2008 was kind of a big year for me. I started this site, bought a house, bought a new car, got a girlfriend, and got involved in a upcoming project that is unannounced. I wanted to write a formal post about all that has gone on this year, and what I am planning for next year.
2008: Wrap Up
As I said earlier, 2008 was a big year for me. I started the year off pretty strong when I for the first time kept a New Year’s resolution. What was it, well it was to quit smoking. I smoked my last cigarette on New Years Eve, 2008. Quitting cold turkey was hard, but I am very glad I did it.
From then I decided it was time for a new car. My 2000 Nissan Maxima was approaching 100k miles and I wanted to sell it before it hit that mile stone. I ended up trading it in for a brand new straight of the truck 2008 Nissan Altima. So far, I love the card, it is a step down from the Maxima, but it get great gas mileage and handles like a race car. Having a car payment sucks, but you got to do what you got to do!
Hey everyone, I wanted to touch base with you all on that is going on with me. I apologize for the lack of posting goodies this past week. As many of you know, I am in the process of purchasing a house, my first house to be exact. Being this is my first attempt at the buying process, I have discovered how much work actually goes into purchasing a house.
Instead of posting about tech news, I have been dealing with appraisals, inspections, mortgages, and more! I am set to close on my house December 1st, 2008, yay! I have a few week break between now and when I move in, so I am going to take this time to try and post as much content as I can.
The House
Some of you might be interested in my house, and some of you might not, but I am going to talk about it anyways haha. I am purchasing a 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath, end-unit town home here is Atlanta, GA. I am super excited. This is my first ever house, and it is a very nice place. I can thank the economy for getting me such a good price. Below are some pictures. I hope you all like!
The house is in great shape, it is newly painted in and out. I t also has a very well groomed backyard and side yard. Now all I need is furniture, I am currently only renting a room in a house, so all the furniture I have is just office and Bedroom.
In an attempt to better establish myself as a professional blogger and web developer and not just another kid attempting to get rich quick online, I decided to design some business cards for myself. In a few weeks I will be attending the Webmaster Jam Session 2008, so I wanted to make sure I had something in print that I can use for networking at the event.
So, I did some research on the subject and came across a post on my friend Paul Stamatiou’s blog, and took his advice. I looked into a few options of where to have the cards printed. The 2 places I narrowed it down to was Moo.com and OvernightPrints.com. After looking at the 2 different sites in detail, I decided to go with Overnight Prints because it was cheaper, and provided quicker turn around.
I used a template I found floating around the net as the template for my design. When having something printed off site, it is important that you follow a template to make sure your design bleeds well, and your logo or content don’t get cut off.
I uploaded the design as a high quality JPG to the Overnight Prints website, picked my glossy or matte finsh, approved my final design, and submitted my order. The next day I recieved a email from quality control at Overnight Prints saying that there was a misprint found in my design. What had happend is the image didn’t upload correctly and it resulted in one sides of my card was printing blank. They quickly haulted the printing, and notified me. At that time, I reuploaded my design and the continued witht he printing at no additional charge to me.
I am very happy with the prints, but I opted for a glossy front and matte black, after seeing the glossy finish in person, I am thinking my next order I will get matte on both sides. The glossy was to shiny, and showed finger prints.
What are your thoughts? Do you like my design? Do you have your own self designed business cards?
Well, as I am writing this post I am in the process of doing Time Machine restore. When I originally bought my Macbook Pro, I setup time machine purely because I had an extra 500GB external hard drive laying round, and I wanted to be able to brag to people about how cool time machine looks when you use it. Well, I have had my Macbook Pro for over 4 months now, and today is the 3rd time Time Machine has saved my ass!
I was at work earlier today running software updates on OS X when my machine asked me if i wanted to restart after it installed an update, and with out thinking, I clicked OK. When my machine came back up it occurred to me that I had my Windows XP Pro VMware Fusion partition running, and had not properly suspended it or shut it down. I quickly opened up VMware Fusion to see if it was still OK. Well it wasn’t, I found that it was frozen on the loading screen when trying to load up the Windows XP Pro install from where it left off. So yea, at this point I am worried.
I use Windows XP Pro on VMware Fusion as my primary work computer so when this would not load, I freaked. I had a 50GB partition of my hard drive filled with important work stuff and it would not load.
With in a few minutes I realized I had a Time Machine backup of that data on my home external backup drive. I opened up Time Machine, browsed to the Virtual Machines folder and clicked restore from my update last night. What a relief!!
Time Machine is probably the most unused program that comes on a Mac, but I would recommend you run it in the background all the time. When you happen to need it, it is great! Now if I could just get 50GB of data to restore in less than 1 hour I might actually get some work done today!
Hey just a quick post, my video I made of the iTunes 8 Visualizer was picked up by Mac Rumors. This might not interest you all, but it a big deal for an up and coming blogger like myself. Thanks to everyone who check out the video, and commented about it. I very much appreciate the support. That video is picking up about 700 views an hour because of MacRumors and Digg.
