I’ve been fairly busy the last three weeks (not busy enough to actually justify a complete lack of updates though). Work has been going pretty well and has kept me working at least 45 hours most weeks. On the 29th, I went to Minneapolis so I could pick up Sarah (my sister-in-law) at the airport the next day; luckily Kim put me up for the night and I was able to spend quite a bit of time catching up with her. This past weekend I also took 2 of my MTTC tests, the Basic Skills and Social Science ones; I believe I did really well on both.

I pulled an 11 hour day today, and tomorrow looks as if it should be a 12 hour day. (See what I mean about long hours?) It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the technician Dell who was sent to replace the motherboard on one of our new servers discovered the problem wasn’t actually the CPU (well, the pins in one of the sockets on the old one were actually bent). Instead, one of the ISCI cards was bad, and causing the server to spit out the CPU error. Of course, we had disassembled the machine and rebuilt it with the spare parts he brought by the time we figured this out.

But, on to the more interesting part for you non-computer people. I’ve been fairly (at least in relation to the few weeks before my last post) productive on the photography front since the 19th. I finally processed all the photos I took at the ROTC Commissioning on Tech’s Campus in May. I only put a few of the photos online. (I gave the detachments a CD with over 100 photos on it.) You can find them on flickr of course.

I took a few quick snapshots of my new apartment (I know the photos suck, I was in a hurry).

The Centennial Mine is the latest set of industrial ruins to garner my interest. I made an afternoon trip out there as a followup to a trip I made with Kevin in early June. Unfortunately, between now and then, someone had been through and locked up most of the doors, so I was stuck with what I could see from the ground and what I could climb to. It actually turned out to be a fun trip though, and I focused on a lot more of the details than I probably would have otherwise.

The 4th of July rolled around and I made the trip to Copper Harbor for fireworks again. (I went to Lake Linden on the 3rd, but a light fog kept me from taking any pictures that didn’t look like crap.) I’ve said it before, but it needs to be said again: “There’s no better place in the U.S. to watch fireworks than Copper Harbor, MI. I’ll just leave you with photographic proof.

My most recent excursion is one that I’ve been looking to for several years now. Douglass Houghton Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the area. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get to and the path is a bit dangerous; this combined with the fact that it is located on private property means it is closed to the public. Honestly, it isn’t hard to see why, I’d be afraid of the liability issues as well. It turns out that I know the land owners though, in fact, I’m a regular at the restaurant she owns. So, my friend Gowtham and I were given a guided tour out to the falls and left to have a very fun photography session. You can see the results in my photostream.