Viva the Digital Overlords

I was sitting here at my desk working on building an HTML version of a digital scoreboard to show who is awesome at Air Hockey. I used to play with my coworker Greg and we both just got extremely busy at work. So we are going to start it back up again. When we left off I was ahead like 131 games to 126 I believe. We would play 3-5 games a day.

But the title of this blog post doesn’t really mean anything. I was listening to iTunes and had it on Random and Octopuses Garden came up on iTunes. For some reason it inspired me to open up MarsEdit and write a click little blurb.

I have been working on converting all of my families home video tapes to a digital format. I must say it has been a rather intensive process. A bit more expensive then I imagined.

The first expense was the Elgato Video Capture device. Scored that for $84 off Amazon with the free 2 day shipping ala Amazon Prime. Another expense was actually getting a VCR. My girlfriends mom had one to lend me. It works pretty well. It has some tracking issues so I ordered another VCR off ebay and now have two VCR’s on my desk.

I remember being a kid and thinking VCR’s could possibly be the coolest thing ever. Now they are just large annoying black boxes on my desk. I picked up the other VCR for $30 from eBay. The lady that was selling lied to me on its condition. But it works as expected.

Also I needed a place to save all of this video as most videos come up after compression to be 2-3GB of data. Then a DVD version ends up being another 4GB or so. Then I make 2 different formats m4v and Divx AVI. Not really sure how my family is taking this. But oh well I am happy to have digital copies of all the tapes. But this all takes up space so I now have 2 1TB Firewire 800 HDD. I have 2.5TB of data hooked up to my laptop for all of these home movies.

Good times. Well I better get back to work. Just thought I would blog some random thoughts.

Happy Valentines Day

So last night I had one of the better Valentines Days on record. My girlfriend told me she didn’t want any gifts or presents. I thought that was perfect. I had some flowers set to deliver to her work so I backed out of that. I later told her this and she was glad I didn’t send them. Sending them on some other day would mean more to her. She made an 8.5”x11” little collage of pictures of us. I will put that on my desk as soon as I can get some frame for it. But it was just a really lazy Sunday.

I slept in until 11am or so just as she was getting home from her errands. She had some doughnuts. We chilled out for a bit and then she went to take a nap. I watched the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. I had it on the TiVo. It was kinda crazy that it took up 22.7GB for 4hrs and 30 minutes. But overall it was okay. Not my cup of tea for an ultimate TV viewing experience.

But anyways that night was going to go meet up with my friend Preston and his lovely lady Mindee. We went to the Cheesecake factory in Southcenter. That place was a total hell hole. Driving around the parking lot with all of those idiots is rather nutty. Manners go out the window. Tempers rise. Good times.

So we get to the cheesecake factory and the wait on the Sunday was about 90 minutes. This seemed to shock and surprise people. But people are idiots and it made me laugh at their stupidity. One group came in wanting a table for 17. I think the hostess told them to piss off. But after much waiting we got a table and ordered some drinks and had a good time shooting the breeze and catching up.

I got a little drunkard and had a good time. They did make me the wrong entree. But that was quickly fixed and they ended up comping my dinner. I felt kinda bad about it and the manager asked if I wanted anything else. I said some mashed spuds sound pretty good instead of soup or salad. He was more then happy to hook that up.  So a few minutes later I had a bowl of mashed potatoes. My girlfriend then asked me “Can I have some” not to be one to say no to a simple request I said “sure” or probably more like “sbhure” in the drunken state. She dips her fork into the hot potato mash. Part of my arm happens to be on the table. Some hot potato falls off and this is what happened.

Tristan: “Ouch, That is really hot. It’s burning”
Girlfriend Laughs
Tristan: “It’s Burning! It’s Hot”
Girlfriend Laughs

At this point I was like she isn’t going to take it off so I grabbed my napkin and took care of business. Typing it out makes it seem like it was incredibly rude sounding. But it was rather comical after all was said and done. Everyone at the table had a good laugh.  Here is a badly painted diagram to show how it went down.

