Wow, I can't remember the last time I'd gone a whole month without an update. It's been an incredible month, though, so there's lots to mention ( Read more... )

The big news of the moment is Nicole enjoying her first few weeks of being unemployed after quitting the job that was making her miserable. Last week, she and her best friend drove down to central California to visit her parents. It was the first time she's seen her immediate family since last May when her and I made the trip and I met her parents ( Read more... )

Easter morning, while I was at work pushing wafers around the fab and fixing IT problems, it dawned on me that I was in what some people call a bunny suit. The fab suits we wear from head to toe is kind of a nylon fabric of some kind and mostly traps particles in the air and on our clothes from getting onto the product. It was kind of funny to go ( Read more... )

My father works at a place called Maxim, a company here in Portland that makes microprocessor chips sorta like Intel. He's been there now for half a year and when he found out they were hiring, my brother, Ryan, jumped at the chance to accept a recommendation and interview. He, too, is in the same boat I am: For our specific artistic skill sets. no ( Read more... )

I'm a pack rat when it comes to things associated with my education. When I graduated high school ten whole years ago, I had a fifty-pound pile of papers stuffed into a two-foot-long black plastic box. When I graduated college four years later, all that paperwork got stuffed into a black plastic box similar in size and weight. That bin was a foot ( Read more... )

I mentioned in my last entry that my brother and a couple of his friends are rumbling to start up their own media design company. After weeks of discussion and desperation, we've decided to name the business, "Beyond Aurora Studios." You may recognize the Beyond Aurora name from ten years ago when my friends and I set out to make a simple video ( Read more... )

The saga to figure out what's wrong with my car continues. In my last entry from Thursday, I explained that I thought I'd fixed the starter problem by replacing the car's battery only to have a new problem -- the fan belt screeching -- appear from nowhere. At the time, I was deadly worried the alternator (A $200 part) was to blame for the ( Read more... )

Waaaaaaay back on January 7th of this year, I bought a battery for my el' cheap-o camcorder on eBay for $17. Up until that time, Bryan had been borrowing the camera and after misplacing the original battery he offered to replace it. I took a risk and purchased the battery from a seller in Hong Kong. Now, think about this for a second- Would I ( Read more... )

Sometimes, you see a news report on TV and it really makes you think. Just now, I finished watching 20/20's report entitled, "Stupid in America", an hour long tirade about how bad off America's schools really are. For sixty minutes, they ran interviews and discussions with officials, teachers and students from all over. They had results from ( Read more... )

You know it's going to be a bad week when the first email you get on a Monday morning is someone demanding a refund on a $70 eBay item I sold to them. They claim it's broken, I just think whoever it is doesn't know how to use the device or has the wrong software. What's worse is that this was something I was selling on behalf of my brother so now I ( Read more... )