I decided to take up a hobby, well, not really take it up now – I’ve been doing this for many years, now I just want to make it official of sorts.

It’s Photography. A number of years ago I had purchased a nice SLR digital camera from Nikon. When I purchased it I intended to use it in my web design business, and I did. It worked great.

Now I’m not doing as much web design on the side that I had in the past so I’m not using it as much. Being that we moved to a very pretty part of San Diego County around a year ago, I thought that I could start taking some pictures of the area I live in. It’s a rather beautiful place… if you are familiar with La Jolla (no, it’s not like La Jolla, not at the beach by a long shot!) San Diego Country Estates could be considered the La Jolla of East San Diego County. All the homes here are custom built, and most all have 1/2 acre of land that they occupy.

So, the other great thing about this area is it is surrounded by the Cleveland National Forest, so what’s here is what’s here… not likely to be building more homes. Although about 5 miles from the house they are planning to build another 100 homes. That’s the most they have planned, and I doubt that without some major infrastructure improvements will we see more than that built.

I’ve been going through some of the pictures that I had taken in the past and I found some pictures of plants and flowers that I took while on my wife and my honeymoon in San Francisco/Napa/Santa Rosa. I have set up a gallery, and you are invited to review them… The official opening of my Gallery Showing starts when you click the link to the site! Most of the pictures are from two places. The home of a famous botanist Luther Burbank, which had been turned into a museum, and the botanical gardens at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Enter the Gallery here. 

You will need to provide your own snacks and drinks. I expect to continue to populate the Gallery and maybe play with my images in Photoshop to get some amazing pieces of art.

Thanks for your participation!

Really, it was a pretty good trip aside from my ‘test’ to see what traveling would be like just having a tablet computer. Actually not just any tablet computer, but THE tablet computer.  My iPad2.

Certainly the design of the device is just amazing, and I think that I am certainly not alone in packing up one of these tablets and hitting the travel track – I saw a number of iPads (both the first one and the 2) out at the airport and there was quite a few being used on the airplane.

I found it to be just as usable as my laptop, but with one caveat…. I needed to use the blue tooth keyboard, I don’t mind using the built in software keyboard, but it’s just flat… flat flat flat!  And with a flat keyboard on glass it’s so much easier to not be able to get the right letters some times, so it is a little frustrating to say the least. But I was able to write the last post completely on my iPad and it generally worked out ok.

I was able to do pretty much all of what I needed/wanted to do.  In fact the most epic thing about the iPad2 is the ability to use Skype. I really missed my wife and through using Skype, we got to talk for free and we got to see each other. Brilliant technology!

I have all the productivity software that I would need, if I were required to do work that involved presentations, or spreadsheets, or documents. But since this was a pleasure trip and not a working trip, there was no need for that. Plus with being able to bring my music and movies and games all in one thin and amazing device (oh yeah I forgot, books!), I was able to watch a movie on the plane, write on the plane, and catch up on my reading.  Reading on the iPad isn’t as bad as most people think or what the advertisers of other tablet devices say. Yes it’s a complete piece of crap when trying to read it in the sunshine, but I don’t often read in the sun with my electronic device!  It would just be my luck that I take the thing out to the pool to watch, read or listen to and then it winds up at the bottom of the deep end. With my luck it’s a given!

I purchased a cover/carrier for the thing, it allows me to not only protect the device, I can carry other things in it such as the charging cord…. Embarrasingly enough, it looks kind of like a murse. (A murse is my wife’s attempt at humour… a ‘man purse’).

I think that unless there is some definite requirement for me to have a laptop on a trip that just having the iPad2 (+ the blue tooth keyboard) is more than sufficient!

It is mid January of 2012. And I am on a flight to go attend a very important event in my eldest son’s life. You see he joined the army last year and started boot camp in mid October 2011. Although I didn’t quite understand why it was he joined, I am glad that he made a choice and is sticking to it. I am proud of him!

I am making a departure from my normal MO which is to take a laptop with me when I do travel. Mostly I have it to entertain myself and to be able to do work if I find the need to. This time I have left my laptop at home and I am trying to use my iPad2 for all my computing needs. I do have to say that typing on this thing isn’t as good as it could be. The built in keyboard I feel is the weakest point on the iPad. But much better than no keyboard at all.