But the meal was delicious. Cheesecake was awesome. I hadn’t had cheesecake at the cheesecake factory in a very long while. That night went home and passed out from exhaustion and began Monday and then got incredibly busy and now we are here over a week later finally getting this post out.

Thanks again to Preston and Mindee for a fun evening out. Double dates have been incredibly enjoyable with old friends.

2010 – What a year..So Far…

So looking back at 2009 it kinda just flew by. It seemed like there was always something to do or somewhere to go. But yet I always found myself saying “Nothing much going on. Same stuff different day” I sometimes worry that I am becoming incredibly boring. Like lately been having to work with Raleigh and her grandma just getting out the hospital. Which has been kinda taxing but it’s what the good boyfriend does. So I am happy to be there for her.

But I am still I am never sure what I can talk about or mention. People say “How have you been since I have seen you last” I could talk about my trip to Maui which was awesome. Or the video I made with my sister that at last check was almost up to 400 hits on YouTube. But all I can ever seem to find myself talking about is work. Nobody really cares about work. It’s something we all do. We all have different jobs but it just seems easier to talk about.

I could talk someones ear off about all things tech. But I always assume people would find that boring. I think I need to quit thinking of myself as boring. I need to just assume that if someone asks what I have been up to that I should just tell them. I will also do a better job of telling the readers that still come to TristanPipo.com and now that these get imported in Facebook those readers as well.

But as January winds down to a close. I hope everyone is ready for February and the lovely marketing holiday of Valentines Day where single people feel guilty about not having a mate and people in relationships worry about not making their partner as happy as they could be.

I would love to hear what’s been going on with you since our last chat.

Welcome to October

Hey Everyone!

We have arrived at October. It has been a rather interesting month so far. My schedule changed at work which has been nice. I got moved to 10-7 last October and was told I would only be on that work schedule for 3 months. Here it is next October and finally getting it changed back. Which is awesome on my end.

Coming up this weekend the girlfriend and I have a fall party to attend. With one of my girlfriends coworkers which should be a good time. I always dig carving pumpkins getting drunk and making scarecrows. I will be posting pictures to Facebook most likely or perhaps my tumblelog. Which if you care to find it’s located at tristan.tumblr.com it’s also a nice aggregation of everything I do online.

But anyways it’s getting a bit late. I think I will hit up a little Beatles Rock Band before I go to bed.

Hopefully everyone has a great week. Send me an e-mail or text message let me know what you are up too.

Welcome to September

Hey Everyone!

Just thought I would take the time to stop by to let you know that I have not died. Life has just been chugging along. Had a pretty good weekend last weekend.

Friday my coworker Jon and I went to check out the Seattle Lingerie Football team. The Seattle Mist Women in Lingerie playing football can’t go wrong. Seattle won 21 to 6 against San Diego. I must say San Diego had the more attractive team. But this one girl on the Seattle team. #15 she wasn’t in the program was totally the MVP of the game. She was like 5’11′ and totally just dominated.

Check out some of the Swag we scored. I got some more pictures up on my Facebook profile if you care to know more.

Saturday bought a new computer chair and went to a Lighthouse Festival up in Mukilteo saw some Fireworks. Good time overall went with the girlfriend and her coworkers. It was a bit of a triple date kinda thing. We were chiling on the beach in front of a firepit. We all ended up smelling like smoke by the end of the show. I got this awesome picture of the sunset.

Sunday was a pretty lazy day which was nice before the workday began. But thanks for stopping by and I hope everyone is doing well. It’s almost fall and I am a bit excited. I can’t wait for the weather to finally cool down again. I enjoy the cold more then the heat of the summer. We had some 100F+ days that I did not enjoy. But thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the rest of your week.

Lately

I have been working on “June Vacation Part 2 ” since those stories tend to be a great deal more epic I like to put more effort into them. Making cheesy pictures and finding related links, etc that takes a while and only work on those in my freetime. This is a blog post that I decided to start at 10:37pm at night and just a bit of free form thinking composed into the digital realm.

