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Right now I am chilling at REV Coffee in Smyrna, GA. I just had the privelege of enjoying a stand up comedian competition hosted by bleepfreecomedy.com and leftarmcomedy.com. It was a good time and the coffee was great. The top 4 in tonights competition are going to participate in the Dogwood (festival?) here in Atlanta. One of the greatest things was enjoying the local atmosphere. The coffee shop is located in what used to be an automotive business and it is surrounded by businesses that still are. The comedians had a lot of material specific to Atlanta which proved to be very entertaining. Also mildy funny by way of irony is that my friend who only wears sweatshirts won a $25 in free dry cleaning from the sponsors of the event. Being the economically trained person that I am I was particularly captivated by the business model. A small coffee shop that supports local art, entertainment and education, profiting from the extra sales and stimulating the culture of the area – its great when you can generate an economic and a social profit. Good stuff.
-Max
Tomorrow we start a class on Basic Electronics. The tagline for the class is a “Four Year Electrical Engineering Degree in 5 Days”. If Billie Mays said it maybe I would beleive it. Nonetheless, it should be a fun class where we get to learn a lot of interesting things and get a decent foundation for Signal Theory. Let the nerd-dom begin. In other news today, I got the privelege of helping my TAC out at his church’s youth group. It was a fun experience, got to worship, play some basketball and meet some people I can hopefully help develop over the next couple months I am here.
Oh, and netbook slated for arrival tomorrow. Just left Spartanburg, SC at 9:03PM today, what did I do before having UPS tracking on my cell phone’s browser – wait eagerly in anticipation? That sounds unbearable. Also, check out my cousin Spencer’s new website. It’s his first endeavor and he’s already got some cool stuff up: http://sites.google.com/site/theunnamedwebsite/
P.S. Gordon Lakes Golf Course is nice and I’m working on coming down from the 90s (on 9 holes…)
-Max
My latest purchase is an Eee PC Netbook. It is the 1000HE in black and should arrive before this weekend. I bought it from Newegg they have had the best customer service and usually the best prices in my experience. It came in around $417 including the 2GB stick of RAM I bought to upgrade it. I decided on it because of its rock solid reviews both on Amazon and on Newegg (It is THE top selling computer on Amazon period.) The specs are a 1.66Ghz Atom Processor, (will have) 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and all the standard webcam, wifi, etc. When trying to decide on a new computer I was in a toss up between a powerful laptop or a netbook. What made me finally swing the netbook direction was taking a step back and looking at what I actually would use it for. While it might be nice to have a powerful notebook, I spend a lot of time walking and living out of my car and though I have an Inverter for AC power in my car, battery life is still too important. This thing supposedly goes 9.5 hours on a charge (which I will confirm when I recieve mine) and it does all the things I need: email, internet, MS Office 2007, streams netflix (will report back on quality), has vga out, which I’ve used before to hook up to my hdtv, and it didn’t look half bad. As far as a powerhouse for gaming/editing/home servering(?) it is much more cost effective to build a desktop. For the price of a powerful notebook I realized I could build a desktop twice as powerful and get this netbook and so it was done. I’ll update after I have used it for a while.
Comment if you think I made the wrong decision….
-Max
I am now at Signal School in Fort Gordon, Augusta, GA learning the basics of being a Signal Officer.
I have been married to Allison for about 8 months now, I graduated from KSU and commissioned into the Georgia National Guard as a 2LT in December and I am waiting to hear back on my law school applications for this Fall of 2009. Blessed, thankful and praying for today and tomorrow.
As technology has become an increasing part of the way people conduct their lives day to day it may be necessary to rethink the way home networks are implemented. As experience streamlines information technology many devices that were separate have become one and functionalities have been added. For instance, that ordinary looking wireless home router so many homes have these days is actually the combination of what was many devices. Routing traffic, giving computers addresses, managing ports and forwarding, and connecting wireless devices use to be tasks for different machines. Gaming consoles are also now DVD players and soon will be streaming internet media to your tv. What does this mean for typical residential consumers?
Still even recently you might have a phone system, a dvd player, a tv, a computer to run your printer/scanner, a fax machine, a laptop, a cell phone, an mp3 player, an external hard drive – probably usb, and an amalmagation of other devices. Many of these devices are fusing together and when deciding what to buy for the future we are facing a possibility of obsolence that makes 8-tracks look long-lived. I recently setup a computer for my father that is connected via HDMI to a High Definition TV and optical audio out to a 5.1 channel reciever. It streams dvds(legally) from an internet service, it allows remote access, it serves as an ordinary home computer, it has a hard drive partitioned to share for back up over a wireless N network and it is configured as a host with a slingbox to view his cable from any device on the network. Some corporations say there will be affordable operating systems for conservatively priced devices like the one I’m describing that will lock your doors, arm your security system and turn off your stove via a secure remote connection from the internet browser on your cellphone. Where will the combinations stop? Will they stop? Are they a bad thing or a good thing?
Ultimately, technology is the same as any other product, the consumer will decide what level of integration and combination is efficient and economical for themselves, but as the comfort level of culture with these types of technology increases it is increasingly likely that the level of integration will be high and in a reasonable price range. Because of this, it is worthwhile to gauge your expenditures on consumer devices based not only on their value now, but on there continued value and synergy in an integrated home system.
