Patrick’s Random Thoughts

This is a photo that we took of Hunter Patrick’s room prior to his arrival.  Much time was spent by Emily and me to make sure that this room was just right for the arrival of our little buddy.  Hope you enjoy.

Well since we last spoke, we have been all over the place.  The first trip we took was to North Carolina to visit with Emily’s brother Drew and his lovely wife Fran.  We ran around the Apex-Raleigh area and took a bunch of pictures and shopped… boy, did we shop.  You can see the images from the weekend here.  We had a blast and towards the end of the trip Emily’s parents made their way up to North Carolina, and it was a lot of fun having the family together.

We returned to Orlando for a weekend, and then we took off to the capital of Florida, Tallahassee.  Our purpose in Tallahassee was two-fold: going to a wedding of one of Emily’s college friends and to tour the campus of one Emily Hayes (Griffin at the time).  The campus was dead being that it was summer session, but it was cool to see all the buildings and to see the mighty Doak!  I will have pictures to post in the next week so stay tuned for that. 

Between the trips I have been doing some wedding photography assisting for the photographer who did our wedding, Greg Dillon.  You can check out his website here.  I am having a lot of fun doing that and learning a bunch, too.

We have a few trips still planned for the summer.  Just so you folks up north know, we travel during our summer because it is so damn hot down here.  We are going to upstate New York over the 4th of July.  We also have trips planned to Italy and to Wisconsin, both incredibly picturesque locations.  Stay tuned to Hayesvison.com; I am sure we will be doing fun stuff for those trips.

 Thanks for reading!

I am testing to see if I can play an audio track.

Some of you are probably reading this going, huh?  IF you have not had a chance to check out The Office on NBC it is an absolute must see.  The show is pretty self explanatory, it is a bunch of people working in an office.  The funny part about the show is, all the different personalities that exist and how they all get along.  You can of course relate to some of the personalities and compare them to people that you work with everyday.  Like the saying goes if you don’t recognize a certain personality, it might be you!

The show is absolutely hilarious.  For those of you who watch the show as religiously as we do, I am sure you are pickin’ up what I am puttin’ down.  Since Thursday is a long time away, check out the website here. 

My favorite character on the show is Dwight Schrute (pictured left).  He keeps a blog at NBC.com and you can check it out here.  Steve Carell is the main character, Michael Scott, and he is so out of control you can’t help but laugh!  I can say so much more but take my word for it, watch the show, you will thank me for it!

I first want to thank all of you for actually coming to Hayesvision.com.  I know it isn’t the best website in existence, but I have a lot of fun working on it, so thanks for giving me something to do.  I hope you have had a chance to check out the blogs that have popped up on this site and I encourage you to give it a go if there is something you feel like writing about.

I am so proud of myself because you will see to the right, there is a random image that appears when you come to my blog now.  This image is pulled from my fancy new gallery that I have installed.  If you see a picture you like, you can click on it and it will take you to the larger version in the gallery.  Who knows, maybe you will see a picture of yourself!

If you have not taken a second to check out the new Hayesvision.com photo gallery I want you to do so right now by clicking here!  Go ahead I will wait.  Did you really go there?  Anyway I didn’t write the code so I can’t take that credit.  I did find it though so that should count for something.  Anyway help me make it fun by voting on your favorite and least favorite images.  I also welcome anyone who is interested in hosting their images on Hayesvision.com to contact me at patrick@hayesvision.com.  I will set up your album where you can add your own albums and let people see your images.

Anyway that is all for now but have fun and don’t forget to vote!

For those of you who know me (I start out a lot of these this way, I think), you know I don’t normally read books for entertainment. However, I have been persuaded to read The Davinci Code.  Now, the only books that I normally read have some sort of benefit to me after I have finished the book.  Good examples of books that I normally read are: photography, web site development, and stock market books… you get the picture.  Well, Emily felt that I needed to broaden my horizons a little and actually read a novel.  And only because there is a movie coming out in a month, I have decided to join the 12 billion other Americans and actually read this book. 

