Andy Gapin

Now that Labor Day has passed and Summer is officially over according to societal standards, I guess it would be in order for me to evaluate how my Summer projects went. That’s actually easy to do, they were all pretty much failures! HAH! I was so busy with so much other stuff that I rarely found the time to work on anything. It was good though, I can’t complain.

My photo organization project was halted about halfway though the Summer. It wasn’t intentional, I just stopped having time for a little while. I got a sizable chunk of photos organized and I’m still going to try to chip away as much as possible at it until it’s done, but who knows how long that will take. While I took a ton of photos over the summer (a few thousand, I think), I didn’t take my camera out every day and therefore certainly didn’t produce a “usable” photo every day. Oh well. It would have been nice, but it just didn’t happen. I still ended up with a lot of good photos though. Heck, I definitely produced more than one good photo for each day between Memorial Day and Labor Day, but they weren’t taken that way (i.e. each and every day). Maybe in 2011, I’ll try to do a photo 365 thing. Maybe. But no matter what, I’m still happy with the overall number of great shots I took this Summer. My fiancée has told me no less than three times in the last week how much my photography has gotten better over the last few months, so that’s a great thing and really one the main goals of taking photos every day.

Of the two nerdy projects I had, developing an iPhone app and getting a lot of work done on the software I develop for the radio station, neither made it very far. The software for the station, ELCRo, got a little attention early on, but for some personal reasons, I decided to end work on that project indefinitely. I pushed out a couple minor updates and got about halfway through a major new feature before calling it a quits, but none of this measures up to the plans and hopes I had. I’m not too broken up about it, my feelings on the project as a whole just changed…completely.

As for the iPhone app, well, that never even got started. I never found the time to start learning Objective-C so that’s really about it for that. I’m not too upset about this either, I still don’t really have a good idea yet for anything that hasn’t been done before. I mean, I could make another fart app to go along with the 1,000 other ones in the App Store, but what’s the point?

However, what I did do this Summer was create a wedding site for my fiancée and I and completely redo my website. I’m happy about these things and I’m happy that time was spent on them instead of the other projects I had.

Now for the Fall, I’ve got a few things to work on too. I’ve got some serious half marathon training to do, I have to redo my fiancée’s food blog which was supposed to be done before my site (whoops!), we’ve been looking for a new apartment and will hopefully find something soon, I’ll be exploring some new photographic territory, and finally my fiancée and I will be getting back on the wedding planning train. Oh, and in addition to all that, I hope to start doing more posts about music again. I’ve actually got one that I should be doing tomorrow about how the hell I’m going to find new music now that I won’t be spending any time at the radio station. That will probably be an entire project itself. Stay tuned for that.

So there’s a lot to keep me busy for the next few months, not to mention that I’ll still be chipping away at my back-catalog of photos and counting down the days until Winter comes and snowboarding season starts up again.

Oh boy!

It’s been happening more and more lately, but I had to skip out on the radio show last night. The Funhouse kids, CJ and Dan, that generally follow The Playlist these days covered the extra hour. Maybe the fact that this is happening more often now should be a good indicator that it’s time to move on. I enjoy doing the show–once I’m actually doing it, anyway–but it seems that a lot goes on on Wednesdays that I have to skip out on because of it.

Anyway, I ran a 5k in Downtown Westfield last night instead of doing the show. It was humid, but luckily, the heat died down a little before the race started. I found that, just like the 4 mile race I ran on the Fourth of July, the humidity killed me. I had trouble breathing and felt like I was going to throw up for the last mile. It was not my best race, but I beat my time from the same race last year by about 15 seconds and it was my third fastest 5k ever. I should probably be pretty happy about that. Though races like this make me ask myself why I do them and why I like to run, but that’s for another post that maybe I’ll make soon.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this post, but my iPhone 4 battery life was seriously impressive last night. I got home with 33% left after having the phone away from a charger for 15 hours. My usage over those 15 hours breaks down something like this:

• About 3.75 hours of reading articles on Google Reader, using Twitter/Facebook, reading other websites. About 80% of this was over 3G
• About 30 minutes of GPS use during the race to track my progress and time. Then I uploaded the route to mapmyfitness.com using their app. (I did not take 30 minutes to run the race, I fired it up about ten minutes early).
• Listened to music during the race
• Snapped a few pictures and emailed them off
• Updated 5 or 6 apps that had updates available
• Made a 2 minute phone call
• Kept push and WiFi turned on all day

I’d say that’s pretty impressive. My old 3GS and 3G would not have been able to pull that off.