I purchased a new MacBook Pro and have found myself undertaking other projects mostly cutting together videos for mostly personal use. Things I have captured for my family etc and been publishing those internally. I miss the blogging realm when I felt like I had a bunch of people reading. But lately I feel like my blog has become a lost cause in some ways. They say that a place with people in it attracts more customers. I tend to think a blog is like that as well. The more people read it the more people want to read it. Currently my RSS feed has 26 subscribers by my count and my Podcast still has 16. It was recently removed from the Apple Store since it hasn’t been updated in two years. But I like the thought that 26 people still subscribe to the blog.

I feel like since I finished school and got an internship that turned into my full time career I have been shoved into what the American Adult should be. I have a career and I get up at the same time every day and go to work and find myself learning and pushing myself constantly. Working in the IT world is always interesting I must say. It never stops evolving. I love my job and happy to be employed but sometimes a bit more variety would be nice you know. But work is work and you can’t really expect things to be different all the time. But it’s like I never expected being an adult to be the same all the time. I was never warned of this and none of my previous jobs gave me any clue since they were always rather free form. You are doing Job A today and Job B tomorrow under the same roof. But who knows maybe this is a bit of a slump.

I have been in a relationship for two years now. She is a wonderful and amazing girl. But we have our moments like everyone does. I remember being single and going on all these dates with women that didn’t really fit me. I think it was more about finding some female attention then a real companion. A great deal of women I found to be rather insane. But I was also a great deal younger then and it seems like as I age women also begin to make a bit more sense. I had a few do a bunch of mean stuff to me and I got to do that to one woman. I felt like a dick about it afterwards then she did that typical thing that women do say some mean things about me and life went on. I still have yet to figure out why women always need to have the last word in every argument. But I am happy now and I try to make my girlfriend happy.

Friends seems to be an odd topic as well I think that goes along with the adult thing. Most of my friends all live at different distances and it makes it hard to go and see them. I still chat with them online or via SMS or phone but face to face contact it all has to be scheduled with everyone now. It’s not like the days of old where I could call a few people and say lets hang out. I kinda miss those days but kinda don’t. Like it used to be “Hey I’m Bored Fix It” sent off to a bunch of people in my phone. Group used to get together and just hang out and it was great. I just don’t find myself doing that lately. Most of the people I hang out with and call my friends are coworkers. Which is great but at times I miss my other friends. There are internet friends as well they can be cool the people that follow me on Twitter and my Facebook friends they are cool and all. But again the whole internet thing can be scary for some people. I send out a twitter update “Anyone wanna go see a movie” I don’t get many responses and if I do they are things like “I would but I am in Spokane” the thought it nice but I also don’t see the point in responding if you can’t go. That is a bit of a mixed bag and would love to dive into the social networking trend of quizzes later.

But as with all things this post must come to an end. Thank you for taking the time to read and I hope everyone will continue to do so.

I Opened This Up…

With the intent to write something witty or comical. But it’s Friday who has time for that? I will say that I have a 14 pound bundle of joy coming on Wednesday. =)

I hope everyone has been well. There has a been an evil battle happening in the Pipo Pad. I was sick for 5 days but it wasn’t anything bad. The Raleigh has been sick for almost 2 weeks now. So it’s been a little tense in the Tristan Terrace.

I would also like to Promote Raleigh and the Junniper to head testers of things. Anytime I have an issue with the site or spelling or anything really they get on me to fix it. So I present you with the Seal of Awesomeness.

Hope everyone has a good weekend. Welcome to April and catch you on the flip side.

It’s Still March!

Hello Everyone!

Thanks for taking the time to read this amazingly awesome blog post. I have been getting reports that if you come to tristanpipo.com and then refresh the page that you get an error. But if you just visit the page this doesn’t happen. So my advice is don’t click refresh. This is due to the nature of calls that the website makes if a few people do it at the same time it can push me over the amount of connections I am limited to at any given second and clicking refresh will resolve the issue. With that said On with my life.

So since my last post was in the beginning of March. So you need to be caught up. Two Thursday’s ago my foot started to hurt. It was just a slight pain not a big deal. But the pain started to get more intense. Like to the point where I had to throw up the pain was so intense. I could hardly walk and this was annoying me so I was cursing a great deal and keeping Raleigh up.  So on Friday I was late for work because I had to go to the doctor. They told me it was some tendentious action and take some Aleve and my foot would be all good. It took almost 24hrs for the pain to go away but it did.

