GarrettBartley.com

I fell for it. I’m doing it, too. It sounds like fun, really. And why not?

For the FaceBook’ers:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click post.)

Now, on with the show!

1. The only other city I could ever live (other than Chattanooga, TN) is Vancouver, BC Canada.
2. Aladdin is my favorite movie of all times. I know the entire soundtrack (the original, not the DVD re-release with the altered intro) and can even sing the Jasmine part in “Whole New World”.
3. I wanted to be a meteorologist when I was in 7th grade. I wanted to be a psychologist in 9th grade. I wanted to be a computer geek from 10th grade until recently. Now I want to be a physicist or environmental engineer.
4. I was attacked by a cocker spaniel when I was wee little (around 2, I think). It happened in the very backyard of the house I’m living in now (my grandfather’s). It took 35 stiches in my left cheek to patch it up. The scar is still there, but you can’t see it under the beard.
5. I love my MacBook Pro to death, but I still can’t get over the fact that I paid nearly $2,500 for what has amounted to a very, very nice web browser.
6. I am religiously conflicted. I was raised Baptist, but never cared much for organized religion. I’m atheist or agnostic–I can’t decide. But I hold many Christian morals. Sometimes I pray to God, but I don’t know what for. I think about the randomness and chaos that created this universe and the possibilities of many others and find a supreme being impossible. Then I think about life on Earth and that there is hope.
7. I have a scar on my left wrist. It looks like a suicide attempt, but it’s not. When my dad re-married and was moving to a new house, I was using a box cutter that wouldn’t cut hot butter. I jokingly moved it across my wrist. Sure enough, it could a few millimeters into the skin, but didn’t hit any veins (thank goodness!). Some paper towels and packing tape got that fixed up!
8. This is actually the list one I wrote (I did it in random order–but that’s not the point of this item). There are a lot of people I miss seeing and hanging out with. Sometimes the timing is never right, other times I can’t put aside my own selfishness to go out of my way. I think everyone is like that in one way or another, I just hate being one of those people.
9. I used to hate beer until recently. My coworkers got me to try it again, and I wiped the slate clean. I started out thinking about it by breaking down its constituent parts and searching for each flavor and what I could taste in the process. That opened a whole new world to explore. I still can’t get down much of the stronger stuff, but I’m actually enjoying it.
10. The best road trip I’ve ever been on was with George. We set off late one morning for New Jersey. What took us about 13 hours (with a stop in DC to have dinner with a friend) seemed to only take a couple of hours. We had a blast talking and singing along the entire way up. I’ve never had a car trip go that quick. And it was quick even coming home. Something about that little yellow Sentra was a time warp of fun. That, and we also visited the Quick Stop from Clerks, the Marina Diner from Chasing Amy, and downtown Red Bank (from other Kevin Smith flicks). And we visited Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash several times–and met Walt Flanagan!
11. I haven’t been to a single hockey game of the 2008-2009 season. I feel bad for not going to support my team (the Nashville Predators!), but I really don’t miss the long drive and getting home late.
12. The first computer I ever encountered was my aunt’s 286. I wasn’t allowed to play any games (she had Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune) until I learned Hello World in BASIC.
13. I have been quoted in the newspaper from Twitter.
14. Fall Creek Falls is my favorite place to go camping. Night hiking is the best! I nearly fell of a cliff at 3 AM one night. Justin and I also took a short weekend camping trip there before school one year and built a log cabin fire with the wood stacked up to 6 feet tall (no exaggeration). It was the greatest fire I have ever built. We worked ALL DAY that Saturday hauling wood in from all over the place to build it. That same trip, we had some of our food stolen by raccoons. Did you know that they are strong enough (and smart enough) to move a 24-pack of Mello Yellos on top of a cooler to open it up? Yeah, me neither. Crafty little boogers.
15. I used to hate my full name, William Garrett Bartley, until the 10th or 11th grade when my friend, Andy, started calling me “Sir William Garrett” or “Lord William Garrett”. It had that cool English nobility ring to it. I started to appreciate my name much more then. What is also cool is that the letter count is 7-7-7.
16. If you do a Google search for “Garrett Bartley”, you will come up with at least hundreds of hits for quotes sites. The quote is, “Never forget what you need to remember.” Yes, that is my quote. I came up with it in 6th grade while hanging out with my friend, Derek. His quote that he came up with was “I think I thought I started to think at least once today.”
17. I want to do something really and truly great. Ever since I was little, I felt that there was something inside of me that was a little spark waiting to ignite that was profound, life-changing, and world-changing. I’m still searching for that idea. Really, truly, movie-like destined for greatness.
18. I once dug a 6-foot deep by about 10-foot wide whole in the sand at Fort Walton beach with my new friend Adam. That night, we stayed up playing Twisted Metal on the PlayStation until we lost our voices. My cousin and brother got paid by a lifeguard to fill in the hole.
19. The most fun I have ever had was over the 2-day weekend of my wedding (Friday 6/13 – Sunday 6/15). Amy, Geni, Adam, and myself set off for Butterfly Hollow on Friday afternoon. We took a detour through Cookeville to visit and eat dinner with our friend Marc. From there, we headed west for Gordonsville, TN in the dark and sang the few lines that we knew to “You Are My Sunshine” over and over again. The rest of the weekend before the wedding, we sat around and played the Catan card game. It’s kind of fun to play a 2-player card game with 4 people (2 teams of 2).
20. The reason I moved out was because my mom found 4 stray puppies at the St. Nicholas School (off of Standifer Gap and Gunbarrel). I had been living with my dad, dog-less, for 3-4 years. I have always wanted to always have a dog in my life. So, 8 years ago, on the night of my birthday (January 17), I left my birthday party at Sparky’s house with a few friends, and we set out to catch the pups. It took 2 hours with my arms under a shed in the sleet to get the dogs out. We rescued 3 and never saw the 4th again. I still think about what could happened to the 4th and what life would be like now if the 4th lived with its other siblings.
21. I married my 3rd girlfriend.
22. I’m a little obsessive-compulsive when it comes to cleaning things and trying to optimize things or do something efficiently. My wife and coworkers can testify to that on a daily basis. When someone loads the dishwasher at home or at work, I typically re-load it the way I like. Everything has a nice order to it, everything gets clean, and never does a glass wind up on the bottom rack and break.
23. I love science. Physics and the cosmos and the theory of everything. One of my goals in life is to be able to finally grasp the concept of the 11 dimensions and be able to “visualize” them in my head. It’s said to be beyond human grasp to do so. I just don’t think anyone has tried the right method.
24. Even though my deep passion for video games has subsided, I have accumulated all 3 of the current major console systems. The Wii for its uniqueness (and promise that it hasn’t delivered for me). The Xbox 360 for the game selection and its excellent media center abilities (when paired with a file server running TVersity), and the PlayStation 3 because it’s a Blu-ray player that also plays video games.
25. My favorite book is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I read the entire series while on a 5-day vacation to Key West with Amy. And I really can’t stand sci-fi.

