What is On Jeffs' Mind

The past week I made some good progress on some of my web projects, and I am feeling very good with what I have done to date.

After well over a year, I finally got the next podcast recorded for my collecting Podcast Jedijeff’s Basement . In this latest podcast, I review a couple Battlestar Galactica Minibusts. One from Art Asylum released in 2006 and another from Diamond Select Toys released in 2008. Head over to my Podcast site to check it out. I have to say, after a lot of work, I have the site to where I want it. I have been tweaking at it for over the past year, trying to get it to a point where I am happy with it. Earlier in the week, I created a new graphic, that I am quite happy with. I did a few other updates as well in the template as well, to get it where I want. So hopefully going forward, I can focus more on doing the podcast, and less on working on the site. There will always be little tweaks here and there, but for the most part, the site is pretty much done for now.

I also got a great chance to work with my friend Rick on a few of his sites. First off, we worked on a redesign on his main website, Take Him With You . Rick had WordPress installed already, so we worked on getting a new template installed, and then customizing it to fit Rick’s needs. After we got that done, Rick registered a new domain for his parody songs, Star Trek Parodies. That was a lot of fun to setup, and along with his other site, I learned a lot over the past few days with php and css sheets. I feel very good about what I have learned, and will help me a lot in the future with customizing sites. I am looking forward to Rick getting the parodies page finished, as it will be much easier to access his parodies, and with wordpress, allows to organize the songs into categories.

I still have another site to work on, as I want to register a Site for Jason and I Podcast group, as all the Podcasts we do will be under the banner of Popoff Podcasts. So In the next few days I will register the domain, and get started on building the site. That should be a lot of fun and looking forward to taking some of what I have learned lately and applying to this new site.

Also in February I will be taking a digital photography course with my Dad. I am looking forward to that, as it should help me with taking pictures of my collectibles, for my podcast. I am hoping over time, that my photography skills get better, so that the quality of the podcasts go up. The past few weeks, I have also learned quite a bit with Photoshop, that I am quite pleased about as well. Before I found myself sort of thrashing around with Photoshop, and I think the out put I did showed it, but now I am getting a better handle on it, so in the future, the graphic part of my podcast should look better.

So all in all, I am happy with what I have done with my time off. I even got some work done in my basement, as I painted a hand rail. Tomorrow I will try and push myself to attach it back to the wall. Also I need to make a trip over to Walmart to get some poster frames, to finish off the basement, as I have some posters I want to hang up.

Tags: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, Battlestar Galactica, jedijeffs basement, Popoff Podcasts, Rick Moyer, Star Trek Parodies, Take Him With You

Happy New Year

Hard to believe that the first decade of the 2000′s are done, it sure went by fast. It just seems like yesterday that I was working New Years eve 2000 due to the Y2K bug/scare. I guess time can really fly.

Reflecting back on last year, not really sure what to make of it. Work as always was a real challenge, and probably accounted for the low points of the year for me, as it was hectic and high stress the whole year through. In the summer Tao Tao and I moved into house, so that was the biggest thing to happen to us. I am happy to be in the house, and very grateful for the experience to be behind us. For the most part it went alright, but moving really is never fun, so we are planning to stay here for a long time. Tao Tao’s mom also came to visit in the summer, so it was nice for her mom to see where she lives. At the end of summer was big for the family as well, and fortunately it all worked out very well.

Looking at my resolutions for last year, I did not have many, some I kept, others I did not. Like most say, making resolutions seem to be futile, as more often then not, they are never kept and dropped rather early. My friend Rick has a great Podcast on the subject, and some great ideas about making small corrections over big changes.

In looking forward to next year, I have a lot I would like to get done, primarily in that I would like to get to a point in my life where I am happy and content. Presently, I don’t feel that way, and it all has to do with how I deal with life. Like many have said, you really can’t change things around you, but you can change yourself, so I am going to set upon that journey and see where it takes me. I guess some could say that is a resolution, but with the ending of the year, it has given me a chance to reflect on my life.