That weekend I really don’t recall what happened. I don’t remember it being very exciting. I have noticed that as I grow older it seems that most of life gets over run with sameness. I get up same time. Walk out the door at the same time. Catch the same bus. Sit in the same seat. Get off at the same stop. Go to the same job. Fix different things. Come home and do the same thing but with slight variations.

I guess this is the human condition since we don’t need to be constantly hunting or finding drinking water. I can see why some people go nuts. But I also see that we have the methods to keep people that are nuts still around. For example you have some guy who isn’t all that bright. Chances were higher that a Puma would find his stupid ass in the woods and idiot wouldn’t be around to breed anymore. Most idiots don’t get attacked by Puma’s anymore. Since they can get all their resources for living without having to deal with Puma’s. Seems like a good idea to me is to have a city surivial force of Puma’s and other various vicious animals around just to get that fear going. If moron A can’t make it to the bus stop without a Tiger attacking him odds are he won’t be breeding.

But I always have ideas like that. I mostly get told “Why do you waste time thinking of such things” or “You are such a dork” or “You are so weird” most of the people that get past this initial shock value of being around the Tristan of the Pipo find me to be an overall good guy. Took my current girlfriend a long time to realize this and pretty much everyone I have ever known.

So anyways week went on and I felt very productive. Friday came around and I didn’t really do a whole heap on Friday. Went home and chilled. Saturday was an interesting day. The Nick and J-Monster came over from Kitsap. I got to meet Justin’s new girlfriend. I will not butcher her name by typing it but she was cool in my book. She is very social and that is the type of person I dig because you don’t have to say much and you can be interested and make their day. So went and hitup SushiLand on Queen Anne Hill. I have seen one of these in Portland, OR as well. I am sure the Junniper will chime in and have many awesome things to say about me.

What has been interesting about Junniper and her blog and my interaction with her.  We exchange the occasional e-mail. Most of the time it’s like “Hey look how Portland messed up” or something I find about garfield. I have spoken to her on the phone once. Caught me off guard when I was hanging out with the KGB Mafia Man. She was at the SeaTac airport. I think she was trying to stalk me. What is also rather funny is how the times I am in Portland she is out of town. I can picture being 89 one day and getting on my floating wheelchair disc and going down to Portland and being like “Ah Ha! We finally meet!” Then that being it I go back to my Evil Mountian of Power in Seattle.

But that was a random tangent. I really have nothing to say just kinda doing a brain dump so there are probably tons of spelling and grammar errors. It’s never been my style to really fix them either. If you would like to make an attempt at being me in a funny manner. You could shoot me an e-mail and your parody post. I would be happy to give it a post.

So Saturday some friends and I went to Sushiland and then went and saw Watchmen in IMAX. What is awesome is that a standard movie ticket at a theater costs $10. The IMAX films cost $11. Plus you don’t have to deal with stupid public fuckers and them using cell phones. The most annoying movie theater people that need to be locked in portable toilets filled with bottle rockets and kicked off a building are the ones that keep their Bluetooth Headsets on. So you get that blinking blue light. They look like annoying ass cyborgs that ruin the movie. I wish someone would kick them in the skull when they walk in with those things.

After that we went to some bar called Pesos for like 15 minutes and then left and went home and passed out.

Sunday I went to my Grandpa’s birthday brunch came home and was tired.

I have no ending for this post so I place a few random periods…   .. ..

December 31st 2008 – Blog Post #1000

I have been thinking about doing a huge write up for post #1000. But I found myself constantly thinking that post #1000 isn’t really that big of a deal. I will continue to write on the blog not like it really means anything. I have 1000 posts under my belt now and feel pretty good about it. So in a little over 5 years of blogging I have posted on this blog that has migrated from blogger.com to siriusdude.com to tristanpipo.com using Blogger and WordPress enginges for running this site. It has been an amazing journey and look forward to the future and I wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

On a bit of a side note I wanted to send out my thoughts to the friends and family of Troy Thoman who died in a car wreck on December 30th. He worked with my Mom and he was a good guy. Always helpful when I needed something at the hardware store. He will be missed. News Article

I Can Haz a Bird?

