Ted Stevens can STAY home.

I realize that I'm a bit behind the times in writing this, but Christmas came a bit early for me this year.

Ted Stevens has not only been indicted, but convicted of by a federal grand jury on seven counts of failing to report gifts received from VECO Corporation and its CEO Bill Allen on his Senate financial disclosure forms.

But the gravy on this giant pile of awesomeness is simply that Senior Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens has lost his reelection bid officially as of November 19.

He's not coming back to Washington, DC, folks, and there's a chance his replacement might be intelligent enough to hold intelligent debate on technical subjects. After all, it's not that I dislike the man, personally; in this case, I dislike Stevens' propensity to ram ignorant opinions forward in support of ignorant legislation that has had and will have profound impacts on my professional life.

Anyway, have a nice retirement, Ted! Good bye, sir!! Good bye.

Long time?

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Originally uploaded by phi1317

It has certainly been a while since I updated my blog, and there have been lots of little updates in my life.

For starters, I recently acquired by first dSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XT (8MP); as a result, I've made myself busy over the past few weeks with taking photos in the area and learning all technical capabilities of my camera.

A lot has changed since I took photography in college on an old 35mm SLR.

On other fronts, softball season has ended, and I feel that we have a great group of folks who will return to play again next year. In my mind, the only question is what night of the week I want to play on; the Tuesday league really was a much more friendly crowd, and I feel drawn back to that environment.

I've also got a decent "hitting streak" going with geocaching and as of this post, now have a 13-day consecutive find streak.

Pretty neat. Anyway, that's all for now. I'll try to update again later this week.