Normally, I don’t do any Summer projects, but I think it’s time to change that. I always have a ton of things I want to get done, but the bigger ones never make it. Tasks that I can’t do in a couple of hours tend to just sit on my to-do list without ever being started. Half of it is because I just don’t have the time for most of these things, but the other half is laziness and lack of motivation for tackling these things. However, this Summer I want to do a few of the things on my list. Hopefully, it’s not too much, but I’ve got four projects that I want to do.

First, I want to get on the task of organizing all of my photos. I was thinking about this a lot last week and wrote an entire entry about it here, but I think this is a doable task. I’ve mostly worked out how I’m going to tackle the project and I’ve actually started already, which is good because this will probably be the project that takes the longest to complete. I’m just a hobbyist when it comes photography, but I’ve been getting into it a lot since getting my DSLR camera. Even before that though, I took tons and tons of pictures, I have tens of thousands of them on my computer. But for all of these pictures that I take, I rarely ever go back and look at them later on. Not only will this project allow me to get all of these photos better organized so that I can find anything I’m looking for later–I’ve got a pretty comprehensive keywording system that I’m planning on using and blogging about soon–but it will also be fun to actually go through and look at all of these pictures that I’ve taken over the years.

My next project is to actually clear my to-do list for the software I develop for the radio station. Okay, not the overall to-do list, but the one that’s been growing recently with about two dozen items on it. I started development on it again for the first time in a while this year and I have a pretty awesome new feature to push out, but there’s a lot more I want and need to do with the software. It’s hard to find the motivation to come home from developing all day at work only to do the same thing at home, but I think over the course of the summer, I can push out everything I want. My general process in the past was to do a ton of enhancements and then push them out in big groups. This was great at first, but it ended up causing some things to sit forever before going out. My new approach is going to be to push out each enhancement and bug fix as I finish it. This will get the new stuff to the users much quicker and also make it easier to check things off my list to make it feel like I’m actually getting things done.

I’ve got one more nerdy indoor project that I want to do, this one is not super important to me, but I think it would be a great learning experience. I want to develop an iPhone app. I downloaded the SDK a few weeks ago when I couldn’t sleep one night, but I haven’t had a chance to actually play around with it. I don’t know Objective-C yet, but I don’t expect it to be too hard to learn given the fact that I do software development for a living. I’m still trying to think of a good idea for an app though. It doesn’t to be the next big thing or even make me any money via the App Store, but I don’t want to make another to-do or fart app or anything else that will just get lost in a sea of similar apps.

And my last project is going to be to take enough pictures to be able to walk away with at least one “useable” picture everyday. I think this will be the most fun project out of the group. I know some people do photo 365 projects and make it a point to shoot everyday, but I’ve totally botched that idea for the year already, so I’m going to make it a Summer thing. I’m not going to try to limit myself to any particular theme or anything, but given that it will be Summer, I think I want to try some action photography. Maybe I’ll take some pictures of my soccer buddies one week or I’ll just go hang out at the park one day and take pictures of what’s going on. Who knows!

So that it. It’s a lot of nerdy stuff that will keep me indoors, but given that I’ll be playing soccer once a week, running a few times a week still, hopefully mountain biking here and there, and my fiancée and I finally got a table and chairs for the backyard so we can eat dinner out there, I’ll still be spending plenty of time outside. And besides, once the temperature starts to approach 80° I’m pretty miserable being outside anyway.

Unfortunately for everyone, there was no edition of The Playlist this week. I was suffering from what I’m willing to say was the worst allergy day of my life and couldn’t make it to the station. I could barely open my eyes. Though, it at least prompted me to finally make a doctor’s appointment so that I can get the ball rolling on determining whether or not the suffering I’ve been going through lately is because of a newly developed cat allergy or something else.