I think we’re slowly getting over our diseases. I’m at work today, but couldn’t each much at lunch. It’ll probably take me a week to recover to normal eating habits…whatever those are. While the ear infections were clearing up, they really screwed with my equilibrium and caused me to be very dizzy for a few days. Then, it was the antibiotics that kept me out of the game. I took the last one last night around 8:00 PM and the pain and discomfort kept me awake until about 2 AM. I woke up and was still experiencing an upset stomach for most of the morning. Maybe by tonight I’ll be over antibiotic-tummy and can start recolonizing the good bacteria in my system.

Amy is having some side effects to her antibiotics as well, but I won’t delve into those. She had stomach pains for most of the morning and right up until lunch. We’re hoping to hear back from the doctors at Physician’s Health about her lab work to see if her meds are going to be good for whatever she has (or had, hopefully).

Whatever the case, we both need to be well in 12 days. We had a pretty crappy holiday season and don’t need to let that spill over into my birthday!

Amy and I have thoroughly tested this vow in the past 6 months (and then some!)…

It all started around Thanksgiving 2007. I got pretty sick to my stomach. Lots of severe nausea that lasted for days. Leading up to this, I had been experiencing worsening acid reflux, but I tended to it with Tums, Maalox, and Mylanta, and lots of it. Overall it was fairly manageable. But Thanksgiving seemed to change things. I went to the doctor and he gave me a month’s sample of Nexium. For the first month or so, things seemed to be getting better. After December, the free samples ran out, and my insurance wouldn’t cover a prescription for Nexium. Without insurance, a month’s supply would cost $300!!! I opted for Prilosec OTC and that worked just as well. For a couple of months, that seemed to do okay.

However, after a few months the nausea started to creep back. I kept up with my Prilosec regimen and the nausea after eating kept up. As the months went by, it go progressively worse. Around June to July (about the time Amy and I were getting married), it was getting to the point where I needed to see a doctor. With all the wedding and honeymoon and reception stuff going on, there wasn’t time for a doctor. Finally, in August, I got an appointment to see the doctor. He turned me over to a gastrointerologist. In September, I got in at the GI doc and got probed. He decided that the nausea came from my stomach not contracting to digest food properly. He gave me some meds that helped a little. After about a month, it just wasn’t doing it for me. He and my other doctor didn’t have anything for me, so I kinda took matters into my own hands.

