Not dead yet

So... that was a bit of a long uncomfortable silence. Yeah, it's been a while since I posted. Why you ask? well after a phenomenal trip to Egypt and then a week and a half of skiing it just doesn't seem like there's much that makes the cutoff to write here. But to hell with that, let's get driveling!

First off, I did get to do some traveling, Oregon baby! Yeah, the land of speeding tickets and cheese. Actually also the land of ghost towns and speeding tickets and cheese. Drove down there over Presidents Day weekend to hunt for run down farm houses and whatnot that might be interesting to photograph. Funnily enough, anything mentioned in a book as a great ghost town usually turned out to be crap, but the stuff we found on the side of the road was AWESOME! witness the photo glory.

An additional focus. Tatiana found a book ("Caffeine for the Creative Mind") that has 250 exercises for you to do to get the creative juices flowing. She has proposed a bit of light competition wherein we see what each other comes up with for the exercise and motivate each other to, you know, actually do them. A lot of them will have tangible results, so I'm happy because now I have projects galore! The first task is to take the concept of "Pimp my ride" and apply it to a Radio Flyer wagon. I've got a self imposed deadline of this Friday so we'll see if my talents live up to my mental image. After that are some writing and photography challenges so this should be fun. Needless to say if it's project worthy, there will probably be a project page, if not, then probably at least pictures.

I've also been toying with a redesign for ye olde site. I'm going to keep the ramblings and whatnot, but need a space better than flickr for my photos and I thought it would be kind of cool to let you all add whatever you want around here. I'm not sure what that means really, but I have in my head a way to "authenticate" yourself by asking questions about me. Sort of a "prove you know zack and you can post pictures of cats sucking on beer bottles". So far the only question I've come up with is "who is the best dog in the world?" but that answer is too obvious. We'll see how that focus turns out. Focus may be too generous a word. We'll see how that eyes-drifting-in-a-vague-direction turns out.

Finally, a bit from work. I said I'd never write about boring days at work which is largely why I haven't written anything about work in a while, but this just amuses me and so you will thusly be subjected to it. I'm working on how the world will search xbox.com and toying around with some new technology. This tech is supposed to be fairly good but the guys who designed some if it must have been on crack. If you say "hey, give me everything that matches halo" it'll say "nope, don't have anything here". Why? because when you didn't define "everything" to mean "anything relevant". That's the best way I can describe what they did - they made it so that unless you say otherwise "everything" means "absolutely nothing". eh, I guess you have to be a nerd and/or just me to appreciate that.

Oh, finally finally, I think I got the coolest Duffman mail of all time this morning. Conor was a representative from a group of 15 or so guys in New Zealand who all dressed up like Duffman for some massive 2 day rugby tournament. All of them:

That just makes me laugh.

So in summary, not dead yet.