We won an award!

This year I was on the Festival of Trees team with the Mount Vernon Chamber of Commerce and Skagit Young Professionals. Our team was made up of mostly women, so the theme is decidedly girly. It was Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend from the old Marilyn Monroe movie. Our tree was part of the overall event which is a charity gala for the local cancer foundation where they auction off the trees we made. We gathered about $6000 of stuff donated as part of our tree. On Tuesday there was a Designer Appreciation Night and we were voted Designers’ Choice by all the other tree designers. I’ve uploaded a ton of photos to Flickr, most of which I have to get permission from people before I make public, but I do have some public photos to show.

2008-11-23 Festival of Trees - Decoration Day 178

There was also a Tiki tree there that I really liked and I took a few photos of it too.

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Observing…

Ya know, sometimes I feel like I’m watching the world flow past me like so much water down the river. In a few days I’ll be 31 and the last few years I’ve been searching for something. Myself. You see, somewhere along the line I lost who I was in so much work and blind ambition to build a business or two that I seldom took the time to step back and actually see where I’ve come from and where I am now.

This time of year, when it gets cold outside and I get a little older, I look around me to see what I let slide past the rest of the year. The fun hikes, the work, work and more work. The dinner out with friends. I started a new business this year as well, became a chamber of commerce ambassador, took lots of photos, and generally got in the way a lot.

It’s been a fun time, but something has been missing, or rather someone. I thought for a minute that I’d found her a few years ago, but alas she slipped through my fingers. Maybe the next year will find her, whoever she turns out to be. Until then I’ll wait and see, there’s always the work, it never leaves.

So, my friends who read my rambling, remember to take a minute to see what’s truly around you or you just might be surprised when it’s gone.

Some new photos

For those of you who don’t follow my flickr feed, I went on a hike a little while ago and took a few photos. They are in reverse order so you see the hike backwards from the end to the top. I don’t usually take photos on the way up. Enjoy…

2008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0012008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0062008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0142008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0162008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0192008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0202008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0222008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0242008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0252008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0312008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0382008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0442008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0452008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0462008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0622008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 0752008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 1242008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 1872008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 1902008-09-27 Heliotrope Hike with SYP 191

A warning for anybody foolish enough to have a fingerprint reader from DigitalPersona

Yeah, I know, guilty… Turns out the reason my Visual Studio 2008 has been having TypeLibBuilder.exe crash constantly on client side script is the dpAgent.exe helper process from DigitalPersona. If you kill the process all is happy again. Thanks Josh.

http://jberke.blogspot.com/2008/05/typelibbuilderexe-crashes-javascript.html

Outlook 2007 with Windows Live Outlook Connector Error 0x80070057

Searching for information on this has been a MAJOR headache, mainly due to the fact that every moron on the Internet has posted the error code without knowing anything about the actual error or a way to fix it. Most of them just tell you to dump your outlook profile and start over. Well, I say that isn’t good enough! Someone, preferably from the product team that made this thing, needs to get off their butt and post about this issue and how to fix it so that it doesn’t keep popping up on me and the other thousand or more people I saw posting about it in the last half hour I’ve been searching for solutions.

In a so far vain attempt to get somebody to answer the question as to why Outlook stops synchronizing a mailbox after a few changes I’ve posted a question in the community support forums. Let the carnage ensue as they read, completely misunderstand, and post ridiculous non-solutions to my question.

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general&mid=a1e35133-6ae2-4221-af97-9bae2fdb6aee&sloc=en-us

Ok, I’m done ranting now. Honestly though, how hard can it be to just fix this?

SYP June – Pool & Darts

Well, the Skagit Young Professionals met again for pool and darts. I took a few photos, but they were mostly blurry. I’d just been to the dentist so I wasn’t my usual jovial self in case anybody was wondering.

We need to do this more often, preferably when I don’t have a sore tooth. If you shrink them some of the blurry ones look ok though none are that great. Anyway, the photos are on Flickr and here are the links…

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No more Emergency Reporting

Well, after a short jaunt at Emergency Reporting in Bellingham, I’m on my own again. It was fun and the atmosphere was great. I’ll miss it. It was more of a vacation for me than anything else and I knew it would end eventually. Now I guess it’s back to the real work at hand.

Snow in April?

Last night we had snow! Snow around here is usually a once or twice a year thing in December or January, not April! I woke on Saturday to find the yard covered in the stuff. The weather around here sure has been weird lately.