It felt like I didn’t have enough acids in my stomach to digest food. I decided to take myself off of the proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) to get some acids back in my stomach to digest food. I armed myself with acid reducers and weened myself off the PPIs. October was a miserable month. Just about everything would trigger major acid reflux that I could taste. Fortunately, throughout November things seemed to gradually settle down. I was finally starting to return to some semblance of normal! The only thing is that it still took a while for food to digest. I usually wouldn’t get hungry again for 6-8 hours after a small meal. After nearly a year, I went from a pudgy 172 pounds to a skinny 138 pounds.

Then Thanksgiving came. We did our usual meals in Chattanooga without incidence. Olivia and Susan, however, came down with a stomach virus. It seemed to have cleared itself up by the time we got there, and Ian had thoroughly disinfected everyone and everything. We went up on the Saturday after Thanksgiving day and decided to stay the night. On Sunday coming back, the virus hit Amy in a nasty way. The trip, thanks to stops for Amy and horrible traffic, took 4 hours instead of 2. When we got home, Amy stayed in the bathroom for hours. Around midnight to 1 AM, we had to go to the ER. We spent the next 6-7 hours at the ER. They had to hook her up to an IV and put 3 liters of fluid back in her. They gave her medicine that managed to quell the upset stomach and let us go home and get to sleep. For the next day or so, the diarrhea kept up. I got a little bit of the diarrhea but managed to hang in there. We were out of work for 3 days while we replenished lost food and fluids and regained our strength. We had to get better by the next week. We had a Disney vacation scheduled for December 6-13.

Amy’s system seemed to settle down for the most part. Towards the end of the week in Disney, it was acting up again, but nothing Immodium didn’t seem to take care of. When we returned home, Amy was still having problems, but it seemed mild and manageable. No biggie. Starting the week before Christmas, a new symptom cropped up–cramping. It seemed to get worse as the week went on. That gets us to last night. There was blood. We went to the ER again (for the second time in 25 days), but there was a long wait. After about an hour, Amy was feeling better and we decided to come home to sleep it off and wait until morning. We woke up a little late this morning, and Amy went to the Physician’s Health on Hamilton Place Boulevard. She spent a couple of hours waiting until she went back. She saw their “doodoo doctor”. The doc thinks it could be one of three things: bacterial, amoebal, or some sort of ulcer collitis or something along those lines. They prescribed her some drugs to take care of bacteria or amoeba and gave her a stool sample kit. She got everything taken care of with the kit and took it back to Physician’s Health. Now we’re waiting on the results of the stool samples. She’s still cramping and I’m just trying to keep things clean and comfortable for her.

At this point, I’m making a New Year’s Resolution that for 2009, we’re going to get better and stay better. I’ll update when we know more. Hopefully the meds with take care of whatever is causing the cramping, but it may take a day or two.

I’ve been saving up for a couple of years for a replacement laptop for my poor, old, busted eMachines m5310. The eMachine still runs, but it’s falling apart at the seams. There are cracks through the plastic, everything is a little wobbly, and half of the hinge has locked up and broken. Oh yeah, and the battery is dead. Other than that, it runs like a champ. It has issues starting up on the first try (a motherboard problem since I had it replaced), but that’s a quick fix, too. However, it was time to retire it a long, long time ago.

Once the eMachine started falling apart on me, I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop from work. It had a little 13″ display that was just too tiny for me to use. I felt so cramped, that even web browsing was uncomfortable. Much less actually trying to use it to do work or anything.

So, I gradually saved up for about 2-2.5 years, putting away a little bit at a time to save up for a new laptop. At the time, I wasn’t sure what. However, after seeing how well MacBook Pros have faired in the hands of many friends, I decided that I wanted one. In August, I had finally saved up enough money to get the basic MacBook Pro (MBP) without any upgrades. Upon researching, I discovered that there were solid rumors circulating that Apple might be doing updates to the MBP line in September. And I waited. September came and nothing happened for the MBP line. The next speculation was for October. I decided to hold out a little longer, lest I be saddened by something ultra-cool hitting the shelves and I jumped on it too early.

