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| So i've only done 3 paid gigs so far, and here are the results:
Angelina's Baptism:
http://www.rapanut.com/albums/Angelina's%20Baptism/
Terri's Wedding:
http://www.rapanut.com/terri
Aydin's Baptism:
http://www.rapanut.com/aydin
9 more weddings to go!
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| Hello again everyone,
So alot has changed in the past 6 months. I got a new job with Kaiser at their hospital in south San Jose in the Corporate Compliance department. In hindsight, the job with the state was awesome. My coworkers were great, the travel around California was kool, it was as stress free as work can be, hours were.... convenient for my golf game, and my boss was a good dude who had alot of faith in me. It was just that time for a change and to pursue new challenges.
I was really excited to start this Kaiser job for alot of reasons. Firstly, I pretty much grew up at this hospital, and it's really kool to be a part of the day to day here. My dad worked here for 16 years, a large part of my family friends that I grew up with all work at the hospital too, and I volunteered here for 4 years during high school.
The work itself has kept me really busy. The hardest part so far has been learning the details about daily operations for each department and finding out who the go to people are in each department not only locally here at the medical center, but regionally and nationally. Other than that, being on the operations side of things is interesting, so we'll see how things go in the next couple months/years.
Outside of work, the golf craze has died down for 3 reasons:
1) My schedule with this new job isn't as open, so no more random golf outings on the weekdays.
2) I started getting into photography alot more, doing weddings and stuff on the side now.
3) I stopped getting better! haha, might be the main reason =p
So yah, this photography thing is pretty recent, and has taken off pretty well. After covering 2 weddings for friends and family, I thought i'd try posting an ad on craigslist for fun. Little did I know that this would lead to me spending $4000 on new camera gear and no free saturday's with 10 weddings in the next 3 months!
At first, I was just hoping to get some more experience and more chances to practice taking pictures cuz I thought it was fun. But now, after all these gigs are done, not only will I have alot more shooting experience, but I'll have some sweet camera gear I thought would take me a really long to to save up for and upgrade. Some other big pluses, this hobby not only funds itself, by filling up my saturdays it also stopped me from spending more money on golf and going out =p If only I could make money off golf... that would make it so much better.
The first version of my website is www.rapanut.com, but i'm still looking around for other possible hosts or services.
No big vacation plans, still saving up PTO. Hoping to go to the Philippines in the spring, maybe hop over to Thailand, japan, or HK. Also looking for a short trip in September, possibly NYC, but nothing final yet.
I guess that's it for now, I should probly get back to work now... see you all in another 6 months if not sooner!
~Mark
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| Sunday at Pebble Beach with the pros/celebs.
w00t!
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| Hmm, first time logging into xanga in a couple months, and i didn't recognize this new interface at all. Took me a minute to find out how to get to my blog, and then add a new entry, but i'm here now wewt=p
With all of these new additions trying to keep up with myspace and facebook, I get this lurking feeling that xanga is going to die soon. Although it's no longer one of the top blogging sites with so many options out there, i'm glad that Xanga is no longer part of the pop-culture fad.
Before Xanga and blogging in general, i had a tripod page where I thought it was really kool to have your own space to keep a journal of your thoughts, and share a lil info about yourself with others. my first blog ever.
Then Xanga came out, and i liked how easy it was to add journal entires, keep track of your thoughts, and also be involved with other people's journals and continue some sort of online conversation.
As xanga became more and more popular, it's reason for being a destination point evolved from being just a blog site. As more people joined, e-popularity became a new target, where having a huge number on your friends list became the new priority.
The next step of the xanga fad became file sharing. Before the age of Youtube and centralized video sharing, I remember when random funny videos were shared through email. Someone would come across a random video, you forward the link or file, and everyone has a laugh. Once this trend entered the xanga zone, people would say with pride "oh did you see this funny clip yet? I posted it on my xanga". It almost became a competition to see who could post the latest funny clip first.
I think at this point i became turned off by what xanga had become, so i turned to other websites like friendster, myspace, and facebook. But then this entire process started over again in the myspace/facebook world, except this time its exponentially worse. With the Rupert Murdoch takeover of myspace, it became another corporate tool used to shamelessly promote anything and everything. It's not too often that i don't get requests like "hey, can you check out my new CD?" or random profiles linked to porn, or random people just looking for adds so that they can get their 'friends' number as high as possible.
At least the facebook environment is more controlled and hasn't sold out completely, but we'll see how long they'll hold out until the next billion dollar offer.
OK, enough ranting.
Now i have come back to xanga to blog again, to keep track of my thoughts, what i've done, where i've been, and what i hope to do. Back to the basics.
Hello again xanga world!
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Finally got a chance to see him live in SF at the Mezzanine, and the show was tiiiiiite. it was a pretty small venue, so being 3 feet away from the stage, surrounded by hip hop heads from around the bay, and Common up front flowin not about dubs, hoes, bein a ballah and big pimpin, but keepin it about hip hop, peace, love, solidarity, and all that good schtuff. Also ran into Surime and Ariane on the floor too =D what a great night!
if you haven't heard his new album, check it out!
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