{"id":2012,"date":"2014-01-26T20:57:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T01:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/updates.xephalon.net\/?p=2012"},"modified":"2014-01-26T20:57:20","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27T01:57:20","slug":"cold-cash-tech-fails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/2014\/01\/26\/cold-cash-tech-fails\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold Cash & Tech Fails"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2014.01.26.a\"<\/a>\"2014.01.26.b\"<\/a>The Retina Fellow’s Forum<\/a> took place in the Windy City this year in the midst of January. The snow and chill assured that all 85 of us graduating fellows remained a captive audience as we sat through 2 days of back-to-back didactic sessions, industry-sponsored endorsements, free instrument\/lens giveaways, career guidance, and an epic bowl-off at 10-Pin Lounge<\/a>. The mix of sushi and nasty bowling balls was a strange combination, but I came away a lucky winner of Insight’s<\/a> shameless “Great CA$H Giveaway.” This visit to Chicago also gave me a chance to finally try out Rick Bayliss’ Frontera Grill<\/a>, although the tacos, taquitos, and enchiladas, while good, did not live up to the hype. With the cash winnings, as well as several other recent, more merit-based awards, I decided to expand my disk space real estate, with a pair of 3TB WD Red’s<\/a> and a Samsung 840 EVO<\/a> SSD, as part of my grand scheme for better data storage, sharing, and backup. I also got my hands on a lightly-used Traktor Kontrol S4<\/a> MIDI controller, which I bought for a fraction of the MSRP after months of bargain hunting on Ebay. With the help of a nifty online course from Udemy<\/a>, my new toy has allowed me to take my first plunge into music mixing and the world of DJ’ing. Sadly, my financial luck streak has also been offset by a number of tech misfortunes, with my laptop LCD panel pooping out, the SATA port of my Red drive snapping off, and even my trusty 18-55mm Nikkor lens failing all within a few weeks. To ward off the bad mojo, I took my parents out to a nice dinner at Poole’s Diner<\/a> to kick start their 2 week visit to spend my birthday and Chinese New Year with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Retina Fellow’s Forum took place in the Windy City this year in the midst of January. The snow and chill assured that all 85 of us graduating fellows remained a captive audience as we sat through 2 days of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}