Oh man, so I got a new computer at work.

Dell Optiplex GX620
-P4 HT 3ghz
-2gb RAM
-150gb HD
-DVD ROM/CD-RW
-And a ball mouse, wtf? I need an optical mouse in this piece.

Combined with my new dual LCD monitors, I'm loving life at work.

I haven't even had it setup for a full day yet and I already want to get a new setup for home. There, I'm running the same computer I got back in 2002. It was pretty fast at the time, but it's over 4 years old. I've doubled the RAM and added 120 more gigs to the HD, but it's just not keeping up with my video/photo stuff anymore.

So, I need a new PC to compliment my new 22" wide screen LCD from Jeff. And then I'll compliment that with another one of the same monitors. And then compliment …

We scored our first point in broomball last night! haha. We're still 0 and 2, but we managed to score a point and defend one more than last time, bringing the final score to 1-13.

Most of our team has official broomball shoes now, which make a ridiculous difference. Basically broomball shoes are moon shoes with some super foam on the bottom that squishes/springs nicely when you run. Somehow this magically keeps you from slipping. The hard part is when you slide/dive for something, because then it's really tough to get back up. Basically your knees are still really slippery but your shoes get traction. So you end up pivoting on your shoe while your knee spins around you in a circle. It's stupid. However they're still awesome. …

I got to hang out with a lot of different people this weekend, which always rules.

Friday we met up Tia and folks at Taki to celebrate her birthday before heading to the Loft to act like idiots. It was a good time and really nice to see those peeps. Pics.

Saturday I finished up the guest bedroom, edited a short vid for the 2030 Society, and then went out for Kari's Colfax Christmas party. It's pretty hilarious to watch teachers party. It really makes me wonder about the teachers I had growing up... So after hanging out for a bit we had a mini after party back at my place where more elementary school teacher debauchery happened.

And Sunday I completely slept through morning, woke up just past noon and realized, "we have our …

If you didn't know, iTunes has an audiobooks category similar to the radio and podcast categories. An advantage to audio books is that iTunes will remember where you left off on your book so it will always start where you want it to.

The problem is that if you rip an audiobook CD into iTunes or have an audiobook in mp3 format, iTunes will not let you simply drag your song into the audiobooks category. There isn't even a buried setting to change the category. So Kari's dad had me help figure out a solution to organize his audiobooks using this category.

The short version:

1. Show audiobooks in iTunes (on the general tab of your preferences).
2. Convert your track to AAC (.m4a file type).
3. Rename the actual file to .m4b.
4. Remove the old …

I was just walking through the hall and someone asked how my nye was, which reminded me to blog.

So in a nutshell, New Years was pretty blah this year. There was no plan, no party, and no going out really. It was quite different from my last couple NYEs spent in Chicago.

The weekend was good though. Friday, Cedric, came over to watch B13, this awesome french action parkour movie. It was pretty awesome. Then Nathan stopped up and led us in debauchery.

Saturday, Kari's parents came over to help pickup and setup furniture for our guest bedroom (another amazing Christmas Present from Santa). We got the furniture from Sears of all places... and it's the most solid "assembly required" furniture that I've ever had. Everything is …

Minnesota is so freakin... I can't think of the word. It's not hick. However, it's similar to hick, with better people. It's so... wilderness or something. See, everytime I go to Chicago I think, "Des Moines is so small town." Then on the drive to Mankato, and up 169 to the cities, I think, "Where do these people shop? eat? go out?" and then I realize that Des Moines is actually a big city compared to a lot. Everywhere I've been in Minnesota is so small town, with smart and friendly people. Then when I get back to Des Moines I appreciate my "big city." Shortly after this roadside pondering I reached rush hour traffic just outside of Minneapolis on 494. Then I saw the skyline off in the distance and went back to thinking Des …

There are two things to note about this year's Christmas.
1. Insanity (running around wise)
2. Awesome

So late Tuesday night, my dad, Chris, and Bre'anna showed up at my place. We basically hung out for an hour then went to bed.

