Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

The ButtKicker LFE Kit just arrived today. All I can say is wow. I'm busy watching all the big blockbuster films with loads of bass. Right now it's Terminator 3 time. From the very first nuke that goes off, to when Arnold makes his debut, all the way until the truck chase scene. The wow factor does not stop. I'm totally looking forward to watching Band of Brothers tomorrow.

I've got a sub in the form of the Boston XB6 but I've got the volume down nearly all the way, apartment living and such. The Boston VR3's go pretty low anyway, the cross over is set to 60Hz but but Boston says 35Hz can be cleanly achieved. The sub and ButtKicker are set to 80Hz. Somehow even at lower volumes it just sounds and feels amazing.

The transducer hits with precision but also rolls extremely well giving big flaming explosions a new sense of realism. Combining that with the great Boston sound and it really makes for an awesome experience.

I'm not sure what else to say beyond that. It's definitely something that one needs to feel and experience to understand. It's not gimmicky feeling at all, one person I talked to asked if it was like a phone vibrating, but not at all. It's far more complicated, smooth and natural.

I haven't had a chance to test it with music yet. That's for tomorrow during the day. I will say, it might need some adjusting then, when I first hooked it up I ignored the manual set the thing to 75% volume. I think that was a pretty extreme, it kinda felt like the provided amp was giving the unit /too/ much power. If that's even possible. Turning it down half way and it's perfect.

Went down stairs and sure enough, couldn't really notice any of the vibrations or anything. Not sure about next door though.

That's the review for now, more tomorrow after music.

I think this must be one of those moments for me where things come together nicely and I just kinda chill about life and live for enjoying everything. I'm not too sure how many hours I've been working since I started my job, I'm not too keen to figure it out either. All I know is that it's probably over 60 a week if you count at home time on the computer reading up, writing, doing email, you name it. I'm feeling like I'm getting loads done and despite having to wind up again to the normal level of multi-tasking that's required I honestly think I'm getting a lot done. At some point it's going to have to calm a bit since I can't keep up this pace. I don't think there's any reason I can't get a little more economical with my time though and gradually balance stuff out.

Speaking of which, damn, do I need to get back to the gym. I've been maintaining my weight but I can already tell I'm losing some of the tone I had gained just by not working out for 2 months regularly. I do miss going to the gym for an hour a day, it's an awesome stress relief when others don't come as easily, oh and gaming isn't much of a relief sometimes. At least not when I get my ass blown off by some punk kid yelling out racist comments.

The only thing I really dread at the moment is the commute. I know some people have crazy commutes at close to 2 hours or more. For me though, if I'm in the car for more than 30 minutes each way I start feeling like there's better things to be doing with my time than sitting in the car waiting for people to learn how to merge.

Despite all the great little things that come with working for the jolly green giant that is Microsoft, I don't really think my team nor my review would take kindly to me suddenly deciding to cut one more car from the road by working from home. Meanwhile it does seem like I've been in the new role for quite some time, in reality it's been 3 months, not 3 years... unless I count contracting time.

One thing I seem to very poorly at is having a good idea of how much time I'm going to actually have available. I mention this because I had intended on chronicling the initial year or so of actually what it means to be FTE. In some ways I guess I've not really failed since my writing has been sparse that in itself is a good indication of what life is like in year one.

I'm a little biased in my perspective and experience as well having been around here a little while, I can't begin to imagine how much that has actually helped me built up momentum.

Considering it's now going on quarter past 2AM, I'll quit rambling and go to bed.

So this discussion came up recently about home theater's and what various people are doing, I just kinda figured whatever and throw my info out here as well.

