Jmilley.com

I’m starting to teach myself iPhone development… I’m not sure what I’ll come up with in terms of Apps, but I’ve got a few ideas, and an interest to learn.

In order to give myself more motivation I paid to join the developer program.  Now that I have money on the line, I’ve got to get my but in gear and learn this thing and see if I can’t come up with a winning App that’ll make a couple bucks.

Thats about it for now, work is at a crunch stage so thats taking up very significant pieces of my day outside my regular hours…

Jonathan

So, I had an interesting evening tonight…  I headed down to Christians to meet up with Dave and Ginny, for a couple drinks and some conversation.  I show up a little later than I said I would, and Dave and Ginny had already tucked away a pitcher of Keiths.  As I approach their table I see that they have 2 people sitting with them that I do not recognize.  One of them hands me a glass of beer, a good start to the evening, and I sit down to clear my glasses of condensation.

One of the women gets up and leaves, but I am introduced to the other (the one who handed me a glass of beer) woman.  I assume shes some friend of Dave and Ginny that I had yet to meet, but it turns out Andrea is a stranger who arrived at Christians from the Beer Fest and proceeded to sit at their table and bring a pitcher of beer and a dish of popcorn with her…

A few of her friends arrive and proceed to sit with us, then some more arrive and they decide to head upstairs.  Andrea  proceeds to pick up the remains of her pitcher and head upstairs, with a few “nice to meet you’s” along with her circle of friends.  Except one dude who stuck around.  I head to the bar to buy my pitcher for the table, and when I get back our new friend is still sitting down chatting with Dave and Ginny.  He seems like an alright guy, talkative but friendly.  All I remember is he was a townie, not from “Bay the fsck knows where”.  Shortly after some of the friends come back down and he’s whisked off.

At this point we decide to take over the jukebox and Ginny gets up to put some money in and choose some tunes.  She proceeds to be cornered by one very skeety looking dude with a shaved head, who looked to be mid to late 30’s.  He’s all in her personal space, and she trys her best to politely converse with him while picking her songs… A few songs (Radiohead, Nirvana, etc.) later we;re having a good time and enjoying some good conversation about music and the strength of lyrical vs. musical driven songs, etc.  we feend to box a time or 2 more getting into some Van Morrison, U2, The Smiths, all good tunes.

All of a sudden our friendly neighbourhood personal space invader plops him self down at our table (I think we were magnets for crazies tonight) he starts hitting on Ginny, and I’m trying to do my best “ignore him and he’ll go away” tactic.  he gets a little more serious into the deal when he takes off his coat and sidles up next to her.  She promptly moves closer to Dave, who takes up the “She’s mine go the fsck away” defense and I try to ignore him.

Not once, not twice, but 4 times he tries to drink from the glass of wax encrusted coffee beens that had moments before held the tealight candle that had since burned out and been tossed.  Four times, complaining at least once that the “coffee was solid”!  He starts a incoherent train of conversation that jumps from confusing the Jukebox with a VLT (claiming it can be deceptive and take all your money!).  The conversation segues into pokemon (gotta unite the dimensions or something).  I’m chatting on my blackberry with Jared telling him about this crazy dude and trying to ignore him.  He notices that I’m ignoring him and starts talking to Dave and Ginny about me being too serious, which somehow turns to me being a vampire…  Around this point he picks up the pitcher of beer (only a small bit left) and proceeds to drink straight from it… he’s so wasted he doesn’t give a crap about what he’s doing.

All this time he keeps trying to get closer to Ginny and put his arm around her, and Dave is doing his best to play the boyfriend… arm around her, fending off this psycho and she plays the “fall asleep on Daves shoulder” card…  I get tired of the dude and realize the ignore him and he’ll leave approach isn’t going to work… so I say to Dave and Ginny that it is time to leave…  we get up and make our way to the bar to pay our tabs, quickly leaving the crazy dude behind…

Our last image of him was passed out with his head on the table.

What an adventure, I’m so glad I went out… you never can tell what you’re going to find on George St.

A hotdog and a car ride later and here I am writing this crazy story down so I don’t forget the details.

Hope your Friday night was as interesting as mine, if not so crazy.

So today was a big day… I woke up to find that the Tax faerie had kindly left my tax return in my bank account… so I promptly used a portion of it to acquire some new gear. I first purchased a new lens, the Nikon 80-200 ED 2.8D, here she is (attached to my film camera, as I’m using my digital to take this snap:

It has now become my pride and joy I also purchased a new tripod/monopod head (it’s barely visible in the above shot) and a monopod.

My gear is now rounding out nicely. I’m going to put the rest of my tax return squarely on my student debts, so as to quickly beat them down.

After my spending spree I went hunting for something to shoot. My hunt took me through Logy Bay, Outer Cove, and Middle Cove. I found icebergs and animals to shoot at all those spots. The first iceberg that I found was at the marine lab in Logy Bay. It’s shape reminds me of a cruise ship.

Here are a few shots from today:

Rain Drizzle and Fog

This has been a very typical spring for St. John’s, which means Cold and Wet. Myself and a couple friends (Brian Kidney, and Geoff Holden ) tried to do a little photography yesterday, in the west end of the city (where we work) is was beautifull… when we got to the east end it was blanketed in fog. I got a few shots, however nothing spectacular… We were going to try again today, but the fog is there again.

Here is the album of three shots from yesterday:

Hopefully more photography will happen on the weekend, it’s supposed to be nice on Saturday.

