EPKPhoto's Tidbits

Christmas Eve has arrived, and I find myself in Pennsylvania in the company of good friends and warm homes. I will be traveling to see my Grandma, parents, and family in a couple days. I wanted to take this time, though, to tell you about Andrew Metz. This 18-year-old family friend of ours has recently been diagnosed with a form of Leukemia just as he was entering basic training in the Air Force. Andrew now needs to find a bone marrow donor. YOU can help by reading Andrew Metz's story, donating to support his medical expenses and marrow donor registrations, and registering yourself for testing as a potential donor. I have created a website to tell Andrew's story where his family will be posting updates as the time passes. Check the Andrew Fund website regularly for more ways to help. Have a Merry Christmas, and pray for those who face tough times this holiday season.

Looks like my neighborhood back home is getting Verizon's FiOS service.  FiOS is Verizon's new fiber-optic, high-speed network that they are rolling out nationwide.  It is their way of seriously competing with the cable companies that offer bundle services.  Verizon will be able to pump tons of data through this system, and fortunately the cables they are installing will be able to support even more data in the future.  This is a good thing seeing as how the install process has damaged our yard.  Take a look at the picture of a worker digging in our yard for an example.  Even though we may be eligible to sign up for FiOS soon, I think my family will stick with Cox's services for the forseeable future.  We are somewhat wedded to their cable offerings as well as their business class internet (which hosts my website).

I have been enjoying the past week off from classes and away from the craziness of an RIT quarter as we near Thanksgiving.  What has been making this break fun in addition to traveling with my girlfriend is playing with my family's new puppy!  That's right, we have a new puppy…a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  The little 9 week old is as cute as a button as you can see from her photo.  Her name is Lucy, and she came all the way from Missouri.  She has a lot of spunk, loves to follow us everywhere we go, and sleeps like a log after several minutes of play.  She has even shown a liking for tennis balls, even though they are about the size of her head.  I'll be sure to take many more photos and share them here.

What better way to celebrate the snow that was falling today in Rochester than by posting some photos of nice and sunny San Antonio?  That's what I'm doing, so go check out the photos I took while travelling to this year's NCHC conference in San Antonio.  None of the photos are of the actual conference, but we did get a very good response from our presentations.  The lot of us presented on aspects of RIT's Honors Program including orientation, colloquium, communications strategy, and communications tools and technology.

I made it back from San Antonio.  Rochester actually greeted me with somewhat decent weather for this time of year.  Unfortunately, it quickly degraded to the rainy mess we have here now.  Anyway, I just put my absentee ballot in for Virginia today.  It should make it back home well before the deadline of election day next week.  For those of you non-absentees, be sure to vote!  For the time being, look for some San Antonio photos to show up on the site soon.

I've been in San Antonio for the past day and a half at this year's NCHC conference. I'm presenting with the RIT Honors Program. We haven't seen much of the city other than the Riverwalk and the Alamo, but from what I've heard, that's all that matters. We're traveling back to frigid Rochester tonight, so I have to go enjoy this 80 degree weather some more! Attached is a photo from our hotel room.

The server that epkphoto.com is now hosted on is up to 45 days of uptime with no end in sight.  I am used to reaching 180 days or so with my past servers before needing to restart them for some reason (usually heavy software upgrades or hurricanes).  Keep on tickin', KerbyServer…you rock!

If you have not heard, our eldest family dog passed away yesterday, October 2nd.  Paws had been a furry friend by my side for nearly half my life.  At 10 years old, he outlived our past family dogs, Spinks and Becks, by quite some time.  Paws was very special to me.  I still remember the day we went to the Norfolk SPCA and found this spunky little dog looking cute with one of his paws raised in the air.  He was so happy to find a family that loved him.  We later came to assume that he had been previously abused by a past owner since his raised paw actually contained a minorly broken toe.  As many of our family members know, Paws quickly overcame his fear of humans.  He was always ready to play with a tennis ball or towel in his mouth.  Over the years, I always thought Paws aged rather gracefully.  The gray patch on his chin grew in size, but his spirit never aged.  It makes me sad that I have been stuck in Rochester these last few days, but it was better in the end that I missed seeing Paws grow weak.  In my mind he will always be the best family dog that anyone could hope for.  I just hope there is a couch in dog heaven that Paws can hid his tennis balls under.  Goodbye, Paws, we'll miss you.

As I mentioned earlier this summer, I built a new server to power several pieces of my network at home as well as my website and email services.  After much testing and careful planning, I can now happily say that the epkphoto.com website is running on this new server.  The site is now much more responsive thanks to larger memory and other resource allocations than it had previously.  Luckily, this transition happened with very few issues, so most would not have noticed the change until this announcement.  Read on for more details about the server.

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I guess I shouldn't keep it a secret much longer: I got an iPhone. About 2 and a half weeks ago my family and I entered an Apple Store and came out with a new AT&T family plan and 2 iPhones for my Mom and me (I can't keep all the fun to myself, you know). Since I thoroughly researched this before making the purchase, my experience has been as expected: overall positive. There are definitely some areas that need improvement, such as the calendar client and basic things like copy and paste, but all in all I'm pleased. Android sounds like it is still on track, so it will be exciting to see the ensuing competition in the next few months. In other news, I'm back at RIT taking classes, which means I have things to do…so, catch you later! PS: I wrote this on my iPhone. 🙂