First off, here is a link to an RSS feed that has some home theater examples which are pretty sweet:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/eh/rss/C154 via http://www.electronichouse.com/

Photos can be found here: http://cid-491062c199155578.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Home%20Theater

Not the ideal set up in terms of layout but it’s an apartment…

Equipment:
56” Samsung HL-T5689S 1080p - currently $1400 (through a long history I originally paid a lot more)
Denon AVR-3808CI - $1200
Dell XPS w/dual OCUR and a LG HD/BD drive (dvi w/hdcp to hdmi) - believe this can be had for $1200
Dell PowerEdge 2900 with 4TB RAID5 in a closet up stairs - $3000
BostonAcoustics VR3 * 4 (front and rear) - $250/ea
VRC (center) - $250
VRX (sides not in use) - $250
XB6 (sub) - $250
Xbox 360 Elite (plugged in via HDMI), Wii (component), PS2 (component) – retail

All the furniture is the cheap but decent Ikea stuff. Unfortunately because it is an apartment and the layout kind of sucks the rear speakers are way too close to the couch, but using the Audyssey in the Denon helps adjust for that and the surround experience is still pretty good. Oh and the fact I’m totally blocking the fireplace that’ll never be used anyway. The main thing for me was finding something cheap and simple to put all the equipment and TV on. Luckily the TV stand thing has space underneath so the cables are tied nicely under there. The only cable that’s visible is the wireless receiver for the KB and mouse. That new Logitech looks like it might be a good replacement though.

Monoprice.com for all the cabling which cost about $60, and considering that included 100ft of 12 gauge speaker wire, banana plugs, 3 spdif cables, 2 HDMI cables, cable for the sub… that’s pretty sweet. I also had previously bought a lot of CAT5e so the entire apartment is wired now though the cables are run under the baseboards.

There’s a single HDMI cable going from the receiver to TV and the TV is permanently set to that input. Luckily there’s no real overscan issues with the TV and MCE. The Dell w/OCUR is plugged in to the receiver via DVI w/HDCP to HDMI, for audio there’s a SPDIF cable as well as the normal 5.1 analog cabling. This allows me to normally use the digital output and get DD and DTS to the receiver, if I want WMA 5.1 and Uncompressed 5.1 PCM I switch to analog and that’s as simple as pressing the Input button on the Denon remote (it cycles through HDMI and Analog quickly). Now I did have an issue with the ATI 2600 card and the HDCP stuff when I added the receiver into the mix, the picture and audio would just cut out every 30 seconds or so. I switched to a nVidia 8600 and the problems went away (ATI driver issue I guess). There’s nothing too special about the setup though beyond that.

I actually use MCE for everything with no standalone players or devices other than the game consoles. It’s just nice and simple that way. The complexity is added by having ALL media stored on the RAID5 upstairs with everything in a domain. It’s pretty well organized but there’s still not enough room to rip all the DVD’s, though Network Media Sharing and Zune handle all the other media.

The speakers are possibly the best part of the setup since they were a total steal. I bought them from OneCall.com who pretty much is the only online retailer for BA. I had some Bostons way back when but they were stolen so it was kinda nice finally getting some again. I had looked at Magnolia and Definitive. I compared Klipsch, Monitor, Definitive’s, and B&W’s. I actually had no way to hear the Boston since Circuit City sucks like that.

My first choice was the B&W’s the 703’s were just awesome and at some point far in the future I hope to have some B&W’s. Randomly though I noticed OneCall had all the VR stuff for insane prices $249 vs. $629 so I ended up jumping on that. Turns out Boston EOL’d the VR series so they were just clearing inventory. They disappeared for a while but it looks like they’re up for $399 now. But this is a good point I think, you can get an awesome deal if you buy slightly used or EOL’d products, as long as you know the product is quality to begin with and the company making them is decent you can’t really go wrong. If and when I go for some B&W’s I might buy the current model year product just after the updated models are out.

All in all it’s a comfortable setup and the budget really isn’t that bad. I personally feel that however much is spent on the TV should be spent on the audio and however much is spent on the audio should be spent on the receiver and stuff that powers it all. So everything is right about that level. Flaws would be the fact it’s all in an apartment with a crappy layout and not a lot of wiggle room. It sucks I have to block the fireplace but that’s the only option in my case, we’ll see what it’s like when I move this month. The center channel is a little weak but I’ve adjusted that. I’m probably going to get a ButtKicker LFE after I move to still be able to enjoy things a bit. Though I’ve actually turned the sub down all the way I’ve still had noise complaints, the VR3’s go down to 35Hz and at a decent volume on some music can probably bug neighbors. I also can’t even use the VRX speakers at this point since I don’t have walls to mount them to, they are dipole surrounds which create a more theater like experience but even so I probably will use them in a dual surround config not 7.1. I mainly bought them because of their discount and the fact they’re EOL.

