Patrick

Well, there’s so many things to say about last year. It was a complicated year, to say the least. I think in many ways, my year parallels the Patriots.

Last year, they completed the 16-0 season, but failed to win the Superbowl, followed by an 11-5 season where they didn’t make the playoffs.

In many ways, that can sound bad because they didn’t accomplish their goals of the completed undefeated season, winning a Superbowl, or making the playoffs and another run at a Superbowl.

Looking at it that way, the Patriots had a bad year last year by failing to complete their goals.

But I don’t look at it that way.

This season, the 11-5 Patriots are somewhat remarkable. They drafted the rookie defensive player of the year. They brought in a back-up QB who turned out to be just fine. I can’t say how many other players went injured and yet they kept on trucking. They were behind in the division rankings almost the whole year. It was a difficult year which had a lot of success and yet it could still be looked at as a failure.

That’s about how my 2008 went. A lot happened. A lot of good. A lot of challenging things. In the end, I didn’t reach many of the goals I had planned for the year(finish a novel, get in shape, etc), but still, I had a lot of success. I have the new house. I travel much less. I have a great boss(who I was very iffy about for the first 6 months or so.). In general, I’m well set to go forward in 2009 and that’s really what you look for in a year - setting up the next year to be even better.

So, I think last year was a good year even though I didn’t meet a lot of my goals. How was yours?

Ok, maybe not. Here’s some photos of the stars I took. I thought I was trying to take a photo of one of the planets, but I really don’t know anything about astronomy.

So, to get better resolution, I left the shutter open longer with a higher F-stop to see what would happen.

It turns out, stars move across the sky rather rapidly. This was 3.5 minutes. It explains why all my 15 second exposures were coming out blurry though.

Oh yeah, Santa brought Oliver some rats even though he asked for a mouse. With a cat named Tom, of course we need a mouse named Jerry. It’s his favorite show. I need to intorduce him to Pinky and the Brain.

Surprisingly cute creatures, if you ask me.

This year, for absolutely no reason, I sent my high school buddies steaks, good steaks from Omaha Steaks.

It was a whimsical thing. I just really wanted to send steak. I mean, as a gift, who doesn’t want good steak?

But inevitably, this leads to a thing most adults dread - the inequality of gift giving. I talked with one of my buddies yesterday after he received his steak and he confessed to feeling bad because he hadn’t even sent a card and now he felt obligated to get me something.

No! Gift giving is not a balance of equality. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I saw the steak and thought, hey, my buddies will LOVE this! I want to get it for them. So I did. I knew none of them were getting me anything. So what?

Anyway, the Christmas Steak is a pass it on type gift. If you received it, you are not obligated to send me a gift(as is the rule for any gift I give, not just steak). If you feel like you should send me something, surprise someone else with an unexpected gift instead.

Happy Holidays!

I kept seeing the Microsoft commercial talking about how it was so easy to make a panoramic photo.

So, I decided to try it.

Not necessarily the greatest scene, but still cool!

See, this whole post is ruined by the poor photo.

See, because then I would say “What is this? Grand Central Station?”

Which it is.

But I got the cheap camera and I feel a little weird stopping to take a photo so this was taken as I was waiting to cross the street. I mean, I wouldn’t want to give it away that I am not a New Yorker. They can smell fear, you know.

But I have a bad photo of Grand Central Station. Maybe I’ll get one inside tomorrow. I ate there yesterday.

On a happy note - I used the train system for the first time without anyone else. I took the PATH train from 33rd over to Jersey City. I managed to do so without getting lost and dying. I mentioned this to a New Yorker friend and she was shocked. What do I think happens in New York.

Really? Nothing.

I have the same feeling in the middle of North Carolina. I assume that if I get lost, there are some creepy people waiting to kill me. I’m always appreciative when I meet people who have no intention of killing me.

I am better though. I no longer feel that there are people hiding in every alley waiting to kill me. In fact, I’m quite comfortable in Manhattan these days. Still not going to move here though.

This is why I want a new lens. At this size, the photo is decent looking. Far from perfect, but decent looking. I can probably get a pretty nice 5×7 print, too. But if you look at it full size, you’ll see that it is very grainy.

This is taken inside, at night, no flash. I increased the exposure compensation and customized the white balance by taking a photo of something white.

The problem is, by doing both of those, it forced the shutter to stay open longer and therefore increased the grain of the photo. You can really see it if you click through to the Original size over on flickr.

Of course, I’m zoomed to 200mm in this photo, which would need the $1600 lens on my list. See, I know you can see why it all makes sense now. Of course, if I had the flash on my list, I could probably have used a bounce flash to the same effect. The built-in flash was horrible.