Journal entries in 'Dear Diary' for December, 2004

Tonight as I was driving home from work, I noticed this large wooden tank or some other sort of cylinder which they've built by the side of the road. I have no idea what it could be for, but the area is pretty industrial, so it doesn't surprise me to see it there. What perplexes me more is the fact that it's made of wood and not metal. It just seems so medieval and out of place in an industrialized society.

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Well I'm basically at the point where I can fly on my own with no help from Harold. I still can't do much forward flight or turns or anything, and I can only hover while the helicopter is pointing away from me (called tail-in). So I'm far from done yet, but at least I can fly without his intervention, as long as I stick to tail-in hovering. I still wouldn't fly at the park here or anything yet, but now I don't have to wait for him to be free at the airfield. I can hover around and do some basic forward flight and practice landings, and then when he makes his way to me we can practice more advanced stuff with the trainer cord.

Once again, I hastily wrote down notes about two dreams I had but then forgot to expand them later, and now I've forgotten the details. So I present to you the vague outline of two dreams I had sometime last week :)

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My big event of the day was finally succumbing to all of Scott's regales about the benefits of a dual monitor setup. He just got a nice pair of LCDs and a video card with two VGA heads, and is quite happy with himself.

Today was also the Xapiens company Christmas party. Yeah, that was about what I expected: computer nerds standing around trying to find non-computer-related things to talk about :)

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Hahaha. Bryan helpfully reminded me of a notable event in my life. When I was like 16, I was chewing on a guitar pick and accidentally swallowed it. And then as Bryan says... biology took over. Man. I've led an illustrious life.

I call it, "You get what you pay for." Patent pending.

I finally got around to scanning and uploading the photos from the B&W roll I took with the cheap Canon EF-M I bought on Ebay a few months ago. Unfortunately, over half the shots were half unexposed, suggesting to me a badly synchronized shutter. There's a chance it could have been mistakes during the developing process, but given the price of the camera, and the fact that had the roll developed at a photography store, I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt to the store and assume the problem is just that it's a cheap camera.

Only nine of the 30 photos evaded the camera's sabotage, but there's some decent shots. I guess I won't bother using this camera anymore, though. Hopefully I can eventually get an older, fully manual camera like the one Jenn said she had. In the meantime, I guess this just means less crap for me to carry around everywhere.