Anywho, there’s my quick personal review of my own setup. Hoping that at some point in the future I can do a proper home theater room with seating, acoustically transparent projector screen and so on.

This is a fairly common problem which leaves a lot of users scratching their heads as to how to just make things work. There are a couple reasons one would encounter this. The most common is because an application or process still has the file open (technically it's called a 'handle to the file'). Another possibility would be if the permissions on the file you were trying to delete were invalid. Without getting too in depth into the how and why there are two quick things to check on when trying to get around the problem.

I'll go over the first reason in this post. In the Windows SysInternals suite, there is a tool called Process Explorer, which is an amazingly powerful app. It will allow you to view what's going on behind the scenes of most everything running on the system. Just doing quick search will show just how powerful this tool is. For this issue though, what we'll do is find any open handles on the file we're trying to access and delete.

1. First, start Process Explorer.
2. Press CTRL+F to open a search window.
3. In the 'Handle or DLL substring' field type in a portion or the complete name of the file you are trying to delete and press Enter to begin the search. In my case the file was "08 mer du japon.mp3".
4. You should now be presented with a list of open handles. Next double click on the handle in the search window to show the file handle highlighted in the lower pane along with all the other open handles on the system.
5. Right click the row for the handle and click Close Handle.
6. You should now be good to go.

In this particular case it would seem the handle to the .MP3 file wasn't properly closed by Windows Media Player despite it having finished playing and updating the metadata. Because of this I was unable to move the album folder. By using Process Explorer I was able to find the culprit and close down the handle which allowed Vista full access to move the file and folder. There are some other third-party tools available as well as other tips and ways of doing the same thing. However, I highly recommend the method I just described, as using and further exploring Process Explorer and the other tools available in the SysInternals suite of applications will allow you to gain a much greater understanding of your system.

This, combined with a few good search queries, a deep curiosity through Wikipedia, and the Microsoft Knowledge Base will help turn any enthusiast into a real power user. Check back shortly for part two where I discuss how to take back ownership of your files and folders through permissions in Windows Vista and Server 2008.

There'll be more on this tomorrow when I'm laying in bed in full blown sore throat and dripping nose mode.

But my current Messenger PSM just about sums things up: 6 hrs = W2K8*2, AD, EX07*2, IIS, DHCP, DNS, Hyper-V

I was in a team meeting thing the other day and had my laptop out taking notes. Unfortuantely despite the fact I always run with all system sounds off, I kept on getting the annoying system beep every so often. It was maybe coming from Outlook and holding down the backspace for too long. It happens even if you mute the sound on the system, and heck, even if you disable the "System speaker" device in Device Manager which is listed under the System devices. And man is the beep loud, amusing really, since the mono speaker on my Dell Latitude D430 is barely audible but that bloody system beep is loud as hell and definitely attention grabbing.

So here's how to disable the Beep, yes that's actually what it's called.

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type in devmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. Click the View menu then click Show hidden devices.
4. Expand the Non-Plug and Play Drivers branch out.
5. Look for Beep and double-click the device to bring up the properties window.
6. Click on the Driver tab.
7. Under Current status, click Stop.
8. Under Startup type drop down switch the driver to Disabled.
9. Click OK

You'll now have true silence from your desktop or laptop PC regardless of whatever crazy error messages pop up or however much spam gets delivered to your Inbox. Though this won't help if you if you've got a bunch of 80mm fans running at 8000RPM still . But that's for another post... Tip though, voltage converters for fans or fans with a high CFM and low dB rating work amazingly well as do rubber gromets for fans and HDD's and not to mention that Dynamat isn't half bad for noise absorbtion as well.

