jeffpollard.net

Marooned in VT!

It's been an interesting morning in Vermont. We woke up to a couple of inches of new snow on the ground. This continues the streak: it's snowed at least a little every day we've been here this year.

So, there's new snow on the ground and Jennifer lives up on the side of a mountain. No problem if you've got a four wheel drive vehicle. However, Dad has a Dodge Caravan. Two wheel drive. We had no problems making it through the paved (and flat) roads that lead you back to the foot of the mountain. But to get to Jennifer's driveway, you must turn and go up a steep gravel-and-dirt road that leads you up the mountain to her driveway. The dirt road hasn't been a problem to navigate all week, but then again, there hasn't been 2-3 inches of new snow all week, either.

So, we started up the mountain. There was faint trace that another vehicle had been on the road recently, but even it was starting to get covered over. Our tracks from coming down the mountain late last night? Nowhere to be seen.

The grade started to get steeper and I noticed Dad was fighting the steering wheel to keep the car out of the ditch. He looked over at me, eyes wide open and a semi-frightened look on his face. And then the tires started spinning. We had lost our momentum and it wasn't looking good. I started smelling the rubber heating up on the tires. I guess it wasn't enough heat to melt away the snow and expose the dirt and gravel. We were stuck.

We all evacuated the van and Mom got in the driver's seat. Dad, Olivia and I got behind the van and began pushing while Mom burned the rubber off of the tires. She got about 5 feet further than we had previously gotten, but gravity was forcing the van off into the ditch. She stopped before it was too late.

The 1/2-mile trek up the mountain in the snow was bitterly cold. None of us had gotten dressed this morning prepared to hike halfway up Spring Hill road.

So here we are at Jennifer's house. She's not feeling very good this morning, so we'll probably be hanging out here for a while. We had originally planned on going to Burlington and a few other places today.

The snow is still coming down outside. Even harder than before. It's going to be interesting to get the van back down the mountain. It's so peaceful up here, just sitting here watching the snow fall. No cars rushing by. No neighbors being loud. Just big fat fluffy flakes of snow. And me.

Too bad we're leaving tomorrow.

VT Photos

Here are some photos of Jennifer's cool house and our snowblading/snowboarding adventure at Smuggler's Notch yesterday.

In other news, I would proudly like to announce that my sister has finally gone digital. In one day, she got a Kodak digital camera and a Toshiba DVD player (plus 5 or so movies). Yay for her! In fact, the left photo above from Smuggler's Notch was taken with her camera. It's one of those cool Kodak deals with the transfer craddle. All you do to download the photos is put the camera on the craddle (Palm-style) and hit the button. Very simple. Almost too simple. She seems to be enjoying it.

Frozen

Ok, so I guess I haven't been online in about 3 days! We're up here in frosty Northern Vermont where it's....cold. But awesome, as usual.

We're heading out to go skiing/snowboarding today at a ski resort called Smuggler's Notch, so I don't have a whole lot of time to fill you all in. I've got some great photos, and I'm sure I'll take evn more before this is all over. One thing I realized yesterday: I left my camera memory card and my PC card adapter/reader at my parent's house in Bridgewater. DOH! So, we went to Best Buy last night and I purchased another reader. Only $12, so it's not that big of a deal. Mom has an extra card she's gonna let me use, so I'm good to go.

Hopefully I'll have some time I can post a couple of photos of Jennifer's BEAUTIFUL house tonight.

Merrie X-Mass!

Happy, merry, and joyful Christmas! Today was awesome. I was awakened this morning by my parents giving me the same treatment I used to give them when I was a child: "Wake up, Daddy! Santa's been here! Wake up!"

I eventually pulled myself out of bed and we began unwrapping gifts. Jennifer called in the middle of our ceremonies to wish us a happy Quanza. While on the phone, I had Mom and Dad open their "surprise gift" that I had been hyping them about for a few weeks. Their reaction was exactly what I had been looking forward to for months. They were bewildered that I had taken the time and effort to create the gift I gave them. So, what was it?

Back when I was a child, my parents were always holding a video camera in front of my face. They filmed everything. As I grew older, I liked having that camera around just about as much as I liked having the chicken pox. But you know what? Looking back on it, I'm so glad they captured all of it on film. Well, a few years ago, they had their old 8mm movie reels converted over to VHS tapes. Back then, that was good stuff. But now, with VHS on it's way to the grave, I thought it might be neat to digitally re-master the old home movies. DVD seemed like an appropriate format, and with the recent advances my favorite fruit company has been making with editing and burning video , I figured this was the perfect opportunity. Their 2 VHS tapes came out to be a 4-DVD set: Pollard Family Home Movies, Volumes 1-4. iDVD2 allowed me to create 100% custom DVD menus with animated backgrounds and buttons. I packaged up the final product in America Online CD cases with custom covers. Check out the photo of two of the DVDs.

