Good Times!

It's Sunday and yesterday was a total blast! Valerie, Me, Jimmy, the Amanda's, Brandon and Cassie (his girlfriend) all went to the lake with the jetski's. We cooked out on the beach area while Jimmy and I gave non-stop rides on the jetski's. I was going to bring my camera, but left it at the house (DOH!). Next time i'll be sure to bring it. The water was great, about 85 degrees, but the lake was the lowest ive seen it in a while. Probably down about 8 feet. The temperature was perfect, probably mid-90's with low humidity. There were A LOT of boats putting in at the park we were at, so that made for some choppy waters and big swells just past the I-35 bridge crossing as the boat headed out to open waters. This of course results in some awesome wave jumping on the jetski's! I was afraid my passengers were going to be terrified by the feeling of launching out of the water and into the air, but they all seemed to love it. Next time, i'll be sure to have some pics! Oh be sure to check out the new site of the week on the Thorpeland.com homepage. VERY AMAZING to watch!

Statitically Speaking

Well on Monday, July 21'st, Thorpeland.com got its 2000'th visitor! I conisder that a great mile-stone. According to the site statistics the busiest day ever was on September 4th, 2001, when I got 24 visits to the site. The visits come from all over but the USA leads the pack with 86.8%, followed by visits from the U.K. with a distant 1.5%. Then there's Australia, Germany and Canada with 1.0%, 0.9% and 0.8% respectivly. July of 2001, 202 people hit the site and the most popular day to visit seems to be on Monday's with 18.8% of visits occuring. The slowest day is Saturday's with only 6.3% of the hits. And, odly enough, the 4 O'clock PM hour seems to be the most popular time to visit, edging out all the other hours in the day with 7.2%. These are just some of the interesting stats from Thorpeland.com. You can view these and more by scrolling to the bottom of the sites main page and clicking on the small graph icon.

Prime Time!

Here I sit at my desk again on a Friday. The weekend before me awaits. I'm not sure what the next 3 days holds for me, except for another jetski outing tomorrow late-morning with Valerie and Jimmy. Should be a lot of fun.
This past work week was a busy one! We set up and installed 71 new computers for a new city library that opened. Thats a huge task for a department of 4 network administrators. Not to mention the 3 networked NDPS printers we had to get online. For months the city had been hyping their new library to the public. Well the day was finally here to open the doors. The announcement claimed they would open the doors to the public at 10am on Thursday. Well by 9am there were roughly 50 to 60 people outside the doors trying to peek in. I thought to myself, these people really need a life. Its just a library! Well the doors open and they all rush in as fast as they can. What was so funny is the people would stop in the foyer just inside the doorway and just look around, not knowing where to go or what to do. I'm thinking, why did you just wait an hour outside and then rush inside for?! Cattle. The only word to describe them. It was about that moment when i heard the head librarian, Mary, ask me, "Thorpe, do you have a library card?". "DOH! I don't", I replied. She promptly whipped out a form for me to fill out and get one. I really dont have much need for one, with this internet thing we got going. But she guilted me into it. It's free, what the heck.
In the traveling news department, this coming August I will be flying out to sunny California to visit my buddy Dan. He lives near Long Beach, and actually just a block from the beach. Once there he's going to give me the L.A. tours, head over to Venice Beach then take a day and drive down to San Diego to see our friend Zach that is stationed there with the Navy. It should be an awesome trip and provide me with some great pics to post up on Thorpeland.com! So be sure to check back in mid August!

Weekend in Review

I got so busy by the end of last week and into the weekend, I didnt get to update the blog. Sorry all. Saturday was another jetski outing. Jimmy and I cruised all over the lake, reaching as far as the 121 Marina and back over to Party Cove. We had a great time, lots of wake jumping. Something occurred to me while out riding on Saturday. I was watching as the large cruisers and yachts moved across the lake. Shortly behind them, is always several jetski's, jumping the large boats waves. It made me think, they must see us as the equivilent to dolphins. Always riding along behind the boats, jumping. It was an amusing thought. Sunday I spent at Hurricane Harbor in Arlington. It was my first time there and it was a blast. One of my favorite things they had to do was a boogy board "simulator" i guess you'd call it. Water is shooting out of a long slot at about 40 mph. Its only about 2 inches deep but is rushing so fast against a banked wall it creates a kind of wave. You jump onto this thing with the boogy board and ride it in place as long as you can. The good riders lasted as long as they wanted, making it look easy. If you slipped up, the current shot you around the enbankment and out an exit shoot. I lasted all of about 3 seconds then got shot out. It was very similar to being flushed down the toilet i guess. Ha! I think if I would have had several more tries I could have lasted much longer. But i didnt want to wait another 30 minutes in line.

Hump

Its Wednesday, hump day here at work. It must be 1000 degrees outside right now. If I have to go outside, I prefer to be wearing a swimsuit and be in the water. The week seems to be going pretty fast. From here on out its all downhill to Friday. Woo Whooo! No sure plans for this weekend yet. But im sure something exciting will gell by then.

Mobile Me

I was greeted with a small surprise during my monday morning meeting at work. We were all given new Palm Tungsten C's. If you had not see one of these, they are Palm Pilot pc's, with color screens and fast processors. Now, in the past i was a diehard Pocket PC fan. But these Tungstens are actually quite impressive. They even have built in 802.11b wireless conectivity. Just to have some fun, one of the guys brought in his personal Linksys wireless router from home. In seconds we had used the Tungstens to detect and connect to the internet. It was an odd feeling surfing the web on a 3.5 inch screen. Configuring it to check POP3 email accounts was easy too. A few information screens on the setup wizard and I was able to check all my personal email accounts. Its too bad my entire work doesn't have wireless network setup. These really would'nt be a bad toy to have around home. Unfortunatly they list at $500. For less than $250 I can get a Dell Axim and add wireless networking to it for $40. Oh well. Its fun to play with new toys at work.