Anyway, I finally made my first t-shirt purchase of the year last night. I can’t remember that last time I went this long, but I’ve been trying to save money for the wedding and such. Plus, I really have no where to store these damn things anymore. However, Threadless is running a $10 sale that’s good an all shirts. It’s a pretty awesome sale, actually. I had to take advantage. I’ll post pictures of the shirts when I get them.

I’ve been listening to the Against Me! album a bit more and it’s definitely growing on me. There are a lot of parts that I like a lot, but I’m still not digging about half of it. There are few bands that could put out an album that I’d put this kind of effort into liking, but I really want to like this.

Lastly, Saturday is free Rita’s day and I’m planning on doing the tour again this year. But I plan on correcting the mistakes that were made last year. We’ll spread it out of a larger portion of the day, eat a real meal in the middle, and get sugar-free flavors at a few of the stops to help ease the sugar overload. It’s going to be intense though. We’ve been swapping proposed maps back and forth and it looks like we’re shooting to double the amount of locations we hit last year. I’m sure I’ll post about it all afterwards, but I’m a little scared!

PS: Yes, I called it “water ice.”

First of all, Rita’s now has Swedish Fish flavored ice. It is amazing. I’m not sure how, but they somehow got the taste exactly right. Plus, they give a pack of Swedish Fish with it! This is probably not standard, but just something they are doing while the flavor is new. Either way, try the damn thing! It’s no secret that I am slightly obsessed with Rita’s, but this just upped the ante a bit.

And second, I saw this car yesterday on the way home from New Hope. Now, I’m glad that the person voted for Obama and all, but why wouldn’t they take that W sticker off the back of their car? I mean, I just don’t get it. If you voted for Obama, wasn’t that saying that you wanted something different than the last eight years? Wouldn’t you want to not advertise that you were pro-Bush in the previous election? Come on, the two stand for completely different things. Regardless of what you think of Obama after his first six months in office and despite the fact that on more than one issue he’s following in Bush’s footsteps, liking Bush enough to have a sticker on your car does not at all fit with the idea of putting an Obama sticker on your car. Just doesn’t make sense.

I’m a very picky dude when it comes to dating. I have a lot of things I look for and a lot of turn offs. One of the biggest ones is definitely music. I can’t date a girl that likes crappy music. It just won’t work out. And usually, I look for girls that are at least partially into indie music since it’s so important in my life. They don’t need to be as into as I am, but they need to know a little something and listen to some good bands. 

Recently, I started dating a girl that doesn’t fit that mold at all. She doesn’t listen to bad music, for the most part, but she doesn’t really know anything about indie music at all. I’m actually finding this to be kind of cool. It’s like a brand new pack of Play-Doh that I get to mold. So far, I’ve made her just one mix CD and she loved it and keeps asking for a second. I think I have at least ten CDs planned out in my head already. And she’s already agreed to take a road trip with me to Chicago in the Fall for the Lawrence Arms’ 10th anniversary show. It’s going to be awesome.  This turning out to be really exciting!

Anyway, here’s the stuff from last week…

If an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time will eventually product Hamlet, who makes the typewrites and fixes them when they break from monkeys jumping up and down on them? And who cleans the poo out of them?

Think about it, we need monkeys to produce the typewriters themselves which then means that we need monkeys to run the power plants and to produce and transport the individual pieces of the typewriters. Then we would need monkeys to build the roads and to serve as traffic cops. Really, we’d need a whole judicial system made up of monkeys just to keep them in order (wait, can we trust the monkeys to police themselves?). Then we’d need doctors to treat the monkeys that get injured. Which would mean we’d need lawyers to handle the malpractice suits as well. We would need monkey bus drivers so that the monkeys could get to and from their jobs. And of course, we’d have to provide paid time off to the monkeys so we’d have to have HR departments (possibly unions too?) and vacation resorts.

This all gets very complicated and before you know it, you have an entire monkey civilization just because you wanted to produce Hamlet. Is it possible that maybe this is how Hamlet was first written? Is all of human existence just an experiment to produce a single literary work? An experiment that has gone horribly out of control?

