Jak’s Life 2.0

My friend Spencer managed to get me addicated to geocaching. For those of you unfamiliar with the term wikipeida defines geocaching as “an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world.” It’s pretty sweet and since we’re borrowing a GPS and doing it it’s getting us out of our houses on the weekends and is keeping us from just pointlessly driving around and greatening our carbon footprints (not that I care much) it’s nice to save on gas too. It’s pretty fun and I’d encourage anyone with a GPS and some spare time to go try it, it may prove to be your new weekend hobby as it is our’s.

While I’m sitting on hold for only the first time with Optimum Online customer support I figured I might as well write a rant about how much I hate thier custotmer support. To start off you get a fairly sarcastic sounding recording that uses a really annoying repetative tone and as it goes through the options when you’re waiting for the option for technical support and then you realize maybe after the second or third round…it’s not coming. So this forces you to hit 0 which will put you on hold. At this point you hear terrible music the same recording about Optimum Rewards over and over. After that torture you get a general operator who will take down all your information, try to get you to upgrade your service, then transfer you. After this you finally get to a tech support person who is usually very helpful but will take down your information again and it’s just a flat out hassle to get to them. Except you still need to wait at least 20-30 minutes for someone to help.

Even though there’s some gross misspellings in the video the point still gets across, we (as high school students) aren’t learning everything we should. I can say this coming from a current high school junior’s point of view, the schools are teaching to the test, during sophomore year pretty much all we learned was how to take the upcoming CAPT test. Although now in junior year we don’t hear as much about the SATs as we should it’s a nice change, we’re actually learning…not stressing about the upcoming CAPT tests.

For the past several weeks I’ve been working with my local library in creating a website geared towards the children’s services department. Below is a screen shot I took of the site if you’d like to see the code for it let me know by leaving me a comment.

The site was built on CSS-Tricks’ “Perfect Fluid Layout.” Which was worked great for me and I highly recommend it. I am looking for some design advice so anything you’ve got to offer me I’d love to hear and once again, if you want the code let me know in a comment!

I’m amazed that when I went to Digg The Candidates (A brand new Digg feature) I didn’t see Hillary Clinton as one of the top people and honesty, I’m glad. A picture below (click it for full view)

TRUCK_FIRE_1B2UV.jpg, originally uploaded by newspaper_guy.

Although this is a fairly old incident and fire the picture still amazes me, I’m not quite sure how Mike captured this one but it’s absolutely captivating to me for some reason. And if you’re ever bored and live around the Bristol area check out newspaper_guy on Flickr, he’s got a lot of really good local new shots as well as some other plain out beautiful shots.

State Opens 151, originally uploaded by Spencer’s.

This picture is actually mine but Spencer uploaded. Anyways I’ll cut to the chase, this is a reall weird number for a bus to have, anyone else think the same? I mean what town has over 50,000 buses?

Well today Thomaston High School boys cross country was aiming to be the first boys class s team to advance from the New England Championships in Cumberland, Maine this upcoming weekend. Unfortunatley today was not Thomaston’s day to do it, despite the varsity team’s best efforts they simply fell short of their goal despite several amazing races by many of the runners. This year’s state open was a very close race where most of the teams were only seperated by only one or two points. For example Thomaston was only 25 points behind 6th place. It is in-fact a sad day from many of the seniors on the THS XC team but it’s been an amazing season and all good things must come to an end but unfortunately it will not end at New Englands. Now all we can do is look forward to the indoor track season!

Well I just realized how long it’s been since I last blogged so I’m going to just give you a quick update of everything that’s going on in my life.

I’ve been using Leopard and it is awesome although I have had a few kernal panics it’s truely been awesome, it seems faster and more friendly to my computer than Tiger did. It seems to run more programs better without any issues of them getting really slow (even Lightroom is better). Time machine I’m not a big fan of only because I don’t have a big enough external hard drive. And yes I did experience the fated blue screen of death issue that some people have been having and an archive install wasn’t an option for me so following Apple’s dirrections I used their “advanced” fix even though it’s really easy.

Next, I’ve gotten back to running and it’s been great although I am still having stomach problems and my doctor isn’t exactly sure what the issue is now and is thinking I need a capsule endoscopy to help the diagnosis.

Even more, Thomaston cross country is the Connecticut State Class S champions for the third year in a row and now is gunning to become the first class “S” team to advance to the New England Championships in Cumberland, Maine. Good luck to all teams in the state open tomorrow and see you there.

Yes I’ve still got more to tell the world. I’ve uploaded a few new pictures to my flickr account (box on the right) so please go check them out and leave me some comments, I’d appreciate it.

I think that’s it for now I’m sure I’ll have some more over the weekend and keep the comments coming.