Wednesday was kinda funny cause both Kari and I had to work but then met back up with everyone at Vicki's later. We had some sweet tortilla soup, hung out, played catch phrase, etc. No big woop.

Thursday, Kari and I completely ditched family to go to the Pink Spiders/Kill Hannah show at House of Bricks. It was nuts, seriously. We showed up right in the middle of the Pink Spiders set, which was perfect timing thanks to our sweet Pho diversion. Greg (bassist from Kill Hannah) put us on the …

Just so you guys know...

You are Iron Man Inventor. Businessman. Genius.
Iron Man 95% Green Lantern 70% The Flash 60% Superman 55% Spider-Man 50% Batman 50% Hulk 50% Catwoman 50% Supergirl 47% Robin 47% Wonder Woman 42%
Take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Last weekend was quite fun and completely random. This week will probably be the same.

It basically started when Kari decided to end her night at 8:30pm Friday, which left me quite bored. So a couple calls later, Cedric, Nathan and I somehow wound up in Ames. I've never partied in Ames before, it's quite different. We met up with Diverse at phuel, then found Nathan's sister and went to Welch Ave Station. After getting ditched by Cara we randomly stopped into this columbian restaurant to have some dos equis with people who didn't speak english. Then after brainstorming our new salon idea, we went to the London Underground. It was a fun night ending with some amazing Gyros.

Saturday was just retarded awesome. The Bad Kids …

Another weekend at home. This is getting a bit out of hand.

So yeah, it was pretty laid back. Zach and Amy came over to play ping pong, eat pizza and hang out on Friday. It was a fun time. Then Nathan and I met Chuck at stix where we had a $50 bar tab which we were not charged for, yesss. We didn't even drink much, we just drank expensive... and ordered more pizza. Service like that is hard to find, I just wish it came more easily at a place like Aura.

Saturday, Kari's parents visited. Kari and Teresa shopped while Jeff and I made some Porter and Dark Belgian Ale, mmm. I'm excited. I think we're getting a lot better at brewing. Now we just need to streamline - a 10-15 gallon pot, gas powered cooker, and a wort chilling …

In the middle of cleaning/working on the house Sunday I decided that it'd be a good idea to start scanning all of my old photos. This kind of thing always happens to me when I start projects. However this time, my decision was retarded. It has completely consumed me ever since and now my house is a disaster. So I've scanned about 1,200 photos now...

Luckily half of my old pics were on advantix, because it was super easy to take them in to be turned digital. Thank you Advantix for your short/awesome life.

That said, you'll be seeing a bunch of old pics appear slowly on the site. Well, maybe you won't see them because I'm trying to backdate them accurately... but they'll be there for sure. Probably in one of these albums:
- /ph…

This phrase is not defined in most dictionaries, so I thought I'd help out.

I · love · you [ahy luhv yoo]
-idiom

1. Goodbye: Honey, could you pick up some meatloaf while you're at the store? ... I love you, bye.
2. I will be right back: Hey, I'm gonna go up to the bar and grab a beer. I love you.

The overuse of the word "love" kills me. Seriously. It completely defeats the importance of the word. Why do people feel that their significant other needs to be reassured of their love before making a trip up to the bar? Don't you think they already know? And if they don't, say it when it means something. Don't kill the meaning of the word, by repeating it non-stop in meaningless context. You're just hindering the overall feeling …

Remember back in college when you could find out what everyone was up to just by checking their AIM away message?

Like, "Ah, Kari's at Hilltop? Bet. I'm headin up town."

It was nice, real real nice. But now, if I wanna know where my peeps are, there are like 18 places to check. I got AIM, Google Talk, MySpace, Facebook, Web Sites, etc. So I have to result in sending 1000 text messages or phone calls. And at that, some of my friends would rather not even be found for hanging out, so then they may get annoyed by me asking, "what's up tonight?"

