Today was a fantastic day. Paal flew in to Minneapolis yesterday afternoon so I ducked out of work early to meet him at home. We proceded to geek out and watch the movie Serenity, pick up a case of Fat Tire beer (which came back to the cities today) and buy an HD-DVD player. The night was full of lots of Guitar Hero, eating, drinking and concluded with us falling asleep while watching what I have decided is my favorite movie of all time – The Fountain, in HD-DVD. Good god is that movie great, especially in HD. Today was laid back. We went to Lindy’s, this place up by where I work that has the best burgers that exist (if you can’t tell yet, Paal demands the best of everything apparently). I kept getting phone calls from work which is the downfall of taking a day off and forgetting to put an out of office email reply up but that stopped in the afternoon. After lunch we went over to Mark Lepke’s place to play Wii sports in which I learned Paal bowls like a weak little girl and I can’t golf to save my life. Deep dish pizza (real deep dish that is several inches thick) from a new pizza place downtown for dinner added to our stellar food record today and now Paal is out with some other guys he knows while I work on a paper for school write this post. I’m predicting a good time at the bars followed by some Guitar Hero to conclude the evening. Good times.
Category Archives: Friends
Washington Vacation
Well, I’m wrapping up my vacation to the Northwest today which has been very relaxing. I flew to Spokane last Friday which was a bit of an endeavor with all the snow but I’ve had all week to stay up late and sleep in. The weekend and first half of this week was spent with my long time family friend Leah. She’s going to WSU getting her MBA so I got to hang around Pullman where the school is, go to the WSU/USC game (which went into double OT), do some nice scenic jogging through the hills and started learning how to really use my new digital SLR camera. Wednesday I flew from Spokane to Seattle to meet up with Dave. Great to see him again since it’s been a year and half since we got together last. We hit up happy hour immediately after the airport and then came back to his place to watch the Departed and drink scotch. It was probably the manliest day I’ve ever had. Continue reading
A New Blog, An Updated Reader
Today is the faithful day I pull the plug on Blogger and move to WordPress. The recent Blogger update pretty much destroyed any custom work I had done for the layout and I wasn’t able to use any of the new features without using their pre-determined templates. So I started learning WordPress a couple months ago. It took until a few weeks ago to get the hang of things and be able to import all the old posts and comments from Blogger. Everything is here and accounted for now. There’s still a lot of other things I want to change on the site, the photos, music, and movies section are just place holders. The blog is the only thing that really is functional right now. Also, since the new Blogger has been finalized I had a chance to go through the Blogulution Reader and update everyone’s feeds so the dates and links are correct again. If there’s anything wrong with the Reader let me know.
Cleaning Up at Poker Night
Last night I went to Jim’s to play poker. We played 2 games, the first of which I lasted maybe half way through – nothing special. The second though was the most bizarre stroke of luck/skill I’ve ever had while playing cards. We went from 6 to 4 people at the table and I barely had played any hands. I was bleeding chips through the blinds and had only enough to play 1 more hand. 2 other guys had a very healthy stack of chips. From that point on I started chipping away at their stacks by getting ridiculous hands. I had 3 hands of 4 of a kind, a few 3 of a kind, a Queen high straight, 2 flushes. Hands that you are lucky to get once in an entire game. The worst (or best in my case) part of it was I wasn’t raising at all. I got burned the first couple good hands I had by raising and everyone else folding. So I just anti-bluffed and called or raised very little each bet. I’ll probably never play that good again but damn was it fun.
Taking the RSS Plunge
I might be a little slow to fully embrace the RSS revolution but that has changed drastically in the last 2 weeks. I had previously used RSS for creating the Now Like Photographs podcast, the Blogulution Reader, and in the Yahoo Widget News feed that sits on my work laptop to inform me of new stories. These are all great ways to use RSS to take the content I wanted off the internet and put it in a more digestable form outside the web browser. I still spent my lunch hours visiting various websites (listed in the little listing of Daily Reads on this site). I would scroll through Engadget, The Register, NY Times or whatever website until I found the overlap from my previous visit. Didn’t take more than 30 minutes and I enjoyed spending some time surfing the internet learning about whatever was on these sites.
Picking a Reader
I read several blogs where the writers talk about how they rely on a standalone RSS reader of web or local-client form to get all their information. They talk about how they are able to read thousands of stories a day (or make the decision to not read them in most cases). I figured I would give it a try and after looking through all the services, settled on Google Reader and NewsGator to try out. Why those two? Google because they usually do stuff right and will probably own the entire internet at the rate they are going and NewsGator since they offered a neat package of having an online reader, PDA reader, desktop app reader, and even a Media Center reader.