Sometimes I wish I had 1000 monkeys who were on keyboards just typing away epic stories. I could combine them all and put them on a blog. Sometimes I feel like that rogue monkey who found out the password and posts when I find some free time. But free time is something I have been lacking a great deal of. Sometimes blog worthy stories are also lacking. I find time to update twitter on occasion since it’s as easy as popping off an SMS from my phone. Or using Google Talk but still I have been busy with other things.

So I figured I would take the time to tell a story about an experience I had last night. It involved Me, Nick, My Car, A Bird and a Cat. It begins now.

So yesterday happened to be Monday. I am not usually a fan of Monday but what can you do on such a day. Your weekend is over. You are not allowed to sleep in any more. You are forced to wake up at 6:30am. I usually take the time and hit the snooze button for an extra 7 minutes of sleep since I have 7 minutes of leisure time in the morning. I would prefer to use it while sleeping.

But I was not fully rested for my day. So that is why we have this thing called Boys night. Now we haven’t really had time for Boys night lately. Which seems to bother the woman because I am sure she would like me to disappear more often then she lets on. So we actually had the time and resources to have a Boys Night.

As many of you know I really cannot stand to drive. I like my car and it’s fun to drive but it has a few issues that drive me up the wall and just all around prevent me from driving. My turn signals are very flaky all of a sudden. They work when they want to. I have replaced all the bulbs on my car. Replaced all the fuses that have to deal with lights. They work sometimes and other times they don’t. I have yet to figure it out. So I generally try to avoid turning or changing lanes out of the fear of annoying someone. Plus the general stress I have had to deal with caused by all the long driving I had to do when I was in school. 85 miles each way for 3 years was not really a happy time in my life. During rush hour. I just have very little patience while driving and would prefer not to do so when available.

So my car spends a great deal of time just parked in a spot. I carpool with the Raleigh to her work in the morning and then I hop a bus. Coming back I either take the bus and walk 1/2 a mile or sometimes get a ride. Or I somehow manage to catch an earlier bus and get to my girlfriends work when she is getting off and we shuttle off together.

But lets get out of that rathole. Raleigh was the last one to drive my car and she backed it into the parking spot. I pretty much have the worst parking spot in this lot. It has this annoying Cherry Blossom tree that likes to shed all this crap all over my car. I have a black car and the other day it was totally white from all these Cherry Blossoms. So when those all dried up and blew away the tree shed all this brown crap all over my car. Today the tree decided to get further revenge upon me but I was unaware of this event.

So I pull out of the parking area and begin the epic drive down to Renton, WA. Hey turn signals were working so I took the easier route instead of the road less traveled. Get down to Renton without a hitch or any traffic. When I grabbing my bags out of my car I happen to look at the trunk of my car. I see what appears to be a dead creature. Upon first examination it looked like a hairless mouse. But then I saw it had a beak so that theory evolved quickly to bird. But odd part was it was rather small and had no feathers. I pointed this out to my buddy Nick and he was like that is gross. I had to agree with that statement.

So I wanted it off my car and needed to devise a way not to touch it. So to complete this step I opened up the trunk and found some armor all wipes and a towel. So I put an armor all wipe into the towel and picked up the bird. Carried it over across the street and just dropped the dead bird in the grass. Turn around and look at Nick. “It’s taken care of mate”  “Good. That was fucking disgusting” “Totally” so I turn around to make sure it cannot be seen. All of a sudden a cat comes out and must have seen what I had done and wanted to check out what I felt unworthy to keep around.

The cat looks up at me reminding me of those photos if I had thought about it I would have taken a picture and put “BIRD I CAN HAZ?” as the caption. The cat just went to town on the dead bird.

Hope everyone is well. I am sorry I haven’t been a more potent blogger just been busy with life and things like blogs get put on the back burner for things like Grand Theft Auto IV. Find me on XBOX live sometime if you desire. I am TristanP.

Leave a comment let me know what’s up or pop off an e-mail. Cheers!