This all ruins one of the major strengths of the internet. There needs to be a way to tie all of this together. There needs to be a way to set a status for yourself for all of your …

Thanksgiving. Ahhh Thanksgiving.

I don't really have a whole lot of thankfulness right now. I mostly just have lots of busy-ness (business?) in preparation for the thankfulness. So I am just treating this last weekend as another holiday.

This year:
Followed the same format as last year.
Painted the guest room with my dad.
Built shelves in my shed.
Ate bad.

I feel like I need some mass change sometime soon - good changes for once. Lately the changes have not been for that.
Pics.

Rico keeps telling me that he refreshes my homepage non-stop just to see what random photos will come up. So I decided to make it a little easier for him (and anyone else) to see random photos.

Just click on the blue "random bar" above the random photos on the right of the home page. Or go to /photos/random/

Also, I now display the number of comments for a given photo on the thumbnails... That way you know if there are comments before clicking.

wtf, are you speaking greece?

So this weekend was quick, fun, and productive.

Thursday we had a little wine tasting party, which was half lame, half fun. But regardless, it was interesting and I learned a few things. Hopefully some of my friends did too.

Friday my group at work checked out the Pioneer suite at Wells Fargo Arena to watch the Stars game. It was definitely fun. Somehow Pioneer made a rule where we're not allowed to drink in the suite, but when we got there, we were offered beer by a waitress. Then when we declined beer and ordered pop, we found that our fridge was full of beer... which was leftover from the last Pioneer party to have checked out the suite. Hmmm. Regardless, it was fun. Hopefully Truespin …

In July of 2005 i wanted to make my site nicer, more organized, and more fun. To do this I added Tagging. Tagging is this really nice feature used by popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Google, etc. Tags rule. They invoke a lot of coordination in a web site and are just fun.

I decided to use this to tag all my photos of people I have photos of. It was a huge task and took me a really long time, but in the end it turned out to be awesome. Everyone likes pictures of themselves, no matter how non-vain they claim to be. Also, everyone googles their name from time to time (no matter how non-vain you claim to be). So if I tag things nicely, my friends will probably find photos of themselves on my site.

Besides the advantages I've …

It has taken me 4 days to build up the energy to blog about last weekend, seriously.

Friday, Josh and Jeff were supposed to meet up at my house at 6... 6:30 at the latest. However when Josh told me that he wanted to take a route that he had never been (while attempting to never touch an interstate), I knew it'd be bad. At one point he was talking to me after he'd crossed into Iowa, 15 minutes later he called again and was back in Minnesota. Later in the trip he got lost again, but his cell phone was dead so he called, while plugged into the ceiling of a gas station. He finally showed up around 7:30. Wingert is never on time, no matter what. He got there around 9 and was immediately greeted with a snowball to the ear.

So …

I haven't really done much framework stuff outside of my full-time job, so I decided to play around. (mainly so Harper would stop yelling at me).

Nearly all of my personal development is in PHP and JS, so I tried out some PHP and JS frameworks on a simple app.

After a few hours, my "funny quotes" site is all smartied and prototyped, which was a nice little learning experience.

The big thing I learned is that prototype RULES. Seriously, it makes life so easy - just ask JD (but refer to it as LAF instead of Prototype).

Smarty is also pretty decent. I can't really think of a huge advantage of using it, aside from the obvious fact that it separates logic from display. However, it was nice to play around with. There are …

Man, I am really beginning to love Amazon wish lists. Not only are they super nice for gifting, they're nice for finding new items and keeping track of things you need to buy. I often find myself looking through Amazon just to mark things that I already own. Why? Because then they recommend things similar, and their recommendations are usually pretty relevant.

However... Amazon sucks at a few things. The first being publishing their phone number. The second thing that has really annoyed me about their site is gift list printing. Nowhere on the site is there a "Print this list" button. You can "Create a new list," "Delete a list," "Tell people about a list," "Make a list private." But you cannot "Print this list." Give me a …