NewsGator
Google Reader was neat but it still suffers from the same problem that Gmail and most other Google apps have – you must be online to use them. This usually isn’t a problem but I like to have local copies of my content, especially email and pictures in case I decide to switch services or can’t get online for some reason. Gmail offers the ability to download messages and archive them online so you get the best of both worlds. The RSS reader doesn’t have anything like that until they make a standalone application. I like the idea of taking all the stuff I want to read and then looking at it on my PDA or laptop when I’m traveling or have some downtime somewhere that doesn’t have a internet connection. I also tend to get sick of sitting in front of a computer from work so I like to space out in front of the TV at home. NewsGator MCE works well for this since I can use a remote and not feel like I’m using a computer. Only complaint about the MCE edition is that you can’t mark items as read, it just lets you view new unread content. So the synchronization of all of NewsGator’s product/services ultimatlely pushed me to use them over Google. Maybe Google will buy them when they realize NewsGator is better. They certainly have the money and balls to do it. Anyways, I highly recommend trying NewsGator online out. It’s free to use the web version and you’ll be able to read more content and spend less time doing it.
Blogulution Reader Improvements
Hopefully you’ve noticed by now that The Blogulution Reader is updated. It should be much faster thanks to moving all the stuff from ijfp.com to Blogulution.com, they were sharing some files before. It also has a little bit cleaner layout with pretty colors to boot! Blogger announced a few weeks ago that they are going to start including comment RSS feeds soon which means we can finally get the number of comments next to each post on the Reader page. Maybe even a expandable button next to each post to show the author of each comment or something. Crazy the possibilities. I also want to solicit a design contest for a Blogulution logo. I think the forum could use one and each of our blogs could have a “Blogulution Member” image we could slap on the button. I’ll come up with a couple myself and post them in the comments to this post, if you come up with anything do the same!
Britta’s Wedding
This past weekend I went to Bri’s home town to attend her best friends wedding. She was in the wedding party with her sister Tia so I spent a lot of time loafing around and hanging out with people I didn’t know very well. It was a good time. I posted some pictures from the weekend here. I’ve found that the picture section of the site can be a bit slow. If anyone has looked at the photos section and had it act really slow recently I’d like to hear about it since I’m not sure if it’s just my connection or what. I also put the pictures up on Facebook which I seem to be getting more addicted to lately.
Alas, no horse riding this weekend but we might be heading back another weekend in the fall. I did play around on a dial-up internet connection at Bri’s dad’s house which made me realize our own internet connection isn’t much faster. I’m not sure if it’s the wireless or just the 768Kbps plan we have but it’s making me think that upgrading to the 3.0Mbps plan might be worthwhile.
Chris & Jes’s New Place
Here’s a picture of their swanky new condo. Chris also got a job teaching, so were partying for him tonight.
Paal Makes Me Young
A rare weekend post. Thursday morning Bri flew out to visit some friends in Oregon with her sister until Sunday. Thursday night was spent in all bachelorhood as I ate way to much pizza and vegged out with video games and TV. We had a half-day lab cleanup on Friday at work which was a nice change of pace and afterwards I met up with Mark and Brigitte at Qdoba. All the girls were having a ladies night and Paal was in town so all the guys decided to have a guy’s night. We went over to Tuggs in St. Anthony Main to do some drinking out of a giant Plexiglas beer tube called “the rocket”. We even met up with Brian, our old roommate from last year. Afterwards me and Paal went up to Santanas for Gyros and fried cheese curds. I was so full I didn’t anything until mid afternoon the next day. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up until 4am but it was great; other than missing Bri when I got home.
Paal is staying here for the weekend and in old tradition we slept in until noon today. We got up and met up with some of his family who were in town. His Aunt is buying a condo across the river from me in the Cobalt; a new building that will have a Lunds grocery store in the bottom. After that we went over to the new library so I could return a book and Paal could marvel in all it’s modern Scandinavian glory. We hung out at Mark and Brigittes tonight watching a Woody Allen movie. I’ve come to the conclusion that I neither like nor dislike Woody Allen movies. I feel so mediocre about them that it almost makes it worse than having a strong feeling one way or another. Although Brigitte and Mark’s Woody Allen couple impression is entertaining enough to make me keep trying to watch them. After Mark’s I met up with Melissa and Lonnie, two of Bri’s nursing friends, whom I’ve never really hung out with without Bri being around. It was a good time and it was good to know we’re friends outside of just our connection through Bri.
That brings me to 3am and blogging. Paal’s in the shower since he went to a show at the Entry tonight. He had to dance so he got all sweaty. Tomorrow we’re going to Brit’s pub to watch the world cup final. I’m pulling for Italy since Rex’s company Caleffi is a big AC Milan sponsor. I never really followed French soccer and Italy was a fun team to watch through the cup so far.
Brigitte is back