I Wake for No One!

So Jimmy and I are out on the jet ski's today at the lake. We ride up to the 380 bridge on the far north section of the lake. As we enter the No Wake zone, we both let off the throttle and coast in. We move thru this area at about 5 mph. Right as we reach the exit area of the no wake zone, we hear someone yelling to us over a loud speaker. I turn around to see a sheriffs patrol boat right behind us. He orders us to pull up aside his boat. After doing so we ask what did he stop us for. His reason, he could see with white water of a small wake coming off the front of our jetski's. Give me a break! Luckly for us, he just let us off with a verbal warning to slow down on in the no wake zones. This guy is seriously bored out there. The lake is full of people driving large boats after they've been drinking all day... and he goes after us for creating too much wake? Anywho, we still had a blast. We hung out at party cove for a bit (www.wetrat.com), cruised to all our favorite coves and did a TON of wave jumping. Ah yeah!

We Have a Winner!!

Well for those of you that knew, I had my old Sega Dreamcast up on Ebay to see what I'd get. Turns out, I ended up getting $60 for it! Which is about what I wanted for it. Not bad for something that had been sitting in my closet for almost 2 years. Now, Ebay has me digging thru my closet again to see what else I can sell. I'll post my auctions on Thorpeland for all to have a look at. Stay tuned.

Swelling and Bloated

I stumbled across an interesting factoid today. I was checking my disk space usage on the web server hosting Thorpeland.com, when I noticed they had changed the hosting plan from 50MB to 100MB for the same price I am paying for the 50. But I was STILL only limited to 50MB!! I quickly wrote them an email and recieved a quick response, giving me the instructions I needed to change my account information and recieve the extra 50 megs of space. So, I'll give credit Myhosting.com (formerly softcom) for giving me 100MB of diskspace with a 5 GB data transfer limit for only $9.95 a month. Not too bad! So now with all this extra space, I can again begin to make Thorpeland.com a bloated site full of stuff about me. :)

Back in the chain gang

After being out on vacation from work for 6 days, I am back at it today. I feel fairly rested and recharged i guess. My urge to kill co-workers and others has greatly diminished. I had a fairly productive vacation. If you had not read any of my recent past postings, I went to 6 Flags Over Texas, had a cook out at the lake with my friends and went jet skiing, visited my parents, went ice skating, went up to Wichita Falls and stayed with some old friends and finally returned to play in a soccer championship game. Which we did end up losing, unfortunatly.
I have to give a shout out to some of my "peeps" for a great time. Thanks a lot to Brotha James, Thai and Mike in WF for a great time. Always good to see you guys again! And James, yes your couch is still very uncomfortable.

Happy 4th!

Just like the title, happy 4th all. I went to the lake yesterday with a group of friends. We cooked out and took my jetski out on the lake for some riding. About 4 hours into it, we start to see helicopters and police everywhere. Turns out over at the beach section, 2 kids had disapeared in the water somewhere. I found myself a bit torn. One side of me was concerned they got the kids back safe. The other side of me was ticked because they were closing the entire park and lake area where we were to search for the bodies. Why can't stupid people watch after their kids on a major holiday at the lake?! Well at least we got a few hours in of fun. Later that evening we went to watch a big fireworks show. It was alright. Now im just chillin at the parents house while i fine tune my mom's new pc. I have monday and tuesday off work, so it's all about relaxing now.

Boom Bang Pow!

Its hard to believe its already the 4th of July. Now, to the rest of the world, this means virtually nothing. But here, we find ourselves sitting atop of another "american pride" holiday. To me, its just a day off work to go out on the jet ski. Which I will be doing! Today is Wednesday, but Im taking vactation from work starting tomorrow thru next tuesday. It will be nice to do nothing for a week. Even though I know thats not true! Im sure I'll be quite busy for most of it, working on a project, hanging out with friends and doing whatever.
On another note, Im planning a trip out to see my buddy Dan who lives in sunny California at the end of July. We'll be taking a drive down to San Diego to visit with my friend Zach who is in the Navy. Should be a great trip with lots of great pictures for the website. So stay tuned.
And lastly, I was send a humorous email from a co-worker. Now, for those of you who know me... I NEVER forward emails. I despise forwarded email jokes and refuse to pass them on. But this one really was clever. And because so, I will post it here. Please, read on below!
----------------------------------------------

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington
chemistry mid-term exam. The answer by one student was so "profound"
that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which
is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

***Bonus Question***

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic
(absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using
Boyle's Law, gas cools off when it expands and heats up when
it is compressed) or some variant, but fell short in
producing a demonstration argument.

One student, however, wrote the following:

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing
in time. So we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and
the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely
assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.
Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, lets look at the
different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these
religions state that if you are not a member of their
religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of
these religions and since people do not belong to more than
one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With
birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number
of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell
because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure
in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand
proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at
which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure
in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase
of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until
Hell freeze over. Considering then the postulate presented to me by
Teresa
K. during my Freshman year that ; "it will be a cold day in Hell before
I sleep with you," and taking into account the fact that over two years
later, I still have not succeeded in having relations with her, then, #2
cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and will not
freeze."

This student received the only "A".