I guess another goal I have is to finish my basement. I started painting the walls, and so far very happy with the colour. I have some carpet on order, but have not heard from the Carpet store since the order was placed. Hoping that the carpet arrived and they had forgot to call me. I am really excited for the basement to get done, as I want to be able to setup my collectibles, and display them the way I had always wanted. Once that is done, hopefully I will be able to get working on my collecting podcast again and model building. With the home renovations, I have sort of learned to just do it, I had been planning on painting for awhile now, but things always came up. I went, bought the paint, and started, and finished about half the basement. As part of my personal journey, need to learn to do, and not stand on the sideline thinking about doing things. This basement will be a great exercise in doing that.

All the best in 2010 to everyone

Tags: Basement renovations, Happy New Year, Moving, Rick Moyer, Take Him With You

Last week I was a guest on my friend Rick’s podcast Take Him With You. It was an honor to be invited onto his podcast. The topic was about some of my experiences growing up and attending a few different type religious schools. I talked about going to a Catholic Boarding school, and some of my experiences there, and the cool people I met. I also talked about going to a Christian school a few years later and how it was not so cool. It was a fun interview, and Rick asked some interesting questions. It was a fun time, and I thank Rick again for having me on.

You can listen to it here

Tags: Rick Moyer, Take Him With You

The past week has been interesting for me, and a bit of a break from my regular routine

This week I went on training for work. I was enrolled in a Sun LDAP course, and was on training Tuesday to Friday. It was something that was quite different from what I usually do, so it was interesting to learn. First off we learned on Unix systems, and that is something I don’t know a lot about. I did some work on Unix about 6 or 7 years ago when I did Oracle support. I was never very good at it as it involved a lot of typing, and strange commands that I did not understand. This time, over the coarse I got more comfortable with the Unix, but probably more so as we used a lot of the Sun Directory Services GUI, which helped out. I am a bad typer, and it took me time on command line stuff, so hoping I don’t have to do a lot of it in the future. Not sure where I go with this training, but I guess over time I will find out.

The weekend turned out to be fuller then I originally expected. On Saturday, I had to cleanup the house as we had a showing late in the afternoon. Tao tao and I went out for a few hours. We went to the mall, and had dinner, then looked around for a bit. We came home and relaxed for the rest of the day.

Sunday turned out to be a busy day, and still wondering how I fit it all in. I started off the morning by working on my Collecting Podcast. I have the second podcast edited, and will now work on enhancing it. The I watched the Monaco F1 Grand Prix. Not a lot of passing in the race, but it was exciting to see the cars race as they looked so fast, and I really like street circuits.

After that Tao tao and I went to see the new Terminator Salvation movie. I must say that I really enjoyed this movie. It was a lot of action and explosions, and not really a dull moment the entire movie. I had been looking forward to this movie, as I had been watching the TV series closely. The story did not really tie in with the TV series, but that was cool. I thought Christian Bale did a great job as John Connor, and brought a different element to the character that we haven’t seen before. He was so intense, I could see where he had the outburst well filming, if he was channeling that intensity to his performance. The guy who played Kyle Reese did a great job, he reminded me a lot of the original Kyle Reese, he was also in the new Trek movie. I am hoping after his role in the Terminator movie, they give him more to do in the next Trek movie.

When I got home, I did an Interview with my friend Rick for the Take him with You podcast. We talked about some of my experiences growing up, and the different schools I had attended and how they relate to God. It was a lot of fun to talk to Rick, and he did a great job with the Interview. Rick also told me some other cool things, and played some cool music for me that he had. I am happy to have met Rick and made a new friend, as He and I share a lot of things in common.

After the Interview was over, I watched the Indy 500 I had taped earlier. The race was alright, though there was some scary accidents, which I did not like to see. For an Oval race, I thought it was alright, and there was some nice racing and intrigue to it. After watching this race, I have come to the conclusion that it is more the length of the race then the track itself that makes it unique. For the most part, it is all about setup, and a max throttle track, but once they get past half distance, then the uniqueness comes in. Most of the Indycar races are a few hours or a couple hundred miles, so after they get past a certain distance, bad luck and problems come to play, and it is interesting to see who has them, and how they deal with it. The track is pretty basic, and not as challenging as some other tracks, it is the length that makes this race different to me.

I finished off the night with this Blog. I would say that was a full day

Tags: Formula 1, IndyCar, LDAP, Rick Moyer, Take Him With You, Terminator 4, UNIX, What's in Jeffs Basement