Venice - the day after

Well, here I am, back home.

I’ve kept quiet about my views on Venice so far because quite frankly I don’t quite know what to say.

The town, for all it’s (former) beauty leaves a bitter-sweet feeling about it and I’m not actually sure how to put it into words.

So I won’t. Not for now at least. I’ll post something about it when I figure out exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it.

In the mean time, photos will be up in flickr in a few days and daily life will return to normal about now.

Technorati Tags: Venice, Traveling

Off I go

After a rather chaotic week, I’m on vacation!

Both dancing examinations went surprisingly well (or so I think anyway, since the grades and comments will only be handed out when we return from our trip, which is sure to make me and Tuxa very popular among our classmates…) ;-) Oh and I finally found out the name of the entity which made the international examination this afternoon: it’s the U.K.A.. So, for the record and for me to remember later, the quarterly exam in the class covered the Waltz, Jive and Quickstep and the U.K.A. exam was a simple start to star and covered only basic Waltz and basic Cha-Cha-Cha.

And now I’m going to try and sleep real early because I have to be at the airport at around 4h45 (that 4h45 AM!) to catch the flight to Amsterdam and wait there for about 4 hours to catch the flight to Venice. That’ll definitely be fun…

What a week so far…

It’s only just Wednesday and already I can say: what a week!

First there was some home improvement works on the weekend, which (naturally) slid into the week nights. Things are going OK but, as expected, we are now on plan B on a few things and making it up as we go along. Damned master walls, hard as steel and impossible to perforate…

Then there are the preparations for the trip to Venice. Not that I’ve had much time to devote to it because of all the other stuff going on, but it is something that is on the back of my mind and which I’ll have to attend to sooner or later.

Oh and don’t forget the family dinners. Because we are going away on a vacation everybody wants to have us over for dinner this week.

At work things are a bit more chaotic than usual, mainly due to the fact that I’m going to be away for a week and I have to let things sorted out back here, but also because there where some changes going on with some services that took me a lot of time.

Then the new server for my sites got ready to roll (thanks to Pedro) and I made the most urgent transition during the week (i.e. this weblog is already there). That’s about as far as I expect to go for now, when I get back the wiki will follow but probably not before then.

And to top it off I just had my ballroom-dancing exam for this quarter today and I will have the international exam next Sunday (actually that’s the reason I’m only flying out on Monday instead of going on Saturday).
This was the second exam I’ve ever had (in two years of classes) and it’s funny how a bunch of full grown adults get so nervous and nearly resort to biting their nails over a simple thing like this.
It really doesn’t get to me all that much but Tuxa, for example, is a real mess… I can only guess the state she got in when she had her oral exams at the university! :-)

Amongst all this I still have to find (and have found) a bit of time to do some work for the dvdlx.com project, sort my music collection (iPod oblige) and catch some sleep. Of course the gym is what gets left behind, but I’m only human…

The move

Nowhereland has moved.

It is now hosted on a server outside of my home, in a real datacenter.

I feel like it is all grown up and ready to go out into the world on it’s own.

I feel so proud… :-)

If you notice anything out of whack say something, the move might not have gone as smoothly as I think. Come to think of it, this was all rather easy so there is probably some bug problem just waiting to be found.

And now back to our regular scheduled programing.

A new look for the iMac

Two and a half months later, the replacement parts for my defective iMac finally arrived.

From what I was told when I asked about the repair, only the disk, memory and outer shell are the same. Instead of replacing just the problem part (which I am assuming is something like the video inverter) they replaced almost the whole computer —motherboard, display, CPU— the works!

The good news is that so far I haven’t spotted a single dead pixel (always good to check for those with extreme care) and the screen is now legible with the brightness set to half the scale. It was getting to the point where full brightness was too dark even at night so this is a welcome change.

It also felt like the boot-up was much faster, but it might just be that I am hallucinating this due to being really tired and happy that the screen is so bright and pretty…

The next few weeks will be nail-biting as I wait for the screen to become darker and darker, like when I first got the iMac… Hope it doesn’t happen!

What I didn’t have time to do was to run the full hardware test on it. I have this thing about making sure that everything is really OK and I ran the test on the previous computer, but since this is mostly a new incarnation of it I will have to run them again. Of course with the memory I have installed running the full tests will take around two hours and last time it set off the fan at full blast for the full duration of the tests. Given the hour and my being dead-tired and the noise that the fan makes, I think I’ll leave it for the weekend when I’m out running all the million errands I have to run.

Time for bed now.

The continuing media spring-cleaning saga

The photo organization is almost done. I still have to tag and date the old photos that where digitized from negatives (some from my wedding and also a lot of them from the USA coast-to-coast road trip, just to name a few examples) and this will take a while, since I’ll have to extrapolate from other (digital) photos and some other bits and pieces of information. But this is a mere detail and the big organization is effectively done.

And this leaves me with just one other major re-organization to do: the music files.

Now this I was leaving behind because, being the meticulous kind of freak I am, I know that once I start it I will not be able to sleep well until this task is done, and done properly. And this means not only grouping albums and ordering the songs in them, but also collecting all the cover art I can from the Internet and digitizing those which I cannot find on-online. And also, of course, filling the gaps left on some albums from the less than ideal approach I’ve taken so far to archiving. I will also have to finally go through the “assorted” folder and all its little sub-folders and choose what I’ll keep, what I’ll throw away and organize what will be kept. A lot of work, then.

But this weekend I just had to start it. And that’s because I’ve apparently been a “good boy” (^tm) this year and so on my birthday my wife got me an iPod Photo. So now I have all of my 10.000+ pictures in it and also about 5.000+ songs in it. But I want to have all the songs in there, and I want them well organized. That is why I couldn’t put it off any longer. A double edged-sword of a gift the iPod… ;-)