I write, occasionally

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 friends to …

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 …

As if I even have to say it... Dog parties are stupid. Kari had this brilliant idea to have a dog party at our house for Ninja's 2nd birthday. I originally didn't like it for a few reasons, one being that it ties us a lot closer to being parents than I'm really comfortable with. But also, wtf? However I agreed to it for both of those same reasons. One, I like having a dong in place of a kid. and B, I thought it'd be pretty hilarious.

I dunno, once it started, I wasn't quite feeling it. Kari decorated our house for a dog party, which felt way lame on an over-the-top level. All the girl dogs fought and nearly killed a couple smaller dogs. And I got peed on - which actually was a highlight, haha. Pics.

Aside from that the …

Oh Yeah. So, we had a Halloween Party last weekend, which marked the biggest party held in my house to date - 40 people. I didn't realize how much fun that costume parties can be. It sort of makes an automatic ice breaker and then everyone ends up hanging out with everyone. I loved it. Check out my pics, Nicole's Pics, Zach's Pics.

And to continue the radness, Des Moines Alive got invited to the Friends and Family pre-opening party for Cabaret Night Club. We're also getting invites for the VIP party. I'm pretty excited. We have some good plans to make the site much better... Not to mention the new Mobile site that we just launched. We're totally going to rock it.

This weekend will be pretty ridiculous as well. Ninja turned …

Hmm, I don't think I can make my anniversary article as good as Kari's. Maybe I'll try to be more serious than her. wtf?

So yeah, this weekend was Kari and I's first anniversary. We were fairly confused about what to do because... well it's our first. And we were never the "today is our 14 month anniversary!!!" couple. You know the ones that not-married people celebrate... usually non-annually. I think kids get really confused about the reccurence of anniversaries. Anyway, off-topic. Again.

We basically celebrated Friday with some fondue, wedding cake, and St. Lucian rum. It was a good, laid back night. I was a little worried about the wedding cake being green and nasty, but it wasn't. And I'm pretty sure it tasted just as …

Weekends at home rule, for real. I can't wait for another weekend like this.

So Friday, I ended up going out with Nathan and Chuck. We started at Stix but quickly upgraded to DJ Skribble @ Crush... then we downgraded again to Drink, and then again to Vieux Carre. Weak. It was a fun night though. (more pics)

Saturday I basically got a ton of things done at home, Nick and I did some web dev, then we went to Moo's house for some sweet loins and scotch older than me. It was a nice night. Always good food and drink ad Doug's.

Then Nathan bought me a bottle of glenlivet 12 for helping me fix his car sunday, w00t. Working on his car always cracks me up because it's just as old and crappy as mine. Plus while we were going to buy …

Oh man. I'm really really scared again.

So I was just working on my home electrical system when I accidentally flipped breaker 8 - the one with all outlets for the top floor. It shut my computer off, etc. No big deal really.

Later I came upstairs to turn it back on and listen to music. I opened up itunes and hit play.

The song "Seein Thangs [feat. David Banner]" could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?

wtf. so I tried another, and another, and another. none of my songs (which are all located on a slave drive) worked. I tried opening the drive directly.

"The disk in drive F is not formatted.
Do you want to format it now?"

No, and I want all my photos, music, and …

So, I apparently let my home network go to crap in the last few years, which is not conducive to my current project - to setup a virtual "whole house stereo system."

See, I have this stereo in my loft with some strategically placed speakers. These speakers use my vaulted ceiling to bounce music all over the top 2 floors. Plus it's all controlled via itunes on my primary computer. I love it, love it... which is why you'll always hear music playing in our house.

The only problem with this setup is that I can't hear the music when I'm in the basement. So usually I just throw in a CD or something, but it sucks to have different things playing in different parts of the house.

So here is what I need...
1. I need a way to get music …

Ahhh, another weekend well spent in my home away from home. I love how comfortable I'm getting with Chicago. It's quite nice.

This time we visited the city for 2 milestone events - Vic's college graduation and Kari's 25th birthday. Thursday was Vic's ceremony, which ruled. They had 30 graduates so it was only like 40 minutes, haha. Plus Vic gave me a rose. We celebrated with much Giordano's.

Friday, Kari's B-day - ridiculous. We started the day out right with some mad omelettes at ihop. Then we met up with Kari's dad to shop around Michigan Avenue, etc. Kari got lots of clothes, we all got new Levi's, I got this insane mashup by Girl Talk, etc. We then hung out at a Viand for a second before meeting everyone at Sushi Wabi. …

So last week I had C#.net training. It was pretty nice. I really like C#.net programming... except for all of the visual WYSIWYG influence that people put on it. It really bloats the code. Our instructor's site for example. He did it all with .net and it's super super bloated. His argument: "but i didn't have to write most of the code!" Mine: "but I'm a programmer." Anyway, aside from that we got breakfast every day, cookies at 2, and were taken care of by 3 hot girls, haha.

So Friday we left early for a dept steak "fry." It was a nice time, we hung out at a park for the afternoon, ate meat, rode scooters, etc. Then Kari and I took Ninja to the vet to find out that he has some pretty bad allergies and a staff infection, wtf, …

So, minnis is one of the biggest hotkey fanatics ever, which is starting to rub off on me. He's gotten me all excited about them in web apps... You know, Google uses them, flickr uses them poorly, etc.

That said, I added some super rad new hotkeys to my site. They use eventlisteners and all that so you don't have to use the accesskey and alt keys. Just use your left/right arrow keys to browse through photos, albums, and even pages. Weeeeeee.

I think I got everything updated on the site, but let me know if I missed anything. Also let me know if you find any errors... It seems to work for me in firefox and IE.