July 2008 Archives

I have been looking back through old blog entires and in continuing in my efforts to post more often, here's some updates on things from past blog entries.

I am still in remission from Lymphoma. I had my latest checkup about a month ago and everything was looking good. I will have another CT scan in December to make sure my insides all look okay. I haven't had any symptoms either which is the best sign. Now that I know what it feels like I'll notice any problems before any medical test will.

Mira is doing well. She takes a pill 3 days a week and gets a blood test every few months. Her hair has all grown back and she drinks a normal amount of water. She is a little thin but healthy.

I haven't written about the aquarium in a while. I lost 3 Bala Sharks in the move to the new house, but all the other fish alive, including the "African Leaf Fish" who is now huge. I adopted all of Khuul's fish as well so that gave me 5 more fish, including a very cool clown loach. I'm going by Pet's Mart today to pick up a few more Bala Sharks and an algae eater or two.

Dragoncon is coming up in almost exactly a month. We've got a huge groups of friends going this year and everyone's pretty excited. Last year was the first year I'd not gone in a while and I really missed it.

Okay so there ya go, a blogpost and a trip down memory lane.

We are back from Italy now. After a not so short flight from Pisa by way of a 5 hour layover in New York. Italy was great! We have lots of pictures. I'll try and get some up soon.

I finally broke down a made a face book page. The link is right there in the upper right of the page. I had resisted it for a while, it seemed to be just another my space/friendster thing that I didn't have time to mess with. However, I immediately got back in touch with a bunch of people that I hadn't spoken with since high school and college so it was a good thing.

I'm so glad to be done with my Masters. I didn't have time to do anything extraneous like make a facebook account while I was working on it. I learned a lot and studying really kept me up to date on information security. I sure won't miss the workload though, phew.

Welcome to any new readers that have come here from Facebook or other places. Now that I'm not in school I'm going to try and update more often.

I am sitting here at the street cafe in Chianni, the village we are staying in, and it has free internet access! I brought my laptop up here one day last week just to see if there were any wireless networks in town and ta da there is one right here in the cafe.

We been seeing a lot while we are here. We've seen Volterra and Lucca both walled medieval cities. We spent a day just wandering around in Florence, a more than a few days just hanging out around the nice villa where we are staying. Yesterday we spent a day at the beach and then went into Pisa t see the famous tower. We resisted the urge to take the "look i'm holding up the tower" picture. It seems to be the thing to do in Pisa. Today we are heading out to Sienna and Chianti wine country.

The reason I am actually up here at the cafe this morning is that I just took my LAST FINAL EXAM for my LAST MASTERS COURSE!!!!! So wooo hoooo done with that.

Well I haven't posted in a while and it'll probably be a while before I post again. Elanna and i head out today for Italy for two weeks! WE are staying at a villa in the Tuscany region near the village of Chiani. It's close enough that we can drive into Pisa and FLorence to do touristy things but mostly we just plan on hanigng out and relaxing. I need some relaxing. School has been non-stop since about Mid-June. Project 1 was assigned right after the Mid-term, Project 2 was as assigned the day Project 1 was due. The projects were not easy either. The class is over Computer forensics and each project was the examination of a hard drive image for evidence. The first project involved looking for evidence of criminal activity. The second project was the examination of a hard drive from a hacked computer. Normally, I'd get about a week break between project 2 and the final but we are leaving for Italy today and the final is not for a week. I asked to take it early so I wouldn't have to take the final while I was on vacation. The final is a take home essay exam and I ended up writing about 10 pages to answer the question. It still needs some work, but we have a four hour layover in New York so I'm planing on finishing it then and turning it in before we fly out for Italy. Thankfully tis is my last class. After three years I'm finally done with my Masters Degree!

It's rumored that the villa where we are staying has internet access so if that is the case I'll try and write a few entries from abroad.