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Costa Rica

I just got back from my trip to Costa Rica and I am still recovering. My connection got screwed up coming home due to maintenance on the plane and I ended up in the wrong city. The trip was fantastic and I really feel I was able to see a lot more of the country since I had a rental car. The driving was really not as bad as I had heard it would be. The roads out there are not nearly as good as in the states but at no time did I get stuck or genuinely feel like I was not safe. I traveled with my lovely girlfriend who made the trip far better.

Over the 9 days we spent in Costa we stuck mostly to the coast on the Pacific side. I visited 8 different beaches and one rainforest with a cyan river called Rio Celeste. we stayed at an AirBnB that was also a rescue shelter / organic farm, a resort, a hotel in the clouds, and then a Hilton by the airport.

Starting at the AirBnB, we met the host and got settled in. She told us about a restaurant in a cave that you had to take a boat to and that had entertainment on Fridays. This was just the kind of thing we were looking for so we made plans to hit a local grocery store, unload, then off to the cave! We, of course, had no energy after the store to go out and ended up going to bed early. Then, after being dead asleep for about 2.5 hours, we woke to pounding on our door. It was the long term guest in the place next to ours. She said only, “You’re dome light’s on!” Katie instantly feared that this is how we would die. This was their plan to separate us, then murder us. She decided to send me out with an under-powered LED flashlight to take care of the light. I sighed, put on my pants and set out to my inevitable death. There were chickens, dogs, and lizards all over the place and high winds that were causing all sorts of noises I found indistinguishable from that of a serial killer stalking my every step. I can be said that my journey was as brief as possible. I returned to find my partner on this adventure completely fallen asleep and no credit for my heroics were to be had that dark night.

Before we knew it, our 2 nights were spent and we got in the car and moved on to our resort. We booked a place that we didn’t know where we would be staying until a couple days before we arrived. As luck would have it, we were placed at a large resort called Dreams. The place sits on the beach damn close to Nicaragua. If we rented a kayak we were told we could accidentally float there is we were not careful. Dreams is like any other all inclusive resort. The food and liquor are included and you don’t have to worry about anything. It is basically day care for adults. You don’t have any responsibility to do anything at all. That is really nice for a couple days but then the boredom sets in. Having all of your needs met so easily can surprisingly unsettling. I guess the best way I can describe it is a loss of overall purpose. You have explored everything you can at the resort, tried all the food, drank all of the drinks and you just coast from there. There is no exhilaration of finding something new. I am not saying I had a bad time there but it does get old rather quickly. This was the second resort like that I had stayed at and I think I need a break for a while to have more time to explore and get into trouble.

After the resort, we were off to drive up a mountain on the worst road I had ever driven on. It was fantastic! We were in a little 4×4 and driving up to our hotel nestled in the rainforest was a really cool thing to do. We were lost and took the long way around and just before we arrived I was having serious doubts but we made it nonetheless. We ended up at the Tenorio Volcano National Park and the scenery there was nothing short of amazing! On the west coast, there was a lot of green but this place was an honest to god rainforest with better views, greener greens, and more rain and growth everywhere.

I enjoyed my time in Costa Rica very much and I can’t wait to do some more international traveling. I don’t know where I will end up but I am thinking it will be somewhere in Asia. We shall see!

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Getting Started with Bitcoin: Part 2

I have had over a month now to let the whole idea of bitcoin settle in my life and I have only used it a very small amount. There are still very few merchants that accept bitcoin so that makes things hard. I did buy an SSL from ssls.com and everything seemed really easy. I just selected Bitcoin as my payment type then I had a short window to send a specific about of Bitcoin to an address. I sent it out in time and it went through without a hitch.

Recently, a buddy of mine was wanting to buy some bitcoin to see what it was all about so I sent him a little bitcoin and he paid me in cash. What I did find a little weird was that on my coinbase account, it showed as pending for quite a while, like at least an hour. But it all went through and the small amount I sent was instantly deducted from my coinbase wallet.

Since I opened my account, the value of bitcoin has appreciated to ~$425. If I had put in a lot of money, that would have been a fantastic return of over 10% in less than a month.  But, my coinbase account currently limits my instant buy transactions to $100 / week and slow bank buys to $2,500 per day. If using the bank method I guess I could invest a nice chunk of money over several days but that is not practical like an online brokerage account is for stocks when there are no caps as long as you have the money in your account to trade with.

So this seems to be the main issue with bitcoin as a mainstream currency. Right now, it seems much more like it would be used as an investment to hold on to and eventually cash out for “real money.” At least, that’s how it feels to me. I don’t even see 1% of my buying being viable for bitcoin. This leads me to the idea that when the masses have a realization that a money is not being used as money, what worth does it really have? At that point I could see the bottom falling out and the price of bitcoin dropping dramatically. But, on the other hand, nobody pays for anything with gold or silver and they seem to retain their value pretty well.

Also, Bitcoin has another more nefarious use. Given the fact that this currency can be used without any personally identifiable information, it is popular for use in black markets. People can download Tor, and find their way to sites that will hook them up to people willing to sell drugs, sex, weapons, or even assassinations I have heard. The currency of choice? Bitcoin. This is where I would guess a lot of the transnational use of bitcoin comes in to play. Eventually though, you have to convert that bitcoin into cash to really use it to buy anything like stuff off of Amazon, eating out in a restaurant, paying your rent, etc.

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Stacking Silver Rings

Sterling Silver Stacking Rings

I have completed my first ever set of rings. I made 9 in total and only ruined one on the process. That reminded me of my old EverQuest days where as you start out with a poor skill in a trade you would ruin a lot of your raw materials. Anyway, I bought a ring mandrel and and some square sterling silver wire and got to work with the aid of YouTube and a some reading. With a set of ring sizers, I measured my victim, er em…girlfriend, and went to work. To figure out how long to cut the metal I just calculated the circumference by measuring the diameter of the correct sizing ring and cut a little larger, then filed to make a perfectly smooth end. Solder it and you have a rings you can make perfectly round on a mandrel. Really easy actually.

I made 5 rings with gemstones, and 4 that are plain. I figured that would allow the most versatility for changing it up. These are only about 1 mm thick and meant to be pretty dainty. I used pre-made bezel cups because making 4 mm bezels my hand didn’t sound fun. Since my stones were round there was no reason to do a custom bezel anyway. I hammered the rings with a steel ball-peen hammer to give them a texture. In doing so, it added about 0.25 of a size to the rings because the metal spread out a bit.