What-What?! Week of February 14th

Happy Valentine's everyone!  Hope you get to spend time with the ones you love. <3

So this week has been very exciting.  We went hiking on Tuesday, and then I started my new job on Wednesday.  I haven't had to get up early in the morning in well over a year, and it's going to take some time to get used to that.  Unfortunately, the office tends to run early, so I'm one of the few there when I leave.  I might slowly switch over to an earlier schedule, but for now the schedule I have is as good as I can do.

Yes, there are programming books holding open the blinds.  They were like that when I got there.

But I do get my own office!  For now, anyway.  My boss is looking to hire another developer, and I'll probably have to share.  There is plenty of space in there, though.  There's another full-sized desk on the left.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week at work.  I'm learning how to use the software, which is pretty complicated.  It's going to take a good while to really learn it.  I'm being paid to, though, so that's fine. :P

Hiking: Skagit Wildlife Area

There are lots of ducks and a blue heron in this picture.  Not that you can see them.

This is a different hike from last time, and a lot nicer one, too.  The trails were a bit muddy, but not overly so like the last place we went to.  There was tons of wildlife to look at; a blue heron, snow geese, bald eagles (in their nests), lots of mallard ducks, sandpipers, a loon, and I saw an otter.  The sun was shining, and overall it was lovely.

There's an eagle in one of these trees.  Not that you can see it, but it's there.

Unfortunately, our phone cameras were too crappy to really see much of anything in the pictures we took.

Hiking.

Snow geese in the distance.

Snack time!

Mount Baker, covered in snow.

This is a hike that we'd do again, for sure.  It was easy to get to, a pretty short drive, the trails were in good condition, and there was plenty to look at.

What-What?! Week of October 19th

This week was a week.  I started on my new job, which is not horrendously exciting, but well enough.  I suppose I should explain what I am doing a bit more; I am working for ZeroChaos as an Ads Quality Rater.  The official description for what I do is: As an Ads Quality Rater, you will be responsible for reporting and tracking the visual quality and content accuracy of Google advertisements.  (Hit the link for more info on the job description).

Monday I had my training, and Tuesday I started working for real.  Thursday evening, I got my first review, and received pretty good feedback -- the things I went wrong with were mostly ratings where the guidelines are a bit more fuzzy.  This job relies on a lot of general knowledge in making decisions, and makes me happy I know as much as I do about computers and car companies, because I keep getting tasks centered around those topics.  The only difficult part about this job is doing it at home; I'm still working out a good schedule that makes it easy to work around taking care of the kids and house.

Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures

I don't know what to categorize this as, other than just awesome.  Thomas Geijtenbeek and his associates do biomechanical engineering work, and have done extensive research on animating creatures using physics-based simulations.  The video below is both interesting and pretty funny.  For the author's website, hit the above link.

Crazy Halloween Costumes

Saw this on Reddit, and was really impressed by the costume accuracy.  This was the child's costume from last year.  The one for this year?  A vending machine:

...and my kids just want to be robots, princesses and Buzz Lightyear.

Maybe next year we should all be inanimate objects?

What-What?! Week of October 12th

This week seemed to go by about as fast as molasses.  Not good, not bad, just interminable.

I got confirmation that I will be starting my new job on Monday, so that's exciting!  It will be good to work again, both in terms of money and maintaining my sanity.

Started working on Saffron's dress earlier this week.  I spent about 20 minutes cleaning my sewing machine after I pulled it out; the move and sitting around made it get pretty dusty.  I'm at the point now where I have to iron things.  I don't like ironing, so I'm procrastinating a bit there.

We went to the Lowe's Build and Grow clinic for October.  The big kids had a good time making their own haunted houses.  We brought them home and they played with super heroes and their spooky houses.

Review:  Digimon Tamers

Earlier this week, the kids and I finished watching the third season of Digimon.  The first two seasons were pretty classic kid show stuff -- lots of humor and creepy-cute monsters fighting bad guys.  The third season, though, Tamers, is made of different stuff.  It's darker and more serious than the earlier seasons, and spends more time looking at the nature of Digimon as monsters.  The show is more complex, though it does suffer from a slow start, it gets better as it goes along.  The fact that the season is 50 episodes hurts it quite a bit -- it could pretty easily be edited down by a third, maybe even a half.  Even still, my kids, especially Saffron, fell in love with it.  Saffron is currently obsessed with Renamon and Rika, who are the strong female leads in the series.


Lopmon and Terriermon.

She also likes Terriermon and Lopmon, but that's because they are glorified rabbit Digimon.

(Images via  digimon.wikia.com, deviantart.com: angel-in-disguise234)