Over three months since the last post. A lot can change in three months, as I've learned.
First thing first: I'm no longer in Sacramento. In fact, I'm about a week away from heading across the country to not-so-sunny Norfolk, Virginia, enroute to my next assignment, the USS George Washington, to begin my second carrier tour. The nice thing about going back to sea is that I've already got a fair idea of what's going on, what's good to know, and more specifically, who is good to know. It also gives me an opportunity to start off with a clean slate; I didn't exactly start my first sea tour off on the right foot, and though I did eventually get onto the right track, life would have been much more pleasant had I put forth a bit more effort.
So, in the meantime, I'm cooling my heels (metaphorically speaking) at my folks' place in the hills east of Fresno, enjoying my last week in California by pretty much doing as little as possible (except spend money, which will be touched on in a paragraph or two). I have taken a couple trips up to Kings Canyon National Park, as well as a day trip to Cupertino to visit Apple at 1 Infinite Loop a couple days ago. Selected pictures from these trips are up on my deviantART gallery.
Pictures, I'll add, were taken with my new Canon EOS 30D DSLR camera, which I'm still trying to figure out the controls for. I've got the basics of ISO adjustment down reasonably well, but I haven't even touched on things like shutter speed, aperture settings, etc. I'm too used to the typical point-and-shoot, though the Olympus SP500UZ I previously used had similar user-adjustable settings (which I rarely used). I'll adjust in time, I suppose - after all, practice makes perfect.
The camera was but one of a slew of acquisitions in the past few weeks, which include:
-17-inch MacBook Pro, with high-resolution display, 160GB 7200 RPM hard drive and third-party upgrade to 4GB of RAM
-8GB iPhone (yeah, that was a given)
-Three external hard drives (1TB dual-drive RAID setup, and two 160GB 2.5-inch bus-powered drives)
-Final Cut Studio 2 (which was a #&*$! to install, since I was putting extra content on the new 1TB drive which accidentally got powered down 2/3 of the way through the first attempt)
-FileMaker Pro 8.5 (which, naturally, was superceded by version 9 two whole days later)
-Adobe Lightroom (coupled with Photoshop CS3, this makes processing the 30D's RAW images so much more enjoyable)
In short, I picked up everything I could possibly need to keep myself busy/entertained when I'm stuck on the ship in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, I have a short attention span. What can I say?I really need to start posting on here more often; I know, I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again in my next post 2-5 months from now. If, for some strange reason, you're wondering what I've been doing lately, better places to look would be my Twitter profile, or my deviantART profile (which has the bonus of including pictures!).
