Merge

Times have been a little rocky for this blog. I'm trying to get it all under control, but it's taking me some time, and time is in high demand these days. A lot of the changes have been made to merge the two blogs, but I haven't had time to complete all the changes. As you can plainly see, my blog design needs a bunch of work, but that will come with time. In the interim, I hope to start posting regularly again about whatever comes to mind. Hopefully my blog can make a speedy recovery!

Please let me know if you see odd things happening with the blog - it'd help me out tremendously.

Heraldk

Butterdome

I've caught up with the last of my recent pictures, but I've got a huge backlog of photos to work through to add photos to flickr. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of pretty decent shots.

This is the University of Alberta Pavilion - or Butterdome as it is called around here. It's a very yellow building, which makes it stand out very well.

Mmmmmm Beer

Right time, right place, I guess. I went out for some beer with one of the new grad students, and when the beer arrived there was just a bit of sun left before it dived below a cloud. That night we watched an exciting hockey game between the Minnesota Wild and my Edmonton Oilers. The oilers pulled out a shootout victory. It was interesting because the guy I was with was from Minnesota - so we had a bit of a rivalry going at our table. It sure was fun!

Through the Glass

The halloween party had some pretty odd lighting. This is some clear blocks that were placed in the wall between the bathroom and the rest of the basement. Here, the orange and red lights that were on in the house make the blocks look really kinda neat.

Dog Express

Even the dog was dressed up at the party. He had a little bear attached to his back ... pretty darn cute I'd say. Unfortunately, the dog wasn't too kind to it's transportee. Later on in the evening the bear was knocked off from it's perch when the dog ran under the foosball table!

Pumpkin Candlelight

This is another pumpkin lantern. I rather like how it turned out!

Red Lighting

Another photo from Eric's Halloween party. They had some crazy lighting going on in their place -- red lights in the kitchen, orange and red in the basement. It was fun to play with the light with my camera and see what I could get.

Bento Combo part 3

Okay, I don't think I'll upload any more from the Bento photo shoot after this one. Next up, a few halloween photos!

Happy Halloween

2 photos today! I didn't want to interrupt the bento photo shoot too much, but I also wanted to make sure a halloween photo got uploaded, so here is one. This was at Diane's brother's halloween party we went to last Friday.

Bento Combo part two

Here's another selection from the Bento photoshoot I did last week. Looks good huh? The meat there is sesame chicken I think - it's pretty tasty.

Bento Combo

One of the shots of some of the food available at my uncle's restaurant. As you can see, it's Chinese food, which makes the name of the restaurant a little misleading.

End to Carbon Poker

Wow, it was awhile ago already when I last talked about what's going on. So I finished off the carbon poker promo in about a week, having played about 4 sessions. I ended the sessions up $500 plus the $120 bonus from PSO. Pretty sweet deal, I must say!

I've got my eyes set on a new camera lens, but I think I'm going to force myself to win the money for it through poker, so hopefully I'll get some time to play a little more in the coming weeks. It's been pretty hectic lately, so no guarantees. It looks like I need to win another $500 to buy the lens I want, so I'm looking at 1 or 2 more promos I'm guessing.

What else ... gaming! There are so many good games to play, I don't have enough time to do that either. I bought guitar hero 3 yesterday, and it's a lot of fun. I also have Metroid for the Wii on loan from a friend that I haven't touched ... and then there's the addictiveness that is puzzle quest. *sigh* - maybe I need to drop video games - they take too much damn time out my life.

Diane and I are doing great. We've started getting plans for our wedding down, and hopefully we can get a lot of the stuff we need to done well before the day of so that the day is smooth and fun. Fingers crossed! Diane's sister is off to Vancouver, so before she left we had a pre-wedding wedding party party (isn't that the best sentence ever?), where the people we chose for the wedding party got to meet each other -- those who hadn't yet. It was pretty fun, and included some good food from Vi's for Pies. (If you haven't been there I highly recommend it!).

So yeah, life is good, and busy, and I wish I had more time to work on side projects!

Heraldk

Times are Busy

So... I launch a brand new blog, and then let both my blogs wallow in un-updatedness. Yeah, I'm good at this! As you might be able to tell, this site's layout is only half complete. It seems that everytime I get the chance to sit down to work on it, I get interrupted after only figuring out how to style one element at a time. At least now you can kind of see the direction I'm heading in. I hope you like it - I'm going for a fairly simple white background theme. It's fairly minimalist, but I think it'll do well. If the layout works out well, I'll probably adapt it for my personal blog as well.

Once the layout is done, I'll go back to trying to write some actual content for the blog. Hopefully that isn't too far away!

Heraldk

Bento

My Uncle fairly recently took over a oriental fast food restaurant in Millbourne mall in Edmonton. They've been running it for a couple of months so far and it looks like they're really getting the hang of it. If you have the chance, you should check it out. The food is pretty good and a decent price.

I was down there to take photos of some of the food so they could put up some signs. I'm not sure whether the photos are up yet or not, but I'll be posting some of the better results this week.

Flower Macro

While in Rimbey I decided to test out the macro capabilities of my Sigma lens. It's not half bad, I think! Although I don't really have anything to compare it to. One of these days, I'll have to get myself a macro lens!

Peace

There's something calming about a sunny fall day. Here's some shadows of trees that I really liked so I stopped to take a photo. This was also in Rimbey in Pas Ka Poo park.

Red Leaves

As usual, I can't remember what type of tree this was, but this was an attempt at a bit of a closeup shot of the leaves of the tree. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, actually.

Hmm - for some reason the jpg I uploaded from my laptop looks redder than the one I see in my browser. Anyone know what's going on there?

Later Afternoon Shadow

This is a picture of my mom taking a picture. I'm taking it with my "hip-shot" technique ... something I just started doing one day and have got rather pleasing results it seems. All I do is I drop my camera to my hip, take a photo at a different angle than normal to the ground and let the camera do the work. Once in awhile, the focus is a little off, but more often than not I get results like this. I'm actually quite surprised with how well it works.

All Aboard!

On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, my family went down to Rimbey, Alberta to have thanksgiving dinner with my grandparents. There was a ton of food, and we had to go walk around a bit after dinner. So we wandered around Pas-ka-poo park in Rimbey. It's kind a neat place, since it's almost like an outdoor museum. This is my sister, Megan, on the back of a caboose that is sitting at the "railway station" building.

AIBO Dog

Back at our booth at the open house, the AIBO dogs were tired after dancing all day to some cool tunes. It turns out that these little dogs have better dance moves than I do! I think I still can do the waltz better than them though.