-Max
It has been awhile since my last post. Life got busy very quickly and I’m just now catching up to the pace so, I think it is a good time to catch this up to pace.
First of, Allison and I have been attending Midway PCA and like it there. I am taking 5 classes plus ROTC classes, I am taking an LSAT prep course, I’m working full time at eDataCenter LLC, I’m the battalion commander of my ROTC program and I work in the S3 shop at my National Guard unit. Those things have all presented their unique challenges and rewards. Sometimes I worry I am spread to thin, but I’ve learned that if I just keep communicating and take each task one at a time in an organized manner everything gets done well, Lord willing.
Big things on the mid horizon are my LSAT on October 4th, getting a letter of acceptance and by-name-request for a unit in the GaARNG, finishing at KSU this December and starting the law school application process.
On the near horizon we have an FTX to Red Top Mountain, Georgia to do Land Navigation, I have to catch up with some reading on real estate law because my LSAT prep course has been overlapping that class, I am waiting got Allison’s new SSN card to put her into DEERS so we can get Tricare backdated to our wedding day and I am working on installing Open Source Security Information Management for the data center.
My project list now includes trying to sell racks/servers for the data center, looking for people interested in the National Guard and some various business ideas involving network consulting, customization and installation.
My hobbies have been expanded to include cycling at the suggestion of my wife who is an aspiring triathelete. So far its been fun and a nice break for my knees compared to running.
I also just signed up for netflix’s $8.99 a month plan – not because I ever plan on having them mail a movie to me, but because their web-streaming service has reached a point where I think it is worthwhile. Right now you can connect a computer to your TV to play streamed movies, but near the end of this month there should be an update where you can stream movies to your xBox 360, which is much more convenient for me. There are also devices for as little as $99 right now if all you want is streaming without the other options of a gaming console or a dedicated media computer. About 11000 titles available for streaming and more every day, I recommend it.
That’ll be all for now,
-Maxwell Thelen
Within 36 hours of the wedding! I am very excited and everything is coming into place thanks to the hard work of all of our friends and family, especially Allison’s mother who has handled so many things herself. It has been more stressful for Alli than me, but she has handled it excellently.
Today went by quickly. I worked at the data center today. We did some more work on an inventory management system for the data center floor, the office, and also to track cell phones and software licenses. The system is in asp with a visual fox pro database. It has been interesting to learn asp and I am getting more proficient in using it to accomplish useful tasks. The main thing we worked on was a reporting feature for the four inventory tables. It was rewarding to finally nail the page breaks for printing after playing for a while with counters, loops and HTML tags.
I spent the evening with Allison at my parents home. Marriage preparations and life’s routine chores are rolling smoothly. Only four more days till the wedding!
Main things in my mind are what I’m going to branch in the National Guard for the time I will be in Law school, taking care of the LSAT and application process and budgeting for the things we want and need over the next few months till I go active duty for training.
An interesting thing to note about Tricare: It is open to the National Guard through the Tricare Reserve Select (TRS) program. It is well priced (about $90 for a servicemember or about $250 for a family) and the care is excellent. A useful tip about getting it for when you get married is this – what you do is after the wedding you take your marriage certificate, birth certificates, social security cards, driver’s license and whatever other documents they ask for down to your local DEERS (Defense Eligibility Enrollments Reporting System) Office and they enroll your wife in DEERS and then after Tricare receives the information from DEERS you can go to the website and enroll both of you in TRS with the date of your marriage as the effective date. And yes your health coverage is retroactive to that date. This is as of July 21, 2008 from speaking with DMDC (who administrates DEERS/Tricare) at 1-800-538-9552
You can view the TRS website here.
Tricare DEERS info here.
DEERS itself here.
Today is July 21, 2008. Just another day in the course of history, but a good day to record events that have and are about to transpire.
I returned from LDAC on July 11th. That was the 33 day culmination training exercise for ROTC. It was an interesting experience, I feel like I learned and developed into a better leader and set a solid stage for continued growth as the future becomes experience. I will try and post the LDAC tracker to my public documents so that record will be viewable.
Upon returning from LDAC I started settling into the new apartment my fiance, Allison, and I had signed the lease for and moved us into before I left. She has been living with her parents while I live in the apartment until the wedding. It is a very nice place to have been blessed with and it is interesting learning the basic things of life like rent and energy bills.
So, the week went well, I did a split on a drill that had occurred the weekend of my return and started back to work at eDataCenter where I have been doing internal application development, specifically focusing on an inventory management and tracking system.
Saturday night, the 19th I was at the young Adam’s home when I got a call from Alli. My mom, who was about 9 months pregnant, had her water break and they were off to the hospital. I met up with Alli and we headed down to Emory – Crawford Long Hospital. When we got close we pulled into a public parking lot, after circling and seeing the somewhat unclean nature of the locale we started to leave to find the hospital’s parking deck. As we pulled out we slipped into a nice big dip that separated the exhaust pipe between the engine and the muffler. So as we pulled into the hospital parking deck we sounded like a very loud lawnmower. Adventure aside excitement continued as we proceeded to the maternity ward. We arrived about midnight and were there till about 8am the morning of the 20th. The actual labor was quick and after a while we got to see our beautiful new gift from God, Melissa Grace Thelen.
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