JesseParker.com

That's what we were. John, me, Darren and Casey Christ. I'm in black and orange in case you can't tell us apart. We did look a lot more alike back then. Good thing we had contrasting track suits. I blatantly stole this photo from a collection of photos Rob Scanned. To see the rest of them, click here . What year was this rob? Those tracksuits were cool in 1st grade I believe, so that would be 1988?

Anthony Sloan is someone from the forums of MTBR.com who generally post's some excellent photos, and some pretty good commentary to go along with them. He recently traveled to Cambodia and made a nice site talking about the trip. Very eye opening, and some really good photographs to boot.

Went for a ride at Palmer on Sunday, it was 60 degrees out. The trail was dry in all the spots that at least saw a little bit of sun. I'd say about 75%, something like that. There is a lot of variety in this park, with a suprising location right smack in the middle of Colorado Springs. From smooth hardpack clay To Painful climbing up slickrock and gravel to a nice mesa. Gee I wonder why it's called Yucca trail? There was something interesting going on in downtown Colorado Springs. I saw this huge dust cloud and thought "those must be some strong winds", then got blasted with a good 50-60mpg gust. Boy I are smart, that's what my degrees brought me I guess... Turns out this was the result of gold mining and the sub-prime lending crisis. The gold mining back in the day dumped all it's tailings somewhere called "west mesa", and a hundred years later a developer began building houses on top of them. Then the housing slump hit and the developer ran o...

So I looked up the president of Synthes and in 2004 he was the richest person in Switzerland. Then he sort of dropped of the list. A bit more looking around and I found he's been giving alot of his money away for various things including conservation in southern Utah. So that's good right? Work was quite hectic this week, I attended an orientation session primarily for product development people from PA to understand what goes on in the manufacturing of the things they design. It was basically showing them that things don't materialize from their computer screens, that there were a lot of people and hard work behind turning their designs into 1000 parts a month of output from the factory. It was a a lot of fun and i learned a bunchy about what goes on in product development and in other departments in Monument. Basically I learned Synthes is a good place to work for everyone. Then I tried to do my regular job at the same time, working 11 hour days all week. It wasn...

So in undergrad I thought it was cool when Professor Robb Larsen was talking about working on stealth technology for Grummen or something. He said he couldn't talk to anyone about what he did, and for the most part still can't. At Synthes I signed a nondisclosure agreement before I even walked in for the interview. That means no cameras, no sharing anything that hasn't been "authorized" for the public, blah blah. Granted some of the things that go on in there are pretty proprietary and the result of 25 years of perfecting a method, but I don't think it's very cool now that I'm working in a place that does things I can't share. It's nothing like Grummen, I just wish I could take pictures of the cool machines and robots I work with. Or explain how something is made. Oh well, I can think of only a few people who would really care about that sort of thing anyways. I spent all last week learning a new type of programming for automated machine...

After a few weeks of work I started to develop some new aches and pains. I started to get some sciatic pain in my legs, and my right hand went slightly numb. The sciatica was new, and the hand was from a snowboarding injury at Lost Trail Pass 8 years ago. The little tip of the coller bone protruding past the shoulder joint is bent down from breaking it, and causing pressure on the nerve going into my hand. Despite the fact it's scary nerve stuff, I've been able to control it with some stretching and a bit of shoulder exercise. I actually went to PT for this before, so I just remembered some of the exercises I did then. Now it's mostly gone. The sciatica also went away with the addition of some stretches and changing my posture. Apparently I slouch when I walk. Of course me slouching looks the same as me walking upright, but it affected my back nonetheless. So new posture and strtching has pretty much made that go away too. My low back also feels better from the st...

The shoutbox is having issues so I took it out. I'll put a different one in if that's what popular demand wants. Seems the regular comments get more use these days..

The bacon, not the eggs.. sheesh

Meet Porter, our new rat. We stuck with the food theme for the name, and decided a good porter was a match for this little guy. Triscuit died about a month ago so we got this little guy from the local shelter shortly thereafter to give Olive someone to hang out with. Rats are very social, and they do alot of playing with eachother and stuff like that. It's not so good to have a single rat, as they get lonely. they both realllly enjoy gnawing on things. Olive got sick of playing tug a war with Porter and decided it was time to try and drag the wood pulp chew toy into the cage, eventually getting it in. Yes, that was an entire post about two rats. Someday I'll post about a new kitty or a puppy and it will seem a bit more normal. I think I'm going to go make an espresso now.