Jon

As of yet I haven’t had much of an opportunity to get out doing any photography this winter, my last serious outing was late fall just as things were starting to freeze. Last weekend I was out in Kings Cove (in Bonavista Bay), Newfoundland visiting, and spent a couple hours driving around and shooting. I need to make myself find the time to sit down with the computer and plug away at the images and post the good ones.

We’ve had a very snowy winter, and on the weekends it’s hard to get the weather just right to get out the camera. Of course week days are a write off since it’s dark when I get home.

I went to Camera 35 the other week with Brian Kidney and Geoff Holden and enjoyed myself. Camera 35 is a photography club that holds it’s meetings on the MUN campus. Actually they’ve now got a fairly permanent arrangement with the School of Medicine to use a class room in the basement of the Health Science Centre. I think I’ll probably join, bring some of my photos to get some feedback…

Look for new photo galleries to be posted in the next couple weeks… I need to clean up my home office, and then I’ll tackle “cleaning up” the digital side of things

Jon

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Managing and organizing media in such a way to make it useful has always been a tricky situation.  Having my music and videos accessible away from my PC has always been a big hassle.  Either you burned the video to DVD (a lengthy process) or hooked a computer to the TV (a hassle).  Playing back my music without having to put CD’s in the machine either involved hooking an MP3 player to the TV, or using the DVD player to play back a CD full of songs. Now I’ve changed the way I do things, and I’m currently pretty happy with my multimedia setup. 

I have a decent TV (32″ I think) that works well for the size of room I have, and I use a Logitech sound system that I originally purchased as computer speakers (a 4.1 system) that has good enough sound.  For playback now I use an Xbox running XBMC, the Xbox Media Centre.  This application can pull media from multiple sources, including windows file shares.  In my office I have a desktop machine that acts as my server.  I currently have close to 750gigs of storage, and it is slowly filling up with TV shows and ripped albums/movies.  This is more than 6000 times the hard drive capacity of my first PC, some 15 years ago.

Now since I work in an office at a computer all day I’d like to have access to my music collection, without having to duplicate it on my work computer, or dragging around external devices.  I was recently turned onto Slim Devices (recently purchased by Logitech) Slim Server and Squeezebox devices.   The Slim Server runs on the machine that stores your Media, and the Squeezebox is a hardware device that connects to your network and streams the music to your stereo.  The Squeezebox can control your music, and let you search,etc.  If you don’t have one of these hardware devices you can download the SoftSqueeze program that emulates the Device on a PC.

So at work I run SoftSqueeze, point it to my home server (through a dynamic DNS address) and stream my music to wherever I am.  It sounds great, and I have no issues with skipping, etc.

The only thing I need to figure out now is how to efficiently rip my DVD’s to the computer so I can play them back at acceptable quality without using all the harddrive space for just a few movies.

Computers are becoming more and more a part of every second of everyday…  It’s amazing how much advancements have come in the last 15 years or so.

Jon

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Well, just a quick update post to say I’m now going to run my website just as a blog… I guess thats it, been sick the last few days and this is the first productive thing I’ve done in days.

We started watching Heroes, we watched the entire first season in a few days. I bought an xbox a couple weeks back… XBMC is a god send

Later,

Jon

Got my Business Card preview today… It’s soon going to be Official, I’m a Software Engineer!

So much has happened since I last wrote anything… My days as a camera store employee, construction labourer, being a bachelor and using the Metrobus are over. Actually most of that happened in the last couple weeks.

Myself and Jessica got married on August 4th, after about 18 months of engagement… that went well and we had great time, I’ll be posting photographs as soon as I get a moment. Several weeks before that we found out I got a new job, a career actually, at Stratos Global Communications. I’m actually a Software Engineer now. So since that was starting this week, we knew we needed a car to get back and forth to Donovans where my job is, etc. Jessica’s parents were awesome and loaned us (which is now payed off) the money to purchase our first car, a 1997 Mazda 626.

So long story short life is coming at me very fast.

The new job is great so far, just had my first couple days and I’ve been doing the typical getting settled in things, getting my computer set up, phone, keys, etc. and of course trying to figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing. I’ll let you know if and when that happens

So things are progressing nicely, we can actually start thinking about making concrete plans for when she graduates next spring. We’re no longer hanging on unknowns. I’m still hoping to finish my Masters program, and Jessica wants to start hers as soon as she can. We might be in the market for our first house once Jessica gets a full time Job after graduation. Who knows what the future holds, but I’m happy with the present.

I’m still doing some camera work on the Side, right now I’m working two photography gigs, cluing up the Tely 10 road race photos, getting orders sorted, etc. and just this evening we started shooting the H.O.G. Rally for the Harley motorcycle owners group. It should be a fun weekend.

So, this was a big post for me, hopefully I can get the motivation to continue this

Life is moving on, work is going well, I’m teaching every second Saturday. This is Jessica’s birthday weekend, the big Two Five tomorrow. We’re going to Montanas this evening with her Parents, should be interesting anyway.

Thursday myself, Dave, Hanz and Leigh went out to Boston Pizza. Just hanging out and shooting the shit.

We went out Friday with the gang, hung out at Dave’s place for a while and then headed down to O’Reillys for a while, met up with some more souls there. It was fun times, decent music and good beer. After that we headed over to the Celtic Hearth for some late night grub. Little bit of a hangover Saturday, made the first hour or so of work annoying.

I’m dreaming up some ideas for projects to take on… I’d like to come up with a commercially viable idea. I’m bouncing one around my head for a wireless device. I’m going to look at starting a photography business as well.

On another note, is anyone looking for an energetic cat? Guiness is driving us nuts. She comes with everything you need.

More to come.

Jon