That really was the highlight of my Christmas: seeing their faces light up in surprise. I received a Sony home theater system in a box with a 5.1-ready receiver, 5 speakers and a subwoofer. It should sound really good. Now, I just need some speaker stands, a cat who won't chew all of the wires, and a residency that will allow me to REALLY see what this system will do. I also got a new set of luggage with a handle and wheels, a cool little set of bendy-socket wrenches, a 12-pack of Code Red, and some new Twizzlers with watermelon filling (weird). Very cool. My parents are so good to me.

Tonight, we picked up my grandmother from the assisted living place and brought her here to eat Christmas dinner with us. We had chicken, mashed potatoes, green beens (from Mom & Dad's garden), and more. It was awesome. I always look forward to their cooking when I come up here. We finished the whole thing off with some pecan pie tonight. Yum!

And now? I'm watching "For the Love of the Game". Great movie.

Tomorrow, we'll be heading out for Vermont at around 6am. The trip should take us about 12-13 hours, which should put us there around 7pm or so. Olivia's flight comes in to Burlington at 11:45pm, so I guess we'll probably stop by there and pick her up, if we think about it.

And by the way, the saying is correct: "Distance makes the heart grow fonder". Yep, I miss her. But we're getting ready to have a great rest of our vacation up in beautiful, snowy (yes..SNOW!) Vermont! I can't wait. Look for lots more photos and stuff coming in the next few days from the arctic tundra! :)

Alive and well in Bridgewater

I feel like I've been out of touch with the world lately. But it's nice to do that every once in a while, strangely.

Things have been good in Bridgewater the past couple of days. Buster came in and woke me up this morning. He jumped up on the bed and curled up right next to me. This was a nice surprise, considering Gizmo would never EVER do such a thing. It's really nice to be around a cat that's actually *gasp* affectionate.

I went over to Daniel's new house tonight. He'll be finishing up Mortuary school in Atlanta in late February and will be moving back to the valley for good. I think he agrees with me that Atlanta is just too crowded. We watched Six Days and Seven Nights at his place tonight and I got to meet some of the family of his fiance'. They'll be getting married in July, I believe.

Tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to get my exhaust fixed, finally. Hopefully Tom will have his exhaust shop open and will have a few minutes to re-route some of my exhaust and quiet things down a bit in the cab.

Olivia seems to be having a good time in Arkansas. I've called her a few times, usually when she's taking a nap.

Almost Christmas! I can't wait...and not because I'm excited about what I may be getting, but rather what my parents will be getting. Don't worry, a FULL explanation will be on here Christmas morning. "Finally, we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi..."

Hi Folks. I'm doing an

Hi Folks. I'm doing an out of the ordinary middle-of-the-day entry. I actually had a few spare minutes here at work before our department Christmas lunch and gift exchange and thought I'd fill you all in.

Last night was crazy. I stayed late at work (again) to work on some things (like my vaugeness?) and when I got home I realized that Olivia was flying out for Little Rock Thursday morning. DOH! This threw a serious wrench in my plans. You see, I had been planning all along to buy Olivia a cell phone for Christmas, but I wanted to give it to her just as she was about to get on the plane. Backing up a step further: I purchased the phone and plan through Sun Com on Monday while I was off from work and had been charging it and programming it at work this week.

So, when I got home and realized that she was flying out the next morning, I freaked. I made up some dumb excuse to come back downtown and get the phone. But, I had to be sneaky so she didn't suspect anything. As it turns out, I pulled it off. She never knew it was coming.

The alarm went off at 3:55 this morning. Did we get up for it? Yeh right. In fact, I woke up to find that my clock had found it's way to 5:15!! We were planning on arriving at the airport at 5 so that we'd have enough extra time for security, etc. We threw on some clothes and ran out the door. We arrived at RIC at around 6:15 to find a TREMENDOUS line at the ticketing table as well as the security checkpoint(x-ray). We made it through the ticketing line by around 6:40. By then, the security line had grown much longer. We took our place in line and began nervously biting our fingernails. Just to put things in perspective, by 6:50 the line had barely moved and Olivia's flight was scheduled to leave at 7:20. As we got closer to the x-ray station, I pulled out my phone and dialed the number for her new phone that I had hiding in my jacket pocket.

