I recently was reading the news feeds for the Fargo Forum and came across an article about an article that was published by National Geographic on the dying towns of North Dakota. Needless to say, this article has irked many a native North Dakotan. To read the article you would think that North Dakota itself is a dying state and has a monopoly on ghost towns.

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A lot has happened since the last time I wrote up a blog entry. We've taken a few trips back to Fargo, had an earthquake, I've started working on a couple of side projects based on the Source Engine, and we've started to make plans to move back to Fargo.

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It's been awhile since I posted here, but in my recent attempts at photographing the hummingbirds that come to our feeder I've come to the conclusion that hummingbirds are EVIL! People must be warned! Below is a post I made to a photography forum I have been frequenting.

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A couple friends of ours from Fargo planned a trip to Vegas last week. Originally, they were going to get married there, but they called off the wedding and just went there for a vacation since their tickets were already paid for. It was also our 2 year wedding anniversary, and since we had gotten married in Vegas ourselves, it seemed like a good idea to meet up with them there. So we booked a room at the Excalibur and took some vacation time.



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I finished up a roll of B&W film this weekend and spent some time developing my first roll of home-developed film. I'm not a stranger to developing B&W as I did it quite a bit in a photography class I took at NDSU, but this is the first roll I developed at home, with my very own setup. At school the chemicals were all pre-mixed, they had a sink with water at just the right temperature, and they had a light-tight closet for loading the negatives into the developing tank.



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When I first got my wife to try EQ2 on the test server she said, "I like the quests, but I'm not so sure about the killing."

Last night, while trying to watch the Sopranos, she said "Hurry up and get in here to help me kill these Qeynosians!" I think her favorite thing to do in EQ2 right now is to patrol around the Commonlands looking for Qeynosians trying to prey on the weaker players. You should hear her cackle in glee as she one-shot kills greens with her master level nuke.

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With the weather turning rainy again, I haven't had a chance to pull out the camera for the last week or so. That's just given me more time to play on the new PvP servers for EQ2, though. So far PvP has been a lot of fun.

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I was going to write up a review on this Thai restaurant yesterday, but I figured that to really do it justice, I should wait until I visited there again so it was fresh in my memory. It is just down the street a few blocks from our apartment, so we decided to go there for lunch again today. I now have the burning spiciness of the food in my mouth as I sit and type this.

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I had seen Panorama a few times along Bascom when taking a detour home from work. What attracted me to it was the fact the soaped windows advertising "$6.99 New York Steak" and "Now serving Chinsese food." Since my wife loves steak, and she loves Chinese food, I figured it'd be worth it to stop in for lunch one day.

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It's been awhile since I've written up a restaurant review. To be honest, we've only eaten at a few new places lately. I'll start with the one we ate lunch at today since it is fresh in my mind. When I get time, I'll go back and try and write a bit about the other 2 places that stick out in my mind.


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A few weeks ago, when I got my paycheck I noticed that I was nearing the maximum vacation accrual amount of 240 hours. Since I don't want to lose any vacation time I could accrue, I decided to take this week off.

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Last night I sat down at my computer after work and decided it was time to give the photo gallery on Rogue a makeover. I decided to download the latest Coppermine and installed it on Rogue. Coppermine has some nice batch processing stuff that helped a lot. I created 74 albums to match the 74 album entries I had in the old custom-made gallery. Copied all the old JPGs over to the album directory for Coppermine, then spent a good couple of hours running Coppermine's batch file add feature for each of the 74 albums. I like the results a lot.



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