Mac Rumors Post: http://www.macrumors.com/2008/09/09/odds-and-ends-new-shuffles-in-ear-headphones-first-impressions-and-more/
I will start by stating, that I am not a workout type person. I don’t like to go to the gym. I prefer to stay physically fit by doing fun outdoor activities that don’t feel like a workout. My favorite activities are hiking and mountain bike riding. I disclose this information to you to show you how much I don’t enjoy regular routine workout.
With that said, I recently started the 100 push up challenge. I am in week 2 when writing this post. I have never been able to do a lot of pushups. I started the program by doing the beginning test which ask you to test yourself by seeing how many pushups you can do in one set. Well, this is hard for me to disclose, but I was only able to do 8 pushups during that test.
Well, I am a big fan of watching people do Me Today videos on Viddler, so I decided it was time I joined the group. For those that don’t know, a Me Today is just a quick video where you talk briefelly about different things that are going on. It is nothing speical, but I wanted to share it with everyone!
In early October, I will be attending the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session. This is a 2 day web development conference that is taking place here in Atlanta, GA. It is very rare that a major web conference be on the east coast and not be up in NYC. I very much enjoy web development conferences but with the high cost of travel, and the high price to registration at these events hinders my ability to attend. Well, you can bet I will be attending one that is here in my hometown.
The Webmaster Jam Session is an all around web developers conference. It covers web design, coding, SEO, and social networking. I plan to use this as an opportunity to network with some of the biggest names in the business. Registration for the 2008 sessions is limited to 240, so if you are interested, be sure to sign up soon. The price is $199 for a standard pass, and $399 for a platinum pass which includes some extra special sessions. If you are interested in registering use promo code “BLUEDOG” and save 20% of the standard prices.
I will be attending all day everyday, so if you are attending, be sure to let me know and we can meet up at the event.
OK, so lots to update you on. First off, let me start by saying that my trip plans changed a bit. My grandmother passed away the weekend before I was suppose to leave, so I had to take an emergency trip to Gettysburg, PA for my grandmothers funeral on Monday 14th of July 2008.
As a result, I had to cancel the San Francisco portion on my trip. I was suppose to fly to San Francisco on Monday but I was in Gettysburg for the funeral. I did still take the second portion of my trip which was a trip to Las Vegas for a 3 bachelor party.
Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas
I arrived in Las Vegas on Thursday, July 20th, 2008. I was the first of the group to arrive so I had some time to myself. I took a cab to the MGM Grand which was where I was staying. From there I dropped my bags and headed downstairs to the casino to drop $1 in a slot machine. I won $5 so I knew it was going to be a good trip. After my one play, I headed outside to do some exploring. It was about 105 degree’s outside, but it was equal to about a 95 degree day in ATL with 100% humidity! I started walking down the strip past New York New York, Planet Hollywood, Bellagio, and Caesars Palace. This was about as far as I could go because the heat and the fact that I had walked about 10 miles when you factor in exploring the inside of each of the hotels.
Each of these hotels was pretty unique and amazing in its own. New York, New York was visually stunning from the outside. Planet Hollywood was very trendy on the inside with lots of shops and restaurants. The Bellagio was amazing with the pools and the fountains out front. Caesars was pretty awesome in and out, it was very visual with a lot of stunning replica style architecture from the Roman days.
Happy 4th of July everyone. I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable 4th of July. My weekend consisted of work, fireworks, the lake, and painting.
Friday, I was stuck at work. I had to go in for a few hours by request of my property manager. It turned out to be a good time to catch up on all the work I needed to catch up on. I got done there at around 6pm and went home to relax for a while. From there I then went to the Buckhead area of Atlanta to watch the Lenox Mall fireworks which is one of the the biggest, if not the biggest, fireworks displays in Atlanta. The property I run is very near Lenox Mall, so I had access to an area where most people were not allowed. From there I set up my camera and tripod to see if I can get some good photos of the fireworks. I stuck around and shot some photos of the crowd and the traffic afterwords. I was mainly just trying to work on my evening long exposure shots. I am pretty happy with my results. Overall it was a very enjoyable evening.
On Saturday, I went up to my parents house for a day on the lake. I was not feeling great so I only took a few photos. We had a good turn out and I got a good action shot of Matt (my soon to be brother in law) jumping off the dock.
Sunday was a relax/house work day. I helped my roommate paint the spare bedroom in our house. The painting was fun. With 2 people it goes quick. The paint is a bit to yellow, but it looked OK once it dried. I will be moving into that bedroom soon because it is bigger and has a bathroom. We are going to do some more work on it over the next few weeks before I move in.
Oh and one final note, I leave for my San Francisco and Las Vegas trip in 1 week! I am getting pretty excited. See this post for more info.
My name is Chris Lentz. I started ATLChris.com in July 2008. I am not a journalist; blogging is just something I enjoy doing.
I operate out of Atlanta, Georgia. My goal with this site is to blog about interesteding technology and internet news and some personal stuff too!. I also do product and
software reviews.