So I was just talking to Mooney about how I used to have my PC audio hooked up. Which immediately led me to talk about the Creative DDTS-100. In this day and age I really have a bad taste from using most Creative products. They can't write drivers to save their life, their audio cards suck, their speakers suck, just about everything Creative makes these days suck. But it's not all bad for Creative, they've got one good product that I know about. They simply need to look at products like the DDTS-100 and then go to eBay and see how much those products go for used.

The Creative DDTS-100 quite simply is the equivalent of a PC audio receiver in that it'll take SPDIF, TOSLINK, PC multi-channel analog, and RCA and it will decode Dolby Digital as well as DTS and it even includes DD and DTS upmixing, I was especially fond of the DTS NEO:6 Music setting. Why would anyone need this? Well it was great, I had multiple PC's all connected via SPDIF and one via analog. I could switch between PC's and use a single set of speakers. I even had an Xbox connected to it as well. I sent out a nice digital signal and it decoded all my content awesomely. Sure it's not a real receiver/amp, but when you're using Klipsch 5.1 Ultra speakers it's perfect.

Like I said though. You know you have a good product when you can look on eBay over 3 years after you bought it, and it has actually gone UP in value! I buy a lot of crap, and usually after a while and some upgrades I buy better crap and sell the old stuff. The two things I'm very very reluctant to sell though is the Creative DDTS-100 and those Klipsch 5.1 Ultra speakers. The speakers, sure, maybe, but the DDTS-100, one day a year from now I'm pretty sure I'll need it.

That being said, it's questionable if the DDTS-100 would be worth as much a year from now. It does the job it does amazingly well. Yeah it's ugly as all sin and they could've saved a shit ton of money by cutting down on the LED's and silverness but as far as I know the product is the only one of its kind.

There's a reason why I could sell it for $200 tomorrow and take a $75 profit though.

Creative needs to learn something fast, which is that people want quality. There's a reason people even still would consider Creative products today, it's not because of the crap that's made today, it's because of the stuff that was made back when the word SoundBlaster meant sound on PC's.

Well I'm almost done migrating servers. I'll post more about it shortly. I'm exhausted though, I honestly thought it was Sunday morning, but no it's Monday morning and I have to get up in 5 hours to get to work. More on the jump from Server 2003 to 2008 and Exchange 2003 to 2007.

Well it's crazy how quickly things can change. Only two months have gone by since I wrote about the so called quarter life crisis that I feel I've been going through. In that time I've sat and thought, a lot, and I've still not really come to a firm gut feeling on the subject. Maybe I'm not supposed to and that's the entire purpose in life anyway.

One hundred day breaks which Microsoft contractors are required to take after a year of gracious service have become a total love hate thing for me. I love that it's like a paid vacation sort of. I hate the struggle to pay bills. I love that I can get stuff done. I hate that I don't get enough done. I love the time to relax and think. I hate that after that's done I can get bored. I've heard full time employees (FTE) that go to contracting praise the decision as the best thing since MSFT's closing price xmas '99. Meanwhile contractors, myself included, can complain like mad knowing the income and benefits could be better plus for some there's always the hope a FTE position will open up.

With that said, I guess I've not felt one way or the other about the direction I've been taking lately. The best I can do is just go with the flow like always, kick back relax, and just do whatever my gut says is right for me in this moment.

