Castles made of sand…

Today went excitingly well for my first day at work. On the way in…

I went to the beach. It was nice… and like 74 outside. I told you that. But I forgot some awesome details. I went for a walk on the beach, looking for shells. In the water I saw a stingray swimming around… good thing I wasn’t it in. The water was like freezing anyways. And then I saw a sand dollar washed up… but it was still alive. So I threw it back. And in the parking lot I saw an armadillo. And I was going to get a picture with my camera, but he ran off. What an exciting trip to the beach.

So pretty in the fall. Good bye changing leaves, maybe someday I’ll see you again.

The weekend was my brother’s wedding which took up all my Saturday. Sunday was dinner at someone’s house followed by seeing Bourne Ultimatum. Good movie by the way. Then I drove back down to Florida on Monday. 8 hour drive, yawn. Tuesday, work. Wednesday, half day at work, then went to the Causeway later to watch the shuttle launch. Vroom. Thursday, Friday more work.

My camera (Kodak C300) broke… I turned it on this morning and it wouldn’t turn off. You might think thats not an issue, but it has an auto off feature which turns the camera off after a few minutes. To turn it back on you have to turn it off and turn it on. That didn’t work.

Warranty? None… it only had a one year warranty from date of purchase and I’ve had it for a year and 4 months. I’m not one to be defeated by technology. Since I wasn’t going to loose anything by breaking it further (if such a thing occurred), I decided for surgery! Yep, took my camera apart. And let me tell you, you never want to drop your digital camera (EVER)! Various internal components are small and plastic, so it should in theory be very easy to break your camera internally such that not even the manufacturer could fix it; it would be cheaper to buy a new one cause you would spend more on labor trying to fix it if the part was replaceable.

I discovered the issue was a toggle switch that controls the mode of the camera (Night, Auto, Off, Video). The switch is a neat concept (thumbs up), but horrible design (thumbs down). The toggle lever was getting stuck in the on position, thus it wouldn’t shut off or change modes. The lever is about as small as the thickness of a penny. Very hard to work with… not to mention fix.

So this tiny piece of plastic is virtually unrepairable if it breaks. It didn’t break, but was just getting stuck. I made the mistake of taking the toggle lever out, and that cost me like 30 minutes to put it back. It took lots of patience and a little ingenuity. I believe I put it in backwards, so now it doesn’t get stuck ON.

And after putting it all back together. The video mode doesn’t work. No big loss there, I still have picture mode, and thereby a working camera. Yay, go me, I win.

Here’s what I recovered off the memory card… 6:38 AM this morning:

These taste as good as they look…

What have I been doing lately?

• Took Friday afternoon off cause I wasn’t feeling well… took some Tylenol and slept all afternoon. Basically felt out of it all day.
• Watched the shuttle Atlantis launch into space (see below)
• Did a little art project (see below)
• Went to the beach, went for a swim
• Went swimming in the pool, relaxed

So I played in this Saturday…

… and I managed to not get sunburn at all. I spent a good 3 hours out there relaxing. I had today off, since its a federal holiday. I also managed to cook something on the stove, so I’m proud of my ventures into cooking.

Yea, I’m in Florida and its great. The first week of work was a little boring, as I had to catch up on training stuff that I’m required to do. Other than training, I have lots to do… some of it could be very interesting. I’d go into more detail but then I’d have to kill you. Not really, its just that I could get technical and I’m sure that’d bore you.

Yesterday I stopped by the beach… it was lovely. I had not been to this beach since 2005, and it feels just like I left it. Its a private beach (as part of a National Park), so its much nicer and not as trashy as a public beach. I got a little burnt but not nearly as bad as the last time I was at the beach (The Weekend Fun).