there are far too many pictures from the italy trip to process. i’m definitely feeling overwhelmed, but i’ll sit down tonight and take a look to see how they came out. i’m pretty nervous because i decided to push a lot of the night time photos into a high ISO. hope it all comes out ok. here’s just a quick photo of the colosseum. looking at it in person, it was hard to imagine to it was built over 1900 years ago.

i’m back from my italy trip! it was fantastic. i came back from italy last night and the first thing i did was eat steak. i don’t think that i’ve ever eaten a more vegetarian diet for as long anywhere before. most of my meals were either vegetarian or very light on the meat.

i took about 650 pictures, all shot in RAW. it’s a little daunting how long the processing of these photos are going to take, but i’m looking forward to look through them and figure out my RAW image workflow. i’ll start posting pictures from my trip as i get them processed.

i am soon going to be a game developer. well, not a full time game developer, but part of my job is now going to develop games. how cool is that? i’m not sure what kind of games i’ll be developing yet, but the ideas that are floating out there are kind of neat. these are, of course, going to be games for mobile. i really need to get a device that will let me browse the mobile web already!

and not in a good way. i’ve been sick as a dog since last friday. it is good to see the light of day. i don’t know where i got it from, but man, i’ve been sick.

mostly bed-ridden for several days now, i think that i’ve finally gotten over the worst of it. i just hope that i’m fully recovered before our big italy trip!

last night i upgraded my d-link dns-323 nas with fonz’s fun_plug v0.5. the install was easy. the main reason i wanted to upgrade was because i wanted to try to compile things natively on the device instead of creating a toolchain, but so far my compile efforts have been met with errors. i’ll have to take a look and see what’s going on.

this sidetracked the real work that i was supposed to do last night, but i think that things at work have finally slowed down from frantic crazy busy to only a slight panic level of busy. i’m actually really busy at work, but i’m trying to leave work at work. it looks like things are moving along though, great progress is being made.

i’ve been in the market for a super small laptop for travel. i’m trying to decide what to get and the current laptop of choice seems to be the asus eee 1000h. my criteria is that the laptop is < $500 and can run windows xp. i thought that maybe i could do with linux, but i think it makes the laptop's usefulness limited. i'd still like the option of running my windows apps, even if i am running them really slow. now the question is, should i really get it? would it really be worth my while?

i installed an antenna in the attic for OTA HD, but the signal strength isn’t that good. i suspect that if i put the antenna on the roof, i’d be in better shape, but i just don’t know how i feel about that. i’m looking at my other options for getting HD in the house, but the rest of the options seem pretty expensive. ah, what to do…

ah, finally, a little time to catch my breath. i have been working some CRAZY hours lately. crazy for me who comes from a job where a thirty hour week was a tough week. =P i actually have been staying in the office until around 7pm and i’m not getting home until around 8pm. there have been some days where it was dark when i left the office! *sigh* the perils of a new job…

but the new job has been pretty fantastic so far. it’s been a lot of fun and i’ve been learning quite a bit, so at least i’m getting something out of all of this hard work. i know that i won’t be able to sustain this kind of a lifestyle for long. luckily, it looks like the long hours are going to be coming to an end soon.

so i’m playing fantasy football and man, what is going on in the league? tom brady is out for the season, peyton manning looks like he’s off, alex smith is out of the season (though that may be a blessing in disguise =P). and that’s just quarterbacks! still, i’m glad that football season is upon us. it’s good fun.

i’m planning the honeymoon trip right now. we’re going to be going to italy. it looks to be a lot of fun. if anyone has any suggestions, i’m open to hearing about them!

a little while ago warren and i went about doing some measurements and grayscale calibrations on the epson home cinema 1080UB. i never really paid much attention to how accurate the colors were on previous tvs, but with the new projector purchase, i figured it was time to try to maximize the potential of my purchase.

it all starts with kal’s calibration guide. it’s a series of complicated steps to measure the grayscale and calibrate it to the correct levels. that’s all we got through that night, but there’s another series of calibration that you can do to adjust your primary and secondaries.

i’m pretty happy with how the projector is performing. it looks like out of the box, the projector is actually pretty decently calibrated. maybe we’ll do more calibrating later, we’ll see.

so while i was at the wedding in LA, i decided to stay with warren and viki. they live about an hour away from the wedding site and EVERYONE was making fun of me about how i was staying so far away from the wedding and how long it would take me to get there. truth be told, it was an hour drive, but traffic wasn’t so bad. the wedding ended fairly promptly at 10:30PM and i think i got back to the house around midnight.

they tell me that i was maybe their 10th or 11th guest in the three years that they’ve lived there. i guess that just means that they don’t get very many visitors in their neck of the woods. i was able to check out warren’s home theatre setup. he had told me that because i have the newer, higher-spec’d projector, i should not expect much from his set up, but the first thing that i noticed when i was watching a movie was that the screen was just SO MUCH LARGER than mine. warren says that picture sharpness and contrast were visibly better at my place, but i don’t think that i would say that it was dramatically different. i think his setup is pretty good.

it was interesting to see how our approaches to setup differed. in large part, it was mostly dictated by the constraints of the room. warren pointed out a few interesting tidbits about his setup, my favorite is that he has set his projector upside-down on a piece of styrofoam to get it oriented in the right direction.

i was able to audition his speakers too and i have to say that when watching a movie, his theatre really feels more immersive. it’s crazy. ah, something to aspire to.

warren and i traded stories and we got onto a rather heated discussion about the best protocol for fighting ants. i absolutely hate ants and any time they come into the house, i wage all-out war. warren has been having some ant problems as well and so we were comparing how to deal with our ant problems. it turns out that warren prefers more eco-friendly, natural repellents, whereas i prefer to wage chemical warfare on the ants.

it was a fun trip, and though everyone i know made fun of me for staying out of the way, i’m glad that i did.