I am a firm believer that movies are a far more efficient way to take in a story for many reasons.  First, you get to eat popcorn, something you can’t do while reading a book (no free hands).  Second, it only takes 2 hours to consume the whole story.  This is compared to the 3 years it will probably take me to actually read this book.  Is three pages per day a good pace?  And finally, there are a lot more pictures in a movie.  In fact, at 30 frames per second, a two hour movie has about 216,000 pictures.  How cool is that?  Part of what convinced me to read this particular book is that it is the illustrated version, complete with pictures of all the artwork to which the book refers.  No really… it has pictures.  Anyway, I will keep you posted on my progress. 

Well for those of you who know me you know I get on health kicks about once every year like most other people.  Mine never happens over the new year, mostly because I am too lazy to make new year’s resolutions.  I normally get my kicks in the March to April time frame, probably because my birthday is right around then.  Well this year is no different, and since I just turned 30, I think I am even more motivated. 

So over the past few days I have been doing a lot of reserach on vitamins, ideal body weight, exercise, and eating right.  I know that sounds like a lot to bite off at one time but when I get on my kicks, there is no stopping me (at least for a month).  What I hope to do in this post and future ones Is give some helpful websites that I have found so that if you are interested in some of the things I am at this point, you will enjoy the websites equally as much as I did.

The first place to start in my opinion is figure out how much you weigh and then how much you should weigh.  There is a great website for this here.  There are four different calculators that give you a range of what you should weigh.  Once you figure this out then you can determine how many calories you need to sustain your current weight here.  You enter a little bit of information and out pops the number of calories that you can eat to sustain your current weight.  If you take that number and subtract 500 calories that should be your target calorie intake to lose 1 pound per week.

I think that this point you have probably had enough for one day.  Check those two out and I will return with more healthful information.  I have also been kicking around the idea of having a section on hayesvision.com with some information like this.  Maybe even an exercise challenge that everyone could participate in.  Just thinking.  Leave some comments and let me know what you think.

The NCAA Tournament is one of my favorite times of year as I believe I have mentioned before.  What simply amazes me about the tournament is how completely random the results are in all of the different pickem’ pools.  Going into the final four I believe there were like 4 people out of all the people on espn.com that had their brackets entirely correct.  That is out of millions, only four had it all right.  I believe 3 of the four of them were George Mason graduates and the fourth thought that George Mason was George Washington.

Leave it to Hayesvision.com though to extend this madness a little further.  Emily Hayes, yes my wife (and the writer of her own blog), who knows absolutely nothing about basketball, won the 2006 Hayesvision.com pickem pool.  When asked what her strategy was she said, “Well I used to know someone who went to that school and I didn’t like them so I am not picking that team.”  That is her strategy- if she liked someone from there, they advanced. If she had bad memories of someone or something from that area, she picked that team to lose.

Now I know that probably frustrates some of you, as it does myself.  She was competing against people who had followed basketball for the entire year.  You watched hundreds of games and Sportscenter nightly.  All of that just to lose to someone who picked a team based on a friendly mascot.   That is why you have to love NCAA Tournament time!

Since I have taken such a liking to photography I have searched many forums and websites in my search for knowledge.  One of the coolest things that I have come across is a website called Shutterstock.com.  Basically what Shutterstock does is allows you to upload images, that you take, onto their website and sell them to anyone looking for images.  There are a number of photo buyers who need images for books, websites magazines and so forth that look to these websites to get cheap images quick. 

Shutterstock sells your image for roughly $1.00 and you end up getting $.20 per download.  I know it does not seem like a lot of money but if enough people download your image you could make enough for a cup of coffee, Starbucks coffee that is.  The purpose of selling your images on these sites is not so much to be the next millionaire, but to have fun seeing if someone wants to purchase your images.

So if you have a digital camera or a scanner and a film camera, give it a shot.  It is a lot of fun and may make you a couple extra bucks in the process.