On January 3rd from noon till around 3:45pm I let God roll those cosmic dice as I entered into my interviews for a FTE position at Microsoft (yeah that sounds ominous doesn't it). First off, I was expecting the interviews to last a lot longer, I've done a full 8 hour interview at both Apple and Microsoft before, so this seemed short. The questions all felt straight forward and I think I did an okay job of staying relaxed and actually enjoy the entire process. Since really it should be enjoyed and experienced so that regeardless of outcome I can learn from it. Oh and it certainly helped I had a 40oz water bottle filled and refilled, water == moist mouth and calmness. Though, I will say, it's a good thing I had a chance to use the loo. One thing that did stick in my mind is that early on I was asked what my 1, 5, 10 year plan was. Geez, what an open question, you want to give your honest answer but want to make sure the answer you give gets you the job as well. How to word it, how to make it right. Then later, in my closing interview I was asked if I wanted to revise my answer since I've had some time to think about it. Well crap, was this a chance to correct an answer they weren't quite looking for? Who knows. Maybe I'll get to ask at some point. But the point I was going to make was that when this question was asked twice I didn't even really think about my previous post or thoughts regarding all that. Maybe my brain just kicked in and without consciously realizing it I verbalized exactly how I felt about my next 1, 5, and 10 years. I really don't know about the next 10 years, seems impossible for me to visualize at this point in life. I have an idea of where I'd like to be so long as I continue down the road I'm now. So yeah, I'll go with that for now.

Five days later I got a voice mail that started my neurons firing with analysis a couple hours after that I got a reply to my email. Just like that at 2:56pm, definite direction... Interviews went well and I was being offered the position. Like my original offer to come up and work with the eHome team, I think I took about 14 seconds to make a decision. Two days later I got everything in writing and finished up my side of the paperwork. Right now I'm just waiting for the 28th to come by and the real stuff to kick in then.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess after I've settled, I'll feel like the entire experience, and the 13 years leading up to this point is akin to falling in love. Or maybe that's just the romanticism coming out in me. What I'm trying to say is that it seems like so many things, like falling in love with the right person, is a struggle that has no end in sight. After that moment where everything clicks into place looking back in hindsight one might think, "well that wasn't so bad".

Maybe in 10 years I'll be doing something completely different, maybe I'll be completely embedded into the road I'm currently paving, who the hell knows. Right now I'm definitely feeling energized and have a renewed sense of enthusiasm about everything. Yeah, I'm still a cynic, but heck, maybe even that will change.

This is a lame rant, but I'm sure at least one person will understand. What the hell is the point of broadcasting in HD when you can't even get the bloody aspect ratio right!? This is what I'd love to ask the ladies and gents at TNT HD. Right now, Gladiator is on 1080i, but it's a 4:3 image stretched to 16:9. It's random too, sometimes they get it right, other times, like with all the X-Files reruns they don't. Gah... Bloody annoying.

UPDATE: So Thirteen Days just came on, and would you look at this a decent 1080i 16:9 image.

Really don't get it, do they just not bother getting the right content? Is it a rights issue or what?

Through some act of God or maybe just a certain person I know in the North Central division, the Internet has returned here. I used to have two Internet connections, one for the server, one for personal use. But now it's just one, so if things go down, there's a total feeling of disconnection. Oddly, despite things being down for 2 weeks I've not been too bothered, though I think that's partly because I've barely been on anyway.

Anywho, the problems started (again) on the 8th, when the web just died, the crappy SMC business gateway reported the upstream ranging was in progress and just sat there. Comcast sent a guy out the next morning but things were back up when he got here. Then a week later it goes down again the same exact problem. I call once more and the Comcast person says they're having problems with the headend, I think maybe she meant CMTS, but who knows, she says to give it 24-48 hours. Things come back up shortly a couple days later and go down again, this time the upstream ranging is fine but I can't ping the Comcast DNS servers I've been given. So I call once more, now they're saying they're having DNS issues. The weird thing though is that apparently incoming traffic is still working fine, but I can't ping jack on the outbound. I can't even get into the internal customer admin pages on the modem either, even when I plug directly into the server.

At this point they've already said they're going to give me a week free, now she's saying a month since it's been down for over a week. I keep asking if they should just send someone out to replace the modem but this guy is saying to just give it time for the DNS stuff to be sorted. "Fine whatever, I give up, I don't care, just sort this out and give me the credit", that's about all I say. I've already been on the phone with them for at least 2 hours to get this stuff sorted and it's been too long for it to be down. Topping it off the service didn't work well at all from day one, I had the modem replaced twice, and the current one is only working well because I got some "special" firmware running on it. Before the firmware the modem had to be logged onto and the firewall reset once a week.

