Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I decided to do a bit of site maintenance today for a change. I removed some dead links, added a subheading to the title at the top of the page, and mostly just updated the “About Me” page. In addition to a reworked bio, there’s also info about the blog itself, how it came to be, what I’m trying to do with it, and stuff like that.

On another note, Blog City, my blog host, has been having some technical issues today, so I apologize if you are trying to read this on the actual site and things are really slow or buggy. Hopefully they will get everything resolved soon.

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Well, as nice as vacations are, when you’re not a terribly organized person to begin with they tend to throw you hopelessly behind. We just got back from a trip to North Carolina on Sunday night. This week at work I’ve been in training and last night I was at a Bare Naked Ladies concert, so I haven’t had a huge amount of time to blogging. I have a lot to write, too, as well as pictures to share, etc. I guess they will have to wait just a little longer. Hopefully I can get back on track by the weekend!

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Well, it appears Wil Wheaton’s birthday is the day before mine, although he’s also four years younger. I will be turning 36 on Friday, and while I haven’t really enjoyed getting older since turning 25 or so, now that I have a wife and a house and more of a life, well, I at least don’t feel like my life is “running out.” Sure, no kids yet, but that will come eventually.

Wil also seems to do some mobile blogging. Since buying my Treo 600 from my friend Rich I have started looking into various applications, getting one to work ok, but it seemed pretty basic. I couldn’t see how to embed links, although I think you could imbed images.

Alas other things have preocuppied my time lately to where I had to put that aside for the moment. For one, me and my wife are going to NC next week to do some sightseeing as well as participate in a digital photography course that will hopefully get me really moving with my new D70 (although they use Fuji S2′s for the classes). So I’ve been doing lots of reading and also trying to get this new GPS system working efficiently that uses my Treo (I’ll try to write about this in a future entry). Oh yes, and there are all the bills and other paperwork that have been piling up for months while we tried to unpack and get the house into some kind of shape. I still want to take a month off and just catch up with all this stuff, but somehow I don’t think my boss will let me do this, even though it is my birtday in a couple of days!

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Today I come to work and for the heck of it try to check to see if I can access Blog City and wouldn’t you know it, I can get to it again, along with my exchange host. No one knows why I couldn’t get to it earlier, the network folks denied any responsibility and the base’s network people as well. If it went higher than that, according to one person I talked to, they wouldn’t have all of a sudden unblocked things. Oh well, at least now I can actually post stuff from here. I had written something up last week but then couldn’t post it, so I’ll post it today. I may just be able to post a lot this week since I’ve got a bit more material after over a week of not writing!

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Well, last week my access to my exchange host (read email) was cut. Today I came to work and found I couldn’t even get access to my blog! I work on an army base and they often clamp down on security stuff for no good reason. I talked to the network people in my organization who said they didn’t do it, they contacted the base’s network people who said they didn’t block anything. So I am thinking it is army wide or something! It just so happens that the server for my exchange host is in Germany and my blog server is in Scotland, so I am thinking that they just started blocking non-US-based machines. Ack! This cuts out a lot of sites. Really unfortunate. Hopefully I can get to the bottom of it soon, but for now, I’m stuck accessing email through my phone. I guess I should be happy I can access it at all.

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Wow, I hadn’t realized how long it had been since my last entry. Things have been a bit busy on the personal front. We have been trying to cart off half our cluttered condo to a storage unit so that it looks like it’s not the tiny place it is. Then my sister decided to finally give birth to her first daughter, so we were up in NYC for four days helping out. While doing this, I learned that my brother in law actually has a blog of sorts, but it’s not really a blog. It’s really just a website where he posts random thoughts. There are some good rants about airline and theater security as well as the whole Janet Jackson debacle. I’m trying to convince him to actually make it into a blog which I think makes it a lot easier to post on a more regular basis (although my current lag does not give a good argument for this!). Anyway, check his site out – http://www.10025.com/.