I had set the ring tone on her new phone to be "We wish you a merry christmas...". Her phone began loudly singing in my pocket, which really confused Olivia...until I pulled it out, handed it to her and told her that I thought that she might find this useful while we were apart. She was totally shocked..exactly what I had hoped for. I quickly showed her how to use the speed dial to call my cell phone that I had already programmed in and then hopped out of line and left.

She called me from Charlotte a little while ago. She somehow made it on the plane in Richmond. I think they actually held the plane for her, since she had already checked her lugage and they knew she was in the airport somewhere.

Check back for further updates....I'm off to eat a gigantic lunch with my co-workers and then exchange gifts. YAY!

Light em' if you got em'

Again, not enough hours in the day (imagine that!) In the meantime, enjoy photos from our tacky lights tour of Richmond with Mike and Lauren.

More to come later...

All Those Acting Lessons Finally...

Well, thanks to Brian, I found out tonight that Olivia and I are FAMOUS! Yeh! Aparrently, Brian's family was watching the Family Channel on TV this evening when a commercial came on for TechTV and it had a shot of us in it! Luckily, they were taping it, so he was able to capture a shot of what it looked like. Pretty cool. That's my second claim to fame in two weeks! I guess I'm finally on my way to stardom!

So this weekend just flat-out flew by. Even today, which I decided to take as a vacation day. Saturday was spent doing some last-minute Kwanza and Chanukah shopping. We were pretty successful, although the malls were very busy.

Sunday was lazy. We wrapped packages and I went down to the agency to get some work done.

I caught up on some last minute shopping today since I was off and Olivia wasn't around. I ended up spending most of the day at the agency catching up on some stuff. It's funny how you have to watch what you say around Christmas. I know my website can be a little vauge at times, but understand that I have a reasonable excuse, at least for this time of year.

Below are two photos I though you all might enjoy. The first is Gizmo, obviously very entranced by Apple's iTunes visualizer. The second is a photo of me after wrapping too many gifts. All that tissue paper and bows finally got to my head..literally!

The funny thing is: I'm not done wrapping. I've still got all of Olivia's stuff to wrap. Wish me luck..and sharp corners.

A Chafing Economy Bears Fruit Afterall

I almost forgot to mention some good news from the staff meeting the other day. Some of you may not care about any of this, but then, why are you here if you don't care?

In case you've been under a rock, it's been a tough year..and the economy has a great effect on advertising budgets, thus affecting advertising agencys who do their business. Our CEO said that a year such as this "chafes" and doesn't fit well on a company like ours. Anyway, it was rumored that Christmas bonuses would not be given this year. There was also speculation that year-end profit sharing bonuses might be withheld.

Well, we found out at the meeting that we will be getting our Christmas bonuses, but no profit sharing. The profit sharing isn't a big deal to me because I'm not enrolled in that program. The 401K and profit sharing are two seperate systems, for those of you scratching your heads right now. I also found out that some companies have decided to temporarily discontinue their matching in their 401K programs. That would really suck if they did that. Anyways, so I'm really happy that I'll be receiving an extra $xxx (you didn't really think I was gonna put a $ amount on here, did you?)that i wasn't planning on having. Now maybe if I don't get that sunroof for Christmas I'll just buy one myself. :)

Congrats to my cyber-truck-buddy Randy on his new baby. No, no, it's not a human. It's a Taco. A 2002 Double-Cab PreRunner. I can't wait to see pictures of it. It's shame that he's decided to get rid of his truck, but I'm glad he stayed in the Tacoma family.

And finally, I forgot to mention (uhh, last week?) that my friend and coincodental down-the-road neighbor, Eric, has decided to start a blog. Actually, it's a website for his entire family that includes a Greymatter blog. Very cool. So, when you have time, make sure you check out The Hurd Family website.

Goin' Stag

I feel..stagnant. Why? I'm really not quite sure. Let's see if I can pin it down.

I was looking around my own website tonight. It feels old. I feel like I haven't really changed much on here lately, besides this blog. This led to me updating my "What's in the changer" area. To be honest, it was still correct until just a few days ago. The other problem is that by the time I get to a computer, I can't remember what's in the changer. It's a good thing it's only 3 CD changer and not an 8 or 10!

