Slow commentary, back online

idiotsIt’s not avoidance, it’s just I’m tackling too many “hobbies” and focuses. Trying to put together some good photography, music, traveling and then furthering my professional career… I just haven’t had time to dive into long form blogging.

I’ve decided I’ll make an effort to get back to writing a few things down, diary style again and just see where it leads….

Today, an office day – and a frustrating one at that. I feel I’m spending way too much time on issues that don’t affect my bottom line and could vary easily fix themselves, but ignoring them for a while with the “hopes” the other person figures it out. Other days… they just persist like an irritating sunburn. I literally had to reply to someone today simply “Please re-read the email I just sent you an hour ago… you’ll find your answer”

I also got in an adrenaline fuels altercation with a NYC cabbie that nearly ran me over hanging a left while I was crossing the street. As I jumped back out of the way, I flashed my coffee all over his windshield and driver side door… Of course he stopped and got out to yell as if it was my fault he nearly hit me. If he continues to drive like that, he’s going to hit someone. He also had a passenger in the car that looked freaked out spinning out around me. It’s drivers like this that NYC yellow cab driver unions should fix if they want to gain ridership back from Uber… not legislate themselves back into the market.

Anyway, I’ll be back with a few day to days here… and as I work on my July photos (finally), I’ll start posting some of those soon too. Cheers!

My first completed website

I picked up web design as a hobby in 1998 when I worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Part of my project was working with the LLNL team to study of the effects of high temperature and intense compression (as a result of long term pressures or immediate pressures via earthquakes) on the tuff from the nuclear waste repository site located in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. With that project I needed to learn coding and the Solaris OS which was what most of the fracture modeling and computational data was run on.

Because a lot of our study was waiting… waiting for pressure systems to build over time and waiting for computer modeling to finalize, I spent a lot of time learning other systems in the LLNL lab including understanding what all this World Wide Web and AOL Chat room excitement was about. I picked up HTML and my first site was actually a very simple web page based on astronomy and began with “This is the intro site for Austin “Vegas” and his interests”.

I parlayed that knowledge into my education and built my first professional web page for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Doing a web search today, I found that it’s still up and being used by the engineers there (unfortunately it needs update, as my Professor is no longer with Cal Poly) :

Advanced Air Pollution Control Controlling Particulate Emissions with Electrostatic Precipitators

Although the Yucca Mountain project was canceled a few years ago, excellent research was developed on how rock materials fracture and of course I started on a path of web design as perpetual side projects…