October came, and sure enough, there was a major update to the MBP. All new case fab from a single “brick” of aluminum, a button-less glass trackpad, bigger hard drive, DDR3 RAM, dual-video chipset, etc. As soon as the product announcement ended, I hit the Apple.com store and bought one. I got the 15.4″ 2.4 GHz model, upgraded to a 320GB hard drive, added iWork ‘08, and got an AppleCare protection plan. With an education discount, the total came out to around $2,500. I hit up Crucial and ordered a 4GB DDR3 memory kit to upgrade the RAM as well. Looking back on it, I wish I had just done the RAM upgrade through Apple. There wasn’t much of a price difference, and it would have saved the hassle of having to open the laptop up and upgrade the RAM.

When I finally received my laptop after about one and a half weeks, I couldn’t wait to abuse it. But, with Mac OS X, there’s not much to abuse. I installed FireFox, Darwine (for what it’s worth), and snagged CodeWeaver’s stuff when they were giving it away. I tried several times to get an install of Windows XP SP2 running in Bootcamp, and finally succeeded on my 7th try. I don’t know why it was so hard, but it finally worked that last try. I thought I’d use Bootcamp for on-the-go gaming with the fancy nVidia 9600M 256MB video card. So far, all I’ve really used Bootcamp for is Quicken. So far, it feels like a waste. I installed VMware Fusion 2 to be able to access my Bootcamp partition from within OS X. That way I don’t have to reboot every time I want to run Quicken. Lately, I have been second-guessing that and am tempted to install a very minimal Windows XP virtual machine setup just for Quicken. VMware won’t let you suspend your Basecamp partition since it could be booted by the machine. Suspending a virtual machine would probably be much faster than waiting every time for the Bootcamp machine to boot up and shut down every time I use Quicken.

So far, I’ve really only used my expensive new toy for Quicken and web browsing. I have great apps like iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Keynote, Garage Band, and, yes, Photo Booth awaiting to unlock my creative potential, but I have nothing I want to use them for. I don’t take pictures enough to want to put together a fancy slideshow movie, and I rarely, if ever, make movies. What do I do with all this creative potential and no creative juices?!

There are only two things that really drive me nuts about my new toy. The first one is the almost razor-sharp aluminum edge on the front of the case where my arms wrest that starts to scratch and chafe after extensive typing (such as this blog post). The second one is my complete inability to find decent, free software. For Windows, I can find just about anything I want to do for free pretty easily. For Mac, it seems like everything costs money. I figure this is because everyone is jumping on the Mac craze bandwagon and hitting the emerging Mac market. Maybe it’s still too early for a lot of the quality stuff to hit the open-source/freeware platform just yet. I mean, these things are really expensive and buying one just to spend time and effort to build and give away free stuff seems daunting.

I guess I’m getting along with “the switch” fairly well. I’m on the lookout for any good freeware simple graphics apps (like Paint.net). I’d like to find a freeware Zend-clone if one exists. And may take advantage of MacFuse. Any tips or tricks anyone could pass along would be helpful. And, no, I don’t want the Gimp.

We’re doing Paws in the Park again this year. If you like dogs (or animals for that matter), donate or sign-up by clicking the image!

One of my pictures taken while running around at the “Alstom Employee Day on the River” made it as the Chattarati Photo of the Day!

Click the picture to visit the Chattarati post.

With a few of my eBay auctions failing, I have fallen to trying out Amazon merchant services to try and sell what doesn’t make it.

Click on the graphic to check out the my Amazon store front..

I’m attempting to clean out and sell a bunch of stuff laying around the house. Partially to free up room, and mostly to raise the last bit of funding and savings that I need to buy a new MacBook Pro when the new models are eventually released (hopefully in October). I’m just a couple hundred dollars shy of my goal, so I’m hoping all this auctioning stuff will pay off (at least enough to buy a combo #1 from Chick-fil-a).

If anyone in Chattanooga decides to bid and wins, I’ll personally deliver the item to you. Free shipping!

You can see a current listing of everything up for auction by clicking on the image above. I have the bulk of my items already up on eBay but have some more to go, including:

• 2 PS/2 KVM switches
• A broken Canon Rebel XT with all docs, cables, and an extra battery
• Coca-Cola beanie plushes
• 4 large Coca-Cola bears
• An Anita Dr. road sign
• 2 collectible Coca-Cola calendars (2000 & 2003)

Keep an eye on my seller page for the updates. If anything catches your eye, please bid. Thanks!

And help them get $5,000! Here’s the message from my friend, Megan:

Hey everybody, Vote for Mckamey. We sure could use 5 thousand dollars. please please!!!! Just use the link below. For the out of towners, we’re in Chattanooga, TN. Thanks a lot!
– Megan

The link is HERE. It’s kinda tough to find the “Vote Here” link in the page, so I’ll give you a little help..

More pictures in my Flickr set