Jpatrickm

A few friends and I ventured down to Black’s Beach today. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a great wide stretch of beach just north of La Jolla, beneath the cliffs of Torrey Pines State Park. Well today when we climbed down off the cliffs we immediately noticed all of this debris all over the beach. What is usually a very clean and clear wide beach, was just covered with heaps of tangled bamboo shoots. Bamboo is nowhere to be found in this area and so it quickly became clear that what we were probably looking at was the washed up remains of vegetation ripped out to sea from the Tsunami disaster all the way around the globe. 34 days later the currents found their way to the California coastline. It was really amazing and at the same time quite eerie. I wandered around picking and poking at the scattered piles and couldn’t help but wonder what far away remote places the bamboo perhaps once grew.

I took a few shots just to try and convey the strangeness of it all. This is truly usually a very bare beach. There are also a few additional images in my San Diego photography gallery.

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Well I’m almost back up and running now. Dell overnighted me a new hard-drive, which I was convinced wasn’t the problem, but low-and-behold it was. I was guessing it was just a connector that had shorted out but appearently the drive seized up. So I spent the majority of the day formatting the new hard drive and re-installing all of my applications back on to the laptop. The last backup I had of my data files was from around the 16th. So I lost about 10 days worth of work and data. Not a huge loss but enough to cause some confusion in my already confusing life.

I attempted to get the data off the old drive by buying a little USB portable drive kit and plugging the 2 1/2″ drive into that, but it’s unrecognizable as even an external data drive.

AND to top it off, my OTHER external storage drive (I keep 2 other drives) also died. This just isn’t my week. So now I’ve also lost 40 GIG of music collected over the past 7 years as well as many software applications that I kept archived there, having long since misplaced the original installation CD’s.

Not a good week. I’d say I’m glad it’s Friday, but there really isn’t any such thing as Friday when you are self-employed… or as my roommate calls it, “self-sponsored”.

Visit www.50prime365.com for today’s daily pic.

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As I was working on my entry for today’s self-portrait on 50prime365.com, I spilled a glass of Coke on my desk. A very small splash hit the keyboard and fan vent of my new Dell laptop and now it no longer boots up. I completely took the laptop apart and found a drop of coke on the motherboard, which I wiped up. But still nothing. It cannot find the primary boot disk. The laptop is just over a month old and although I do frequent backups, I have not done one since about Christmas. So if I am unable to getting it working again and/or retreive the files from it, I will have lost much work including client website work as well as original photography. I’m going to contact Dell tomorrow to work through getting it fixed.

I was just saying to people the past few days how I’m getting burned out with computer work and was wondering if maybe God would give me some sort of sign as to what I should do about this. I’m not a very religous person but it makes you wonder…

Please pray for me.

This was also posted as my entry for 50prime365.com.

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I finally got around to updating the photo gallery with some photos I shot of San Diego and vicinity from the air. I went up for a quick flight with my roommate Dylan and his boyfriend Luke, who was the pilot, flying us around in a Cessna 174. These were taken just before Christmas.

Photo Gallery

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Today I had a quick meeting with a web client to go over some material. The meeting was at his home office, which was located on the boardwalk at Mission Beach. Afterwards I decided to take advantage of being down on the beach and take a little stroll with my camera. It was a little hazy but warm and mostly sunny. It’s moments like this when I have to stop and ask myself, “Do I really live here?”.

Work meetings suddenly don’t seem so bad.

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Today’s Blog entry is brought to you by The Sun. Ok, so when I moved to San Diego, I have to admit I was skeptical that the weather here really was as perfect as everyone said. I mean, for the first few months it wasn’t anything to write home about. Rainy and windy and cold and as I’ve said on numberous occassions (practically every other post), it was very much like Seattle weather, which I was running from. Well, the natives are saying that winter, defined as that 2 weeks of rain we just had, has finally passed and we are now back to “normal”. It’s been averaging 78 degress this week and is, dare I say, perfect. Today I felt like I moved to a new city all over again.

My heart-felt sympathy goes out to the 70% of the rest of the country suffering in 0 degree weather, specifically my family in New Hampshire. I feel so bad about their suffering that I forced myself to actually take a swim today, which I NEVER do.

January… Yes, January.

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Just an update that my new site 50prime365.com is now live.

77 degress here in San Diego the last couple days… THIS is why I left Seattle!

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