Think about it.

My iPhone seems to be a little confused this morning about which way to be turning. Or maybe it’s trying to play a lame April Fool’s Day joke on me. As you can see from the conversation that’s happening via text, I was already a little confused otherwise I would have jumped all over the classic Mallrats reference. For anyone that may be wondering, the topmost message in the left screenshot is indeed a reply to a random Flight Of The Conchords reference I sent.

But speaking of April Fool’s Day, I hate it. This tends to come as a shock to my friends when I tell them, but I just find it annoying. I feel like I spend the entire day being blamed for pranks pulled by other people. I come off as the kind of guy that would be all about pulling pranks and playing jokes on others and, to a degree, I am. So this makes me the first person that people blame for pranks…every day of the year. And sometimes, it is me. But it’s so cliché and expected today. Why would I bother? My pranks usually fall into one of the following groups: making someone believe something ridiculous about myself or that I did/didn’t say/do something, sending horrible links to people disguised using TinyURL that are not Rickrolls, or bigger ones that tend to require a lot more effort and planning. The first two I’ll do any day of the year if the opportunity arises and for the third one, if I’m putting a lot of effort, I want to go for maximum shock and do it on a random day instead of April Fool’s.

So everyone should go and have fun today, but I’ll sit this one out. I won’t be installing the blue screen of death screensaver, freezing anyone’s office supplies into giant blocks of ice, filling someone’s office cube with packaging peanuts, installing software that randomly inserts keystrokes here and there, or partaking in any other office or non-office related pranks.

And while I’ve already been accused of using this as a way to boost a prank later in the day, it is not. I promise.

Every year on the first day of Spring, Rita’s gives away free Italian ice. And every year, I say that I’m going to go on a tour of all the locations in the area. This has never happened…until this year! Rita’s Tour 2009 started as a great idea, sadly, it did not end as a great idea.

Since it was a workday, we just did it after work instead of making an entire day out of it, though I did cheat and go during lunch. We hit four locations in a well orchestrated, but slightly mob-like, assault of gluttony. It was actually quite impressive. I didn’t think we had it in us to follow our dreams like that, but there was some serious inspiration behind all our eyes.

The biggest issue we faced was that since they were literally giving it away, there were lines and not a lot of flavors to choose from at a couple locations. One location only had pina colada and it sucked. The gods were on my side at two locations though and I was able to score vanilla and sweet tea. Vanilla is my favorite, but sweet tea was a nice departure from the ordinary flavors. It even had a slightly different texture.

Prior to the outing, I thought I would feel amazing after all the glory of getting Rita’s five times in one day. I was mistaken. Very mistaken. I actually felt ill afterwards. I’m not talking about the Beastie Boys kind of ill, I’m talking about contemplating forcing myself to throw up just to get it out of me kind of ill. I didn’t think that too much Rita’s was possible, but it is very possible. Not only did my stomach feel weird, but my whole body felt like it was crying out for insulin. There were moments of intense amounts of energy throughout the tour, but the crash after the last stop was awful. The four of us were sitting in a diner booth looking like we were hungover and hadn’t slept in days. I felt just as bad as I looked.

While it will be forgotten over the next 365 days, there is a lesson to be learned here. If you are going to try to eat Rita’s out of business, you need to start early in the day and spread it out. Don’t try to do it all at once. Realize your sugar-intake limits!

For a more in-depth account of the outing, check out this.

And on a very related (read: completely unrelated) note, I got two new zombie shirts this week. I’ll have to double check the count, but I think these may be zombie shirts four and five. Both are from 6dollarshirts.com. But they’re printed on Hanes shirts which always fit a little weird so that kind of sucks.

I had never heard of these things before, but I was at a friend’s place last night and he made me try one. Basically, you let one of them dissolve on your tongue and then, for the next half hour or so, everything you eat that is sour or bitter tastes sweet. It’s totally weird as hell. I ate a slice of lemon and it tasted like pure sugar. No, no pure sugar. More like Splenda! The strangest thing was the contrast of the sourness that I still felt on my lips and the sweetness that was on my tongue.

And it made my Guiness taste like an Irish car bomb without adding anything to it.