samain).[2] The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes [3] regarded as the "Celtic New Year".[4] Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, the boundary between the alive and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, where the bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them. Thanks Wikipedia, I like to keep the history lesson going. The only evil spirits I wish to placate come in packs of twelve. These spirits like the ones mentioned above also cause sickness and damage, but coupled with Bourbon Street it is all worth it. I would like invite everyone down for the mayhem that a Friday Halloween brings. This includes people from Florida, New England, Out West, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas,not you Mississippi, Georgia is cool, but North Dakota is right out. Airfare is cheap, hotels are cheap, drinks are cheap, and you can get drinks taller than most grade school children.

I'm a big girl now...

Well, my internship paid off. My supervisor got a promotion and you'll never guess who was offered her spot! After only a few short months of working for free I am now the Fitness Director at the AEGON all-employee gym... which basically means I run the company fitness center :) AEGON is some kind of a financial/insurance company (not entirely positive what they all do, it's a big building) and the company I now work for that AEGON contracts me through is called Corporate Fitness Works. I'll be there for at least a year because that's what they asked of me, and then we'll see where it leads me. The pay isn't spectacular but it's a respectable start, and the benefits are a nice supplement to the crap I have, which is something I like to call pay out the A$$ for COBRA. I'll actually have a 401K! Haha... I knew I'd start to grow up sooner or later!

What has our society become

http://myespn.go.com/blogs/nfcnorth/0-3-15/Packers-brass-offers-cultural-reference-lesson.html

Read the article first and then my response below.

It's sad that our society as a whole is so ignorant as to warrant an article about someone making a reference to ancient roman history. There was a time when the phrase "alea iacta est" was one of hundreds of phrases memorized, along with the historic or literary stories behind them. This knowledge enriched and enlightened our lives, and public discourse as well. Take the phrase, written by Horace: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," which means "it is a sweet and honorable thing to die for one's country.". Horace was being literal when he wrote this. Now when Wilfred Owen, a soldier in WWI, was in the trenches, he thought of Horace and thought "how wrong that old coot was.". Owen then used Horace's phrase as the basis for a poem about the horrors of war and how senseless all the killing was. I make two points: this is much more effective than "Bush lied, people died." And huzzah for a Colgate man making reference to the Rubicon. A small victory but a victory nonetheless.

$250 = $300

just helped my mom set up a new ingdirect savings account. she used my referral to get a free $25 and made an initial deposit of at least $250 to get another free $25. so she was able to turn her $250 into $300 and all i got was a measly $10 referral bonus.

let me know if anyone else wants to take advantage of this, maybe i can turn these referrals into a free tank of gas :P

Another bank bites the dust

http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/press/2008/pr08065.html

Bradenton makes the front page of digg, but not for something good of course.

Wedding Invite Clarification

A "+1" is implied for everyone that received an invitation addressed to themselves only. In those cases, we either didn't know your significant other's last name or didn't know if one existed at all. Sorry if there was any confusion!

College Rankings

I know everyone is aware that UF topped the list of party schools this year but a more important ranking came out, the schools whose graduates make the most money. I just thought I would post some of the results...

Colleges

Starting Median Salary

Mid-Career Median Salary

University of Florida (UF)

$47,100

$87,900

Florida State University (FSU)

$42,100

$73,000

Auburn University

$45,400

$84,700

Middlebury College

$47,700

$94,200

Colgate University

$52,800

$108,000

Here is the link, in case you want to check it out. Alex, do not worry you beat Alabama.

http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-colleges.asp

Plans within plans

We have Cristina's beach place for Eric's wedding so anyone looking for a Hotel can stay. It has 3 bedrooms and 5 queen sized beds and it is right next to the beach and bars. It makes for a fun stumble. I am also heading to the Keys Aug 22nd, I am going to have a six toed cat fight a Florida Lobster for my drunken amusement. If anyone has a free weekend to walk around the keys give me a call. Punch and pie will be served, more people will come if you tell them we have punch and pie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZZRe9sKcfw

Bahamas next week

So I am going to the Bahamas again before I start my new job.  Alex is going to the Bahamas too before he starts his new job.  

Mac user

I am now a mac user.  I made the switch.  I now have to learn how to use it.  Anyone else using one?

Dark Knight

I saw the new Batman movie last night and I just want to say it was phenomenal. The most impressive character was by far the Joker I will give big time credit to Heath Ledger. It was played way different then Jack did, but it was so much more deranged. Between the Joker and the typical Batman theatrics it was more then I expected. The only downside is when Christian Bale forces the "Batman voice" which he does a few times but other then that you will not be disappointed. I am not sure if him being dead adds to his performance or not but you can not take your eyes off the Joker the entire movie.

PS Saw a preview for a couple of good movies a lot of my boys are coming out with new ones (Pitt, DiCaprio, Reeves and of course a new Terminator staring Christan Bale).

Have a good weekend ladies and Gents.

Nick D....out.....Rory is gay.

My Catch Log

This is something that a buddy and I have been working on for a while now. Can everyone take a couple minutes and register and give us your opinions on it. For those of you that are tech savvy, this is in the alpha stage of development. Let us know everything. http://www.mycatchlog.com

Bradenton

I love when Bradenton makes national news. It was even on the Drudge Report!

Link

Netflix + Live = Awesome

Press Release

To summarize, starting in the fall Xbox Live Gold members who are also Netflix members will be able to watch their "Watch Instantly" queue on their tv through Xbox Live.

Something else they touched upon is being able to sync across multiple accounts to watch movies with friends. Hard to say how useful that will be, but I could see giving it a shot.

I was seriously considering getting a Roku, but now I'm glad I waited.

Sandy Mousseau: 2/19/96 - 7/12/08

Sweetest dog ever in the world... may she rest in peace. God I'm going to miss that happy face...

NYC Vids

Note to self: Don't play rock band around Jenny.

NYC on the 4th

How was everyone's 4th of July? I assume there were some shenanigans had in NYC? Adam, how was camp? DC was rainy most of the day on the 4th, per the usual. But fun was still had.

Boat Races

and 2 videos:

Also Heading to B-Town

As some of you already know and already realize from Bryan's previous comment, I am heading back to Bradenton to start work at (surprise surprise) my dad's practice. I was going to delay a possible decision to move back home for about another year, but Ashley has decided to give FL a try and I decided I should take the opportunity. Plus it is hard to turn down a job where I work fewer hours, have consistent days off, don't have emergency duty, AND get paid more. It probably doesn't hurt that my current job is driving me crazy. I should be moving back late July/early August. I just need to find a way to move that's not going to cost me a fortune.

So I expect to hear from anyone who visits Bradenton.

NY Trip

I am officially ready for the "Invasion" for those of you coming up please bring a pair of shoes you are comfortable walking many miles in. You will also need a pair of jeans because even though it is hot as hell bars up here like to enforce dress codes on males. Even run of the mill Irish Pubs like to think they are fancy and deny people in shorts and sandals sometimes. It is better safe then sorry.

Please post when and what airport your flight arrives into as I only have a half day on Thursday so I want to be sure I am around and not out gallivanting (copying logan) around town. Call me if you have any questions....

Let the party begin....HIIIYOOOOO

Nick D....CPA

New Job

Yes, gallivanting around Florida and the Bahamas on someone else's boat while getting paid to do it was fun. I figured it was time to actually start my career though. I took a job with the Florida West Coast Resource Conservation and Development Council. I am coming in as an Assistant Project Manager. Which means......I will be moving back to Bradenton! Never thought I would be excited to do so but I do have to say that I miss that town. I will be back in Btown in early August.