On the topic of stagnant websites...The Martin intranet is getting a little stagnant, although that's really not my fault. The problem is: they're moving people around in our Corp. Communications department..moving the guy that used to write scripts for Seinfeld and has been doing an AWESOME job writing news content for @Martin AWAY from doing ANY kind of writing for the site. In his place, someone with (IMHO) less writing skill..whom I have yet to receive ANYTHING in the last week and a half.

Another thing I noticed while glancing around the page here is that I haven't used my digital camera very much lately. I took a bunch of photos last weekend in Natural Bridge, but I never made a gallery out of them. Perhaps I got a little burnt out on photo galleries while making CustomTacos.

Imagine a brand new Dodge Viper. Red. Only 28 miles on it. Wrecked. Front-end collision, in fact. Broken corner lamps, bent bumper. Inside, the air bags deployed. The dash squeaks and the driver's side window is broken out. However, the owner still drives it to work every day. He simply doesn't feel like taking the time to fix his brand new (ruined) sports car. It still runs and gets him to work, but the engine knocks and sometimes it takes it a few minutes to start. Folks, that shiny new wrecked Viper is our server room right now. That's about the best way I can describe it.

Surprise Wedding Bells

We received a strange envelope in the mail today. Harrisonburg was on the return address. Didn't recognize it, but opened it anyway. It turned out to be a wedding invitation from an old friend from high school. An old friend that I haven't spoken to very much since I left for school. Some of you may know a guy like my friend. He has one of the most amazing, innovative, creative brains of anybody I know, but he didn't take it as far as he could. Perhaps he decided willingly that he didn't want to further his education. Perhaps he didn't have the money. Ok, so he decided not to further his education..doesn't make him a bad person at all. But it's what he decided to do (or not do) with his life that boggles my mind. Alcoholism started to take over to the point of picking fights with his own best friends. That's what I hate to see more than anything. However, he decided to go into the Marines and that apparently has turned him around. From what I understand, he's doing well lately. I think we'll go.

Not to continue on my soap box, but it's interesting to look back and think about all the times my parents fussed at me for "not using all of my potential". Looking back on it, perhaps I wasn't working as hard as I could, but when the time came, I knew where I was going. I knew what I was doing. And, I think, I knew how I was going to do it. What really tears me up is to see a good friend with amazing potential not use it. But it's really not for me to decide, I guess, is it?

And lastly (and on a TOTALLY different topic), I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that Mariah Carey looked like a total TRAMP on Dave Letterman tonight. Boys, back me up here, but she's just gone to the crapper in the last few years. My question is: who is she trying to be?

I survived Geek Retreat #1

Here I am! This weekend was awesome. Mike, Brian, and I headed to Mike's grandparents' house in Natural Bridge to "camp out" in his Uncle's cabin on their land. The plan was to get away from the rest of the world so that we could play Quake, hang out, and do nothing. As Brian quoted from somewhere else: "We did absolutely nothing and it was everything I hoped it would be." But boy did my fingers hurt after playing Quake for that long. I'm not quite sure exactly how many hours we actually played, but it was a significant chunk of the time that we were there and not sleeping. I'm sure Brian's website has a bunch more detail about what else we did, but I won't bore you all with the details. Instead, I'll bore you with other stuff.

Oh yeh, on the way home, we took a jaunt on the Blue Ridge Parkway and took some great sunset photos. Here's a panorama that I made from a few shots I took:

Work was pretty hectic today. I guess the holiday season is causing people to be a little more frantic than usual. Or it could be that we're in the middle of a bunch of new business reviews. Or it could be that one of our main servers ran out of disk space again. It's only happened 5 or 6 times before, so it wasn't anything that anybody saw coming.

We went to the museum for a dress rehersal for my big theater debut tomorrow. I think I've pretty well got my lines down. Perhaps once I get a hold of a copy of that I can post a small-ish version of it on the web somewhere for you all to enjoy. If I failed to mention who I am, I'm Clarence Oddball, the gaurdian angel of the main character, George. The skit is "It's a Blunder-Filled Life", a parody of "It's a Wonderful Life." It should be pretty good and I think the company will get a kick out of it.

And that's tomorrow bright and early at 8am...but I have to be there at 7. Goodnight!

Bringing back Alfie

It looks like I'll be needing to polish up my acting skills. I have been asked to take a role in the Agency staff meeting christmas skit. We're doing a spoof of "It's a Wonderful Life" called "It's a blunder-filled life". It uses basically the same plot as the original classic, but with a Martin Agency twist. For those of you interested, I'm Clarence, the gaurdian angel. I have about 7 or 8 lines, all near the end of the skit. Pretty cool. We had a rehersal this afternoon, and we'll be having another tomorrow, with a dress rehersal on Monday afternoon. I hope I can remember my lines!