As far as the flight from San Diego, CA to Charlotte, NC… It is full, kind of stuffy, and I wound up with a middle seat. Oh how I dislike the middle seat. I usually go for the window seat, because I try so very hard to check out and sleep. I am a poor traveler. I don’t like turbulence, and I guess I am bit of a chicken. This flight is the first of two legs, the second leg of the trip is from charlotte to Columbia, where Fort Jackson is, where Josh, my eldest son is at. Why did they have to send him all the way across the US? Why couldn’t the army have taken my needs into consideration? Oh well, these things happen.

Really the most amazing thing is that I have 11 full length and high definition movies, around 40 books, 500 plus songs, text adventure games and other things to entertain this middle aged nerd!
If I think about it, really what I have is a device that I can not only consume digital cogent, but as you are reading I am also creating content. I can’t publish it right now, but if I wanted to pay some small fee I can now get wifi on this areoplane as well.

The iPad is so well equipped that if I really wanted to, and I was a professional reporter, I could film, edit, and publish news stories right here from the slab of electronic amazement. I am quite sure that there are people in the business that use this device for just that purpose. Well, we have now been in the air for a little over an hour. Flight has definitely been smooth, with an occasional bump here and there. Kay chicken self had taken a couple of sleeping pills before I boarded, and no matte how I tried, I just can not get to sleep. It looks like my idea of saving money and taking the red eye is not going to work well for me. My flight gets to my destination at 8:30 am eastern time, and family day on base starts at 10am. I cannot check into my hotel until 3pm, and I am going to have to take a cab to the hotel. My mother an sister are going to my son’s graduation as well, but they left at 1pm on Tuesday, and are already in Columbia, SC… With a rental car. Hopefully they are sleeping well… Better than I am for sure.

Back to replacing my laptop with my iPad2 when traveling. It is different, but is working quite ,well. I am going to watch a movie now, so maybe I can sleep, I will come back to this later, and through the magic of writing, this break will seem no more than just a ‘blip’ to you dear reader.

I am now nearing the end of the first leg of this long ass flight, so I will be powering the iPad down as we approach Charlotte, NC…. Then there is a little two hour layover. I did kind of get some drifting sleep, but nothing solid.

And now I am navigating the airport at Charlotte, NC. With that thought, I have Internet access again, so I will be publishing this. More to come later once I get my Bluetooth keyboard!

Sitting at the gate. Time to get a drink!

It’s the first few minutes of 2012, and I saw that I haven’t posted this on my blog, although I started writing it in mid October. I’ll put some finishing touches up on this and post it post-haste!

Well today my eldest son got on a jet to take him from Denver Colorado to Columbia, South Carolina to Army boot camp.  This is something that he’s been looking forward to and planning since last December. I wish him the best of luck and hope that his dreams become his reality!

I have two other children that are still ‘in the coop’. A 16 year old girl (who is now 17!) and a 13 year old boy. Sooner than you know it, they will be out of the house too… starting their lives, getting apartments and going to school.  It happens to everyone at some time, but that time seems to blow by so darned fast. I still remember holding My oldest son right after he was born, and then all the activities and such that we participated in through the years.

I have been writing Josh every day (well almost every day, let’s say fairly regularly….) and have found at times it’s a very hard thing to do since I rarely get any mail back from him, and the occasional phone call is always way too short, I don’t always remember what I wanted to tell him, or ask him… it’s a bit frustrating to say the least. This year he is spending his whole break in Colorado, he got a quote from his travel agency for something like 800 bucks for a round trip ticket out here, but I found a flight for more like less than 300 bucks round trip. He had his mind set about the whole thing, so we are missing him being out here this year. I hope that in future years he will want to spend time out here with us every once in a while.

When he was born, I never thought I would be a father, or even a good father… Well I think I turned out to be a pretty damned good father! And I hope that as the years roll on by he will still feel comfortable talking with me about things, and asking questions about the whole big thing called life. I don’t know if I remember what the scale of intelligence or percieved intelligence is for parents by their kids…  I know that when they are young, you are the smartest being on the planet! Somewhere in the teen years you all of a sudden become this droolling self defacating (I know, I should have said depricating, but if I’m droolin.. there ain’t nothing left but lack of bowel control too) idiot who thinks they know what kids are going through, because you never were a kid, and things are different and so on…  I want to get to that place where my Son will think I know something of value again. I’m sure he says he does (but the truth may be different).

So I started this rambling post in Mid October of 2011, and am finishing it 19 to 20 minutes into the new year of 2012! The final thing I do want to say is – I’m proud of you Josh! and I love you, and miss you more than you will ever know. Thanks for making me the father that I am.

Happy New Year, may 2012 be more than you expected, less than you dread and overall a warm and comforting year!

Dad.