Finally, Julie calls Comcast today hoping that the feminine touch will do the trick. After a bit she hands the phone to me and this guy isn't any more helpful. The entire problem I've been having is that I can't log onto the modem as a cusadmin to see anything, I can't tell what he's doing remotely or anything. But he's telling me the settings are fine except the subnet mask, it should be .252 not .0, uh, err, wrong. I keep asking about the DNS but he says it's fine, and there's no issues. The issues with the DNS and the other crap were apparently resolved already so there's no reason why our Internet shouldn't be working. I still can't ping jack from the router, and I plug the server directly into the modem. Whatever he did though made it so the cable and traffic lights wouldn't even come on after power cycling the gateway and such. He ends up just giving up and sending someone out tomorrow morning.

Fed up, I give in, call the real help. After about 20 minutes of digging, we finally get the modem back online, she gets in remotely and we get it going again so I can log on as cusadmin. Turns out that Comcast had turned on DHCP even though we're static, had the subnet wrong, and had disabled the manual DNS entries. She also switched the port to half duplex since apparently the SMC has issues with auto detection. After all that I can finally log into the modem, can see everything. She mentions something about some work being done switching the rules in the RIP to force business customers to use the business DNS not the residential, so we switch to those DNS servers and everything magically works again, switch back to the residential just as a check and stuff stops again.

This is a huge rant for no purpose, but I just don't get why someone in a completely different division without complete access to my modem can sort stuff out in 20 minutes but it takes the Northwest Comcast people 2 weeks, and 3 service calls and they still couldn't do it. I guess their solution to everything is not bother on the phone and just replace the modem regularly.

Now I just have to call up and cancel the service call and make sure they give us that month free that they promised. Hopefully it doesn't go down again after I call.

Okay, so Comcast has been giving me the runaround with getting my business Internet connection back up and running correctly but one of the upsides of running your own server with DHCP, DNS, Active Directory and all the other overly complicated things is that I can still access all of my own content since it's local and can write this right now.

I've decided to take this time "off the net" to go through and organize the terabyte or so of data I've got sitting around including the 500GB+ worth of music. Now there's this one folder though, that's only like 60GB but is completely filled with various file formats and bit rates of individual tracks that I eventually wanted to complete and sort.

What an eclectic set of music. It's got everything, even stuff that I would dare say shouldn't even be called music. But I love it. I love it all. Even the cheese, since even after only sampling a 30 second clip of the music it brings a smile to my face.

For example I'm listening to We All Die Young from the Rock Star soundtrack, just seconds before I was listening to a Phish cover of the Cheers theme. This random assortment of tracks is totally bringing back to my days of spending all day and night on the Internet and on Messenger just fiddling, talking, and listening to music, and laughing my ass off.

That brings me to listening to the I AM advert song, Kazachok, Protest the Right Way, and all the other gold from back in the day. Sure this stuff is close to trash, but at the right moments it's also a treasure.

So not really sure where I'm heading with this other than to say I miss the days of having music playing all the time, even while I slept. Music really does get every bit of me, the best and the worst. Right now it's just putting a huge smile on my face though.

I think this is pretty cool considering the number of times I've accidentally clicked an AdSense ad during fast web browsing. Smaller clickable ad area is a good thing.

Through years of computer usage I've formed this habit of clicking in advance of object appearance on the screen. Back in the days of my 100Mhz Pentium with 8MB RAM, the system would take so long to do things that it got to the point where I was clicking on the Start menu, going to Shutdown, then clicking Reboot even before the Start Menu had time to come up. These days I find myself still doing the same thing but now in IE, when loading web pages and sometimes, I end up clicking a stupid Ad. Come to think of it though, with the speed of the PC and the efficiency of the OS and the apps, I don't seem to notice myself having to click ahead anymore.

Maybe it's a sign that computers for me have breached that point of price and performance where no matter what I buy above $500 will do me just fine. Well, okay, as long as it has two cores... What does any of this have to do with Google decreasing the size of the AdSense area? Absolutely nothing, but it's the back story to why I appreciate it regardless of what Google's intentions are.

