I’m Back!

Hey gang. You’re friendly neighborhood photo guy is back. It was, without doubt, one of the longest weeks of my life. Make that two weeks. After the Texans thing and the pageant combined my ass is dragging. I’m back here at the office and Lauren is on her way to pick me up. I didn’t want to leave my car here in the ghetto all week so I left it at the apartment. I’m a bit too tired to go into the detail of my week, I’ll save that for tomorrow when more than 3 or 4 brain cells are firing at the same time. I’ve got quite a few stories to share and I’d like to do them justice. So, like I said, tomorrow will be story day. For the time being I’m going home and going directly to sleep. Then I’ve got to come back here to the office tomorrow, at no particular time thankfully, to help with the copying of pictures from our laptops to our storage computers here at the office. 20G’s of pictures won’t move themselves. After that it’s a quick Wednesday and Thursday and then I get an extended 4 day weekend to rest and relax. I need it. I deserve it.

Matt out.

Off to see the wizard…

Well kids, I’m off. It’s 8:30 in the morning on Monday and I’m about to hit the road for a day long drive further to wards the equator. I don’t like hot weather and I’m unfortunately heading right for it.

This past week was very very long and tiring and this week will only add to it. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of “stupid pageant people” stories when I get back.

Later.

Two Weeks of Hell

I should preface this by saying that I’m half a sleep. If none of this makes sense you can blame it on someone else. Regardless of who’s to blame, I’m tired, and it’s only the beginning of my woes. Some could say that being busy is better than not. I say to those people, “you should try my kind of busy and then re-evaluate your stance on the subject”. We’ve been shooting the Texan Cheerleader squad for the past two days and it’s only just begun. Friday and Saturday we shot for this years poster project. 40 girls, 2 days and LOTS of background changes, costume changes, lighting changes. I’m friggin’ pooped. At one point I was standing, bent out to one side, holding a 20lbs “Sun-Buster” white translucent umbrella over my head for about a half hour. No, I don’t get hazard pay. Yes, I probably should. Thanks for asking.

In addition to the poster, there’s also a “publicity book” to do. This monster project, involves 7 continuous (6am-9pm) days of shooting. All on location. All at different locations, all over town. This also means that I don’t get a weekend. I have to work tomorrow, Monday, my day off. This displeases me. The overtime pay however, soothes the sting a little. A whole day at time and a half… hells yeah.

Wait. It gets better. All this Texans shooting wraps up on Saturday… the day before we leave for 9 days for Laredo TX for the Miss Texas USA beauty pageant. Oh yeah baby… thats right, 18 continuous days of work.

Where’s the Jack Daniels when you need it?

You know, I remember vividly the time that Jason, Nagle, Chris, Andy and myself waited outside the Trustee’s Theater in Savannah for 24 strait hours to get tickets for what we thought was the world premiere of The Legend of Baggar Vance. If you haven’t heard the story it bears repeating at some later point. The punchline at the end would have been that we had been awake for nearly 40 strait hours and we were a bit punchy toward the end there. That and Kimberly going to get a sandwich at 3am. And Chris trying to kill Andy… yeah, that shit was funny.

40 hours, compared to this, is a friggin cake walk. I’m sure I’ll actually get some sleep at some point in there, but I don’t really foresee being incredibly conversational toward the end of it all. After all, a week of skipping meals and running on Red Bull and protein bars can probably fuck with your head. Or so I’m going to assume. Ask me sometime around Saturday. That is, if I don’t punch you in the face for looking at me the wrong way. I have a tendency to be a bit cranky when I don’t get my nap, if you know what I mean.

Then it’s off to the beauty pageant… where the annoying people are. Lots of them. With the make-up and the hair-spray and the fakeness.

It’ll be like a vacation to the 7th ring of hell.

I’m going to go now, play a little BF1942 since I won’t get to for 3 weeks, and then go to bed. I’m not quite sure when my next update will be. We’ll get back from the pageant on the 28th, so don’t be surprised if it’s not until then. I would prefer that it were sooner, but I really don’t have much control over it.

Later guys. And wish me luck.

Round 3

It seems that Joker went ahead and transfered the domain anyway. Swell. At least I know they didn’t take my money and run. It just takes them far too long for their service department to get back to anyone. Ok. So, as it stands, the domain is being transfered to Joker. I think I’ll wait until the transfer is complete, give it a day or two, and then get it out of there.

Round 2

Got an email from Network Solutions Customer Service Dept. They at least have half a brain. I still haven’t heard ANYTHING from Joker regarding any of this. Anyway, according to NetSol, there IS a transfer in progress. According to a simple Whois, my domain is listed as being in “REGISTRAR-LOCK”. It’s locked, according to NS, until my domain transfer is complete, failed or timed-out. Since I also locked the domain from leaving, it’s either going to fail or time-out, whichever happens first. I’ll paste the rest of the email I got, it’ll make more sense than me:

“Actually, there is just a pending transfer in process at the Registry and currently your domain name is locked until this transfer is completed, failed or timed out. … You may renew you domain name once the status Registrar-Lock has been updated to Active. For your information, you may contact the Registrar that you initiated this transfer from and have this transfer canceled. Normally, a transfer expires in 96 hours after you received the authorization e-mail from the gaining Registrar. You may opt to do nothing and wait for the status to change to “Active” and renew your domain name.”

So, it should time out soon. Basically. Worst case scenario it actually gets transfered and I simply transfer it away again, this time doing it through someone a bit more reputable… like Jason.

Actually, I think I might do that anyway. I’ll have to renew it either way. If it times-out, which it should, I’ll still need to renew it before the 26th. I’ll drop Jason an email (or if he reads this first) and ask about how to contact his company and get it done through them. As helpful as NetSol has been, and I do appreciate good customer service, there’s just something about paying $35 for something that should really only be a few bucks that doesn’t sit right with me.

We’ll see what happens in the next 96 hours or so.