An Aleatoric Harangue

House Warming Party

The house warming party was a blast! Got a little out of hand with David’s house warming gift, but that’s all part of the fun… Just to point out what my dad noticed a few days later when we were cleaning the ball of fire out, David can’t tighten a bolt very well as we had to tighten several of them. No surprise there though. Here’s some pics…

Mobile images

So word press does not naturally allow posting of attachments like blogger does when posting mobile. What this really boils down to us that I cannot post any images from my phone when working mobile which is a shame to me. However, I found a plugin I am testing here that is supposed to allow me to post attached images. This will also allow me to post from other computers without having to log in to my Blog’s backend which would makes it a bit easier to me. Here’s hoping this works!

Cheers–

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

We are mobile

So I have been arguing with the back end of word press and am trying to get the mobile function working. It basically is just a way to email all of my posts which I can do remotely with my email enabled phone. At this point I have it active and am working out a bug that is messing with the text and making it jibberish. Hopefully I’ve got it now and we all see this. Cross your fingers.

Cheers.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

We’re back on the air.

I've clearly abandoned this Blog since I got back from Europe and kind if forgot about it. Work and school happened and my life got kind of crazy. Now it's time to pick it back up for a few reasons. First is because of the little sibling post-Christmas party I had with my fake sisters. One of them mentioned she was going to start a Blog about food or something. Also, I recently got word that I might be sent back to Prague so I'll be needing this thing all over again in order to update people on the haps in the CZ. Now a normal person might change the name in order to have it make more sense to the new purpose(s), but that's just not my style. I'd rather it just make it confusing and awkward like most things in my life.

That being said, I leave you all with this picture. It is of the Carl's Jr. of the future where we no longer need people to take your order and further alienate humans from each other. A system with so many flaws it is almost all Dane and I could speak about while devouring our food, which also tasted like it was made by a machine. Is that being too critical of Carl's Jr.? Oh well.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

As Promised

I finally got the pics from James and got everything sorted and uploaded to Picasa Web Albums.
I will be slowly releasing more HDR photos and just general edited photos over the coming weeks. I love playing with the pics I take so stay tuned. I have been learning about some new tools that I can use to do some cool things from Drew and I intend to continue playing with them. For now, I have to get to Photoshop to finish somethings for work. Please let me know what you think of the pics.

I’m Back

I know it’s been a bit since I last posted and a lot of people are asking me about pictures. I know, I know, everyone wants to see the whole trip. The delay has been because I did not have the pictures as I was continuously dumping all of my pics onto James’ laptop so I didn’t have to keep deleting things as I go and not be able to keep the videos I took. I do have the snaps now and I am sorting through them so that you each of you can enjoy all of them and see what you missed out on while each of you was stuck being working stiffs ;). It’s okay, anyone who wants to can rub it in for pretty much the rest of the year as I’ve pretty much spent all my vacation days and what’s left has to be rationed in case I get sick.

And I know that I owe you all the rest of the story, but that will come with the pictures and the captions and such. To satisfy everyone for the time being, here is the first of, what I hope will be, many HDR Photos. I took a few series of these and am trying to learn how to make them as awesome, or close to as awesome, as the ones that you see online.

Enjoy!

Netherlands

Amsterdam is now finished. Nothing more should need to be said. Thank you and have a wonderful day.

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

We are chilling in the common area of the hostel here in Berlin now and gearing up to leave to Amsterdam. I have a feeling most of this will end up being written on the train when I'm not passed out from exhaustion. All this travel has been a huge learning experience and I definitely have a better idea how to do this next time. At the end of this trip, I am going to post a decent sized post about lessons learned. In the meantime though, I suppose it's correct and necessary to actually mention Berlin.

The first and most important thing is my obsession. I believe I have mentioned on more than one occassion the amazingly often use of bicycles as a mode of transportation and have been emailing several people about how I want to tour Europe on my Fuji. Well, Berlin has showed me my dream and I love it. There was a ridiculously amazing bike race that got me way psyched and drooling at the thought of abusing the hell out of my body to ride around this glorious city, circling around some of the most importat historic landmarks of the 20th century in this perfect weather. The sun was shining, a perfect, crisp breeze, and just a couple scattered clouds with the sound of bikes flying by made our walk around Berlin perfect for me.

As for the actual touring of this city, it is amazing. The first day here we just wandered, one of my favorite things to do in any new place. We walked over to the victory column which was really cool since we made it just vsrely in time to be able to go to the top. That vantage point was amazing as you could see almost the entire city. Some great pictures from up top of the 300 or so stairs and a few I am going to put together for some HDR shots, hopefully. Without a tripod that can be a bit difficult but I tried to make due.

After enjoying the view for a bit, we went back down and continued to explore. We walked over to Bellevue which we later learned was the chancelor's house. Working our way around to the Brandenburg Gates, we came across the setup for the bike race sponsored by Skoda and, no surprise, I'm the only one paying mler attention to the bikes than the cars. After getting past this area, we came to the square facing the gate and were welcomed by perhaps the most significant building in all of Berlin's history; Hotel Adlon. Who can remember what happened there just a few years ago? That is correct, Michael Jackson dangled his child from the balcony. We learned the next day that our tour guide was the AP press staff on site during this event at that time yet he missed it as he was too busy getting his starbuck's coffee to be bothered with one of the top 5 most historical moments of our time. The rest of the evening was spent making our way to Nikalae Quarters for some old-style German food and a meter of beer. Yes folks, I said a meter of beer.

Day two we took a tour of Berlin to see some of the biggest sites around the city. I did this last time I was in Berlin and I'm inclined to not say much about it as most of the sites were things I ace previously seen. I will say that it gave me a different perspective on what I saw as our tour guide, Alexander McKenzie (keep your eyes open for his book in a few years about the Jeziuts of Berlin from 1773 - 1803), had a different agenda of what details he wanted to cover. It wa definitely very interesting and, mom and dad should be happy to hear this along with my uninvited, unofficial mentor, learned a lot. So much so that we went back and did a different your with him the next day.

But before I go onto that, I should finish off that day. We ended up going to one of the five museums n the muarm district. Originally, I was unsure about the idea of a museum. Especially one that didn't really have much to do with German history. However, our tour guide suggested it on the premise of it housing one of the eight ancient wonders of the world; the Gates of Babylon. The funny thing about it was that James and I actually didn't even realize that we were looking at the gates as they are more of an arch and all the signs were in German only. So we didn't even realize what we were looking at yet we were rather impressed anyways.

Day three has been the Third Reich Tour and train. I'll write more later when I get back.

Cheers.

Kutna Hora; Bone Church

Praha Castle