I think I'm totally in love with OS X, but I think I've probably mentioned something like that on here before. Not that I'm counting, but I professed my love Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here. Whew.

And, for the record, I've been trying to make time to take some macro photos to join in Brian's reindeer games. If you haven't joined in his new Guess the Macro game, it's worth checking out. Kinda addicting if you ask me. Nice work, B. :)

You're in the jungle, baby!

Every night starting at about 5pm, strange noises can be heard out in the circle outside the Agency. When I first heard it, I though that maybe somebody had brought a wild pack of apes to Shockoe Slip. Then I realized that the noise is supposed to be birds. And not just any birds. Wild birds. Wild birds that are designed to scare away every other bird on the planet. But, get this: There's no pack of big scary birds. Nope. Speakers. Just speakers playing loud scary bird noises. After asking a few people why bird noises were being played over speakers in the cirlce outside, I found out that real birds usually flock to the trees in the circle every night at dusk. The flocking birds make a terrible mess that only washes away whn it rains, which isn't very often around here. So, I guess they figured the best solution was to keep the birds from ever landing in the trees and pooping on the sidewalks. It just seems strange to me that every night at sundown you hear this terrible loud noise that, in my opinion, is worse than having poop on the sidewalk. Crazy.

Some exciting stuff today. Connectix released VirtualPC 5.0 and I somehow convinced Glen to purchase a copy for the Agency (Merry Christmas to me!). Hey, at $99, it's a good deal, too! So, it runs under OS X (YAY!), albeit a little slower than OS 9. So, I can finally do all the PC things I need to do without having to boot back to 9. Yay progress!

Mike came downtown and we went out for dinner. With my busy schedule, I felt like I hadn't seen him in a long time, so it was really cool to spend some time with him again. There will lots more of that this weekend when Brian and Mike and I take off for Mike's grandparent's farm in Natural Bridge. Yep, we'll be realxing old-school style, except this time we won't be camping, but rather staying indoors and fragging it out. For all of you non-Quake people, fragging is when you kill someone in Quake. There will be much Quake playing, MP3 swapping and lots of other activities. Should be a blast. And perhaps just what I need right now. :)

Whassamattame?

Work was busy today. We got slammed by some new PC email-based virus. We took down our email server for about an hour, brought it back up only to find the virus still propogating itself via instant messaging. Pretty smart virus. It completely took us by surprise. You should have heard the help desk phone ringing off the hook. "Yes, it's a virus. Delete it. Goodbye." Over and over. It was actually kinda funny from my standpoint. Not a single one of our Macs aided in the propogation of this virus. Again, we missed the bullet. I keep waiting for a nasty Mac virus to come along.

Ok, here's a little problem I've noticed I've been having lately and maybe some of you loyal readers can help me figure out what's wrong with me. When I'm at work and people ask me for advice (should I buy an iMac or a G4 or home? for example) I always have a decisive answer. If there's a matter that needs my opinion at work, I am quick to give my opinion..usually a very strong opinion, too. But when I come home and it comes time for Olivia and I to make simple decisions, I have a problem coming up with a decisive answer:

"Do you want to go out to dinner tonight?"

"I dunno."

"Do you want to go to Wal-Mart with me?"

"Doesn't really matter."

Anybody have any idea what causes this? I mean, I have an idea what might be behind this. I think at work, I don't have a problem being decisive because I don't really care too much about "stepping on toes" so to speak. However, here at home, I'm always trying to be accomodating to everybody else's needs and just want to make sure everybody's happy. In the process, I have trouble deciding which is the best choice. Any advice or ideas how I can become better about this?

Last minute shopping? Here's a tip:

Ok, for all of you who haven't gotten me anything for Christmas (not that you have to or anything), here's a little tip: Ginger. Aka: IT. Yeh, so it's $3000. Anyways, take a look at it, if you haven't had enough hype about it yet.

Nothing else terribly exciting to report in my world. I found the coolest piece of software for OS X today. It's a program that captures streaming audio from ShoutCast servers. You see, streaming servers are usually NOT "recordable", thus making streaming commercial audio and video legal. So, if you can capture that data, then you have high-quality media delivered right to your door--err hard drive. Pretty cool. The software's called StreamRipper and it's available for OS X, Linux/UNIX, and I think there's even a plug-in for Winamp.

I had something else to talk about, but I seem to have forgotten it. To find out why this happens, make sure you read up on my theory about what's wrong with my brain.