This is something I'd not normally post here but I feel compelled to do so to hopefully gain some outside perspective. Basically, I feel like I'm going through a quarter life crisis, but a year or so early. Ever since I got into geekdom my first PC in December '95 and later got into beta testing Windows just a bit after that, I've been pretty set on what I wanted. I didn't go to high school and instead got my GED at 16, I went to college for a year in England, then for a bit in San Jose, but then I got what I was working for all that time and got a job at Microsoft (and yeah this is the first time I've literally said I work there on this site).

For the last year or so I've pretty much led the life I thought I always wanted, I had a girlfriend that was fantastic, I've got a great car, a nice apartment, pretty much all the toys I could possibly ever want as well. It's seriously gotten to the point where all I want for myself now is to relax, go on nice long vacations travelling to all the places I've dreamed of with the girl I'm in love with.

Granted because I've gone just a bit beyond my means and I spent too much money on college and living in England I've got a nice lump of debt that I have hanging over me. I kinda feel like this is all just a fact of life and such so I'm in this position where I'm looking for houses so that I could consolidate my debt into a mortgage and have one payment for that, get some room mates to reduce expenses, etc etc.

At the same time, there's this inner voice inside me that tells me I should be doing something different, it's that voice that's also behind my rebellious nature towards authority. Recent events and stress in my life has seriously got me thinking about things like this. Not to mention, I've talked to Julie quite a bit through our relationship about the shackles of adulthood. I've also talked quite about all this with my Gramps as well. I partially blame him anyway for seeding the desire to travel the world and do something unique and different.

I've really been into photography for some time. Coupled with the desire to travel and have my contribution to the humans on the planet be something more than just ensuring that Media Center is a little less buggy. I've given serious thought into doing humanitarian work, doing photo journalism, or who knows what along those lines.

I guess that is where I'm lost at the moment. I love working at Microsoft, even as a contractor, some days it sucks some days it's great, but the people I know there are awesome... and it is work after all. I've justified my entire crisis of adultdom on the fact that the grass is always greener and these are the facts of life and no matter what I'm working on there's going to be stress. Because of my trouble with authority, I'm not too sure I'm cut out for a long standing corporate job.

My Dad worked out Southern California Edision for something like 15 years, he's definitely going through a mid-life right now. I don't really want to be working at Microsoft for 15 years and then start going through the same thing. I typically just go with the flow and relax and whatever comes will come, but I also am the type to get my mind made up and work non stop till I get there.

Meanwhile I can't really figure out what I'd do as an alternative. I'm not even too sure what professions are out there that would help fulfill my wild eyed dreams of travel and making even a small difference in the world. You know, trying not to have too many regrets looking back on life another 24 years from now.

My Gramps has suggested that maybe I just sell the car, sell pretty much everything, and travel for a year or two, or even three. Doesn't sound like that bad of an idea really but impractical, irresponsible, and not very adult like. Then again this this coming from my 83 year old grandfather. Maybe he knows something that I don't with all those years. Plus there's no reason why I can't pick up where I left off after I get that travel bug out of my head. Of course maybe I'll really fall in love with that and find something amazing during that time.

Not really sure what the true point of this post is, I guess it's just a good brain dump.

I heart Boing Boing sometimes. It's my fav of the big 3 RSS feeds out there, sometimes I love it even more than Engadget, but whatever. They linked to this page showing how little nutrition is in most of the big fast food places burgers and fries. I'm still in shock over this:

"The Double Six Dollar Burger from Carl's Jr. contains an insane 1520 calories. That's not a typo. One sandwich contains more calories than some smaller females need... PER DAY."

I do miss In-N-Out though, there was always something nice about the way the bun was just a bit crispy around the edge from the grill. On the plus side I've gotten pretty good at a home made burger in the last couple of weeks and the grill I was given is pretty sweet too. Now if only I didn't live so far away from everyone I know, I'd have people over to join in .