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Yes, I am still alive! I apologize for the long delay in posts! Many good excuses have I to explain my absence (in addition to the simple truths of laziness and mood). Here’s the deal.

First off, I had a fender bender that actually totalled my car, so this threw me for a bit of a loop. I finally bought a friend’s car and dealt with all the registration stuff, so that part of my excuse is now through.

Secondly, me and my wife started looking at houses a couple of weeks ago. We have been planning on looking for a while as our 750 square foot one-bedroom Condo in DC is getting mighty cramped! This search, both online and in person, has taken a considerable amount of time and energy. However, a bid that we put down on a house in Vienna, VA a couple of days ago was accepted and loans and such are just getting finalized. I would like to say that this excuse is now null and void as well, but we now have the task of fixing a few minor issues with the new place, replacing a couple of appliances, and then starting to get our current place ready to go on the market, so I’m afraid we still have our work cut out for us. Moreover, although I’m very excited, there’s a certain sense of dread lurking in the back of my mind that I am trying to keep at bay. This dread is for the tremendous amount of information that I don’t even have the faintest clue about regarding home repair, renovation, upkeep, gardening, landscaping, furnishing, etc., etc.! I’ll post more about the new house with some picutres soon enough.

Thirdly, my blog host, blog city, upgraded their system a few weeks ago. For a good week or so we simply could not post. Even after that one-week period, there were glitches that had the system down more than it was up. Things seem to have stabalized lately, so this hopefully should no longer be a problem.

I’ll leave you with a couple of shots I took in Northwest DC on 13th Street and I believe Irving Street. We often come down 13th street from Maryland and it’s at this spot that I always marvel at the view. These picture’s don’t do it justice, but it’s just a unique spot because DC does not have any real high-rises, so this natural summit creates a view that’s unique.

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A quick reminder for those of you out there who like to read this blog. Blog City, the hosting company I use to create and maintain my blog, has a very helpful feature that I’ve included that lets one “subscribe” to a blog. I’ve placed this on the left side of my page under the calendar – at least that’s where it is right now. If you type in your email address and then hit the button titled “>> >>” you will be updated every time I post a new entry. I thought I would mention it specifically because currently the number of subscribers are pretty minimal compared to what I see in my traffic reports, so I think perhaps a lot of folks just don’t know it’s there or don’t know what it is.

A couple of words about this: I get tons of email myself, both spam and mailing lists, and actual persona email, so I know some people’s resistance to signing up for things where one might be signing on for potentially more spam! From everything I have seen, Blog City is extremely responsible in trying to combat spam and would never sell email addresses. I myself can’t even see who has subscribed, that’s how serious they are about preventing spam! Also, I know that you can unsubscribe as easily as you can subscribe, as I’ve unsubscribed from a few blogs that I felt were starting to spew stuff that I had no interest in.

So please, for those of you who read this blog on any kind of regular basis, let me know by subscribing so that I don’t feel like I’m just, as my grandfather used to say “talking to the wall!”

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Thanks for your patience! The wedding was perfect and aside for coming down with a cold, the honeymoon was great as well. I hope to post some pictures of these soon, as well as a book review and a dvd review. For the moment I am still trying to get back into the swing of things, get the apartment clean and things relatively organized and there’s still a lot to work on even though we’ve been back for a week already!

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Despite this recent flurry of activity, I wanted to forward readers that I may be out of commission for a couple of weeks or a bit longer. I leave today for St. Michael’s, Maryland, where I’ll be getting married on Sunday! I’ll be bringing the laptop there and on the honeymoon (Key West), so theoretically if I feel really compelled to write something I can, but chances are that I will have other things to do, hahah! I’m currently listening to an audiobook that I will probably be finishing on the way there this afternoon, so who knows; maybe I’ll try to review it. There’s also the chance I may decide to post some pix of St. Michaels or Key West, but we’ll see. — Levi

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