man, my legs are killing me.

hi, i’m glenn, you probably remember me from my previous writings on lj. ok, so a long-overdue post!

yes, i really did graduate. my last grade finally posted online on august 28 and it turned out that i got straight B’s for the semester… not as good as my previous semester with straight A’s, but i’ll take what i can get for working full-time and going to school full-time this last semester. but i finished at umuc with a 3.158 gpa, so that’s awesome too.

a few days after that we had a graduation party for both feisty_fitz and myself. mom’s got pictures of the event here, and it was lots of fun times. 🙂 spent a lot of the next day feeling nostalgic and in a “oh shit what do i do now” mood, and ran some small errands like getting my car washed and stuff like that. navy was having their first home football game of the year that afternoon, and it made getting to the house difficult.

sunday was a family graduation / labor day pool party and barbecue at an aunt and uncle’s place (feisty_fitz has photos up here), and that was also fun since i hadn’t gone swimming at all during the entire summer.

monday – labor day – the family picked up pap-pap from riderwood and took him out to ihop for breakfast. i noticed that it was the same host that led us to our table and the same waiter that we had when we went to the same ihop for the same purpose on labor day 2007, which seemed a little weird.

i ordered a firewire 800 drobo and three 1 TB hard drives (and added a 750 gig drive to fill all four bays), and it’s totally awesome. i’ve got it set up so my home directory on my computer is actually stored on the drobo, so not only do i have a ton of storage space available, but it’s a ton of redundant storage space so i don’t have to worry about things suddenly disappearing… well, unless i actually erase something by accident (i’m still trying to figure out if/how i might be able to set up time machine to do its backup thing with this setup i’ve got, but at least i’m a lot happier now than when my 1.5 TB drive – actually two 750 gig drives set up in a striped configuration – decided to have one of the disks go kaput… i managed to rescue a lot of my stuff, but i lost a bunch of stuff as well. hence the lone 750 gig drive in my drobo). it’s also plugged into a UPS that i got from william, since he had no need for it anymore and it was just taking up space, so no worries about the power suddenly going out either.

i got one of these “happy anniversary for being at your job for 5 years” cards about a week ago, and i actually felt insulted. see, previous ones that i received were “signed” (and when i say “signed” i mean “had a printed signature”) by some big mucky-muck with the company like a president of the northeast area or even the president of the washington/baltimore/virginia area. this year it was from the vice president of federal accounts who actually knows the names of the people in the department, unlike the previously-mentioned mucky-mucks. i really doubt that if i went up to him and thanked him for the card that he’d have any idea what i was talking about and i’m very skeptical that he’d know how many years i’ve been with the company if i were to ask him, all because a) it’s one of these things that is just sent out by human resources to make you feel good about going to work, and b) with having just a printed signature on it, it’s very impersonal. i know that he’s got to be a busy guy and probably doesn’t have the time to sit there and sign x / 12 anniversary cards each month (where x is however many employees are in the federal team), but i think i’d much prefer getting the cards with the pre-printed signature from somebody in the company who has never met me (like the president of the northeast area) over getting no card whatsoever from someone who has. like i said, it was very impersonal, and while i’m not looking for a ticker-tape parade or anything for being with the company for 5 years, it didn’t make me feel sincerely appreciated.

i picked up a wii, and managed to find a wii fit (it’s probably upset at me since i haven’t had a chance to work out in the last few days :P) as well. it’s been pretty fun! if you’ve got one, my wii number is 1669 8071 9677 4290 if you want to add me and tell me your wii number as well.

i was thinking about putting my graduation moneys toward and saving up to get a canon 40D, but then when i did some research i found out that the canon 50d was announced just a few days before i had this thought. it’s about $500 more than the 40D, but has 15 MP compared to the 40D’s 10 MP, so there’s the big question: is $500 worth an extra 5 megapixels and increased resolution, especially when the cost of the 40D ought to go down as a result of this new camera? that’s a tough call, especially after looking at some sample images taken with a pre-production camera. hell, my G9 can do 12.1 MP and it’s practically a pocket point-n-shoot! it’d be weird to have an SLR that has less resolution even if it does have increased manual functions and focus points, great for shooting things like roller derby and any other sporting events.

i also thought about upgrading my version of photoshop from CS2 to CS3, and then i found out that adobe just announced that CS4 should be demoed/released later this month. what is up with all this thinking about getting something and then a more awesomer version getting announced??

one thing that i’m glad that i got and probably wouldn’t care if they came out with a new one because it’s so awesome is my amazon kindle. seriously. i’ve had it for almost 3 weeks now, and in this time i’ve done more (non-school) reading than i did in the last 2 years. seriously, i don’t mind paying for books, and when i want to read something, i want to read it ASAP and don’t want to have to hunt it down at the library or bookstore, or wait for it to arrive in the mail from amazon or wherever. the kindle is perfect for me because i can add books to it quickly in a few different ways: