I write, occasionally

Here's a collection of 651 pieces of nonsense that I've written over the past 24.44 years.

  • Lollapalooza 2012

    I'll start off by saying that the weirdest part about lollapalooza this year was the line-up. I wasn't really stoked about ANY of the headliners and kinda "meh" about most of the other shows. This has never really happened to me on any other year. However, I'm living in Chicago right now and couldn't pass up the ease of going to the festival.

    Here's how things went...

    Friday

    I obviously had to work on getting that President re-elected, but was able to sneak out and catch some music in my downtime. Actually, The Head and The Heart came to perform IN our office, but I missed most of their performance for a meeting, which was a bummer.

    The other shows I saw were...
    • Anamanguchi - I took a lunch break to check out this 8-bit rock …

  • The 30 Year Old DJ

    I'm 30 years old, love music, and am about to become the sickest DJ my bedroom has ever seen.

    But first, let me give you a a bit of a backstory...

    In the late 90s (high school, for me) I found house music. I had mostly been listening to terrible metal and rap at the time… but once I heard those crazy electro sounds, I started to become super interested. I even started going to some under-18 dance clubs in the Quad Cities.

    As soon as I heard a DJ mixing these crazy electro tracks on ridiculous house systems I fell in love. I still remember that first club pretty vividly… Not only was I blown away by what I was hearing, I was also blown away by what I was seeing. There was an entire room of people just raging out, crazy raver kids, etc. It …

  • A Visit From The President

    Once I got to work, things were fairly normal - well aside from most everyone else being dressed to the nines… especially the ladies.

    But then around lunch time, about 30 giant secret service dudes started showing up along with cops, dogs, etc. We had a mandatory office leave while they swept the entire place. (Remember, this is Obama's campaign headquarters. These are the people who love the president and are hired to re-elect him. Security was still this tight)

    After the sweep was done, we all came back to the office and went through security similar to an airport (or a hip hop show), but with qualified professionals. Not the TSA.

    Once through security, we hung out for a bit, working as usual while tip-toeing around the secret service …

  • Preparing to Meet the President

    After my shower this morning I thought to myself, "What should I wear to make myself presentable to the President of the United States?"

    I don't really like dressing up and I wasn't about to start… but I felt like I should at least make an attempt. My normal attire consists of a hat, a pair of skate shoes, an unwashed pair of jeans, and an inappropriate/inappropriately priced screenprinted tee.

    To me, the only real variables of this outfit were my hat and shirt.

    So I glanced at my 2 stacks of t-shirts and thought, "I probably shouldn't wear a screen printed shirt... Maybe I should throw on one of my 'fancy' flannel button ups."

    After looking through those for a bit I remembered that I worked in a 76 degree office and that everyone in the …

  • 2011 Retrospective

    Ah, 2011. A year that was brought in while wearing tie dye tighty whities at a house party in Des Moines, and finished at a freshly painted warehouse party in Chicago.

    It was quite a roller coaster year with my new job, huge culture shifts, and a long distance relationship with that amazing wife of mine.

    There's sooo much to talk about, but I'm gonna try to keep this short and list style.

    So, other than my new job and the move to Chicago... I also traveled a bit. Here are some of the places I visited...

  • Lollapalooza 2011

    The 20 year anniversary of Lollapalooza, my 5th year at the festival, the 30th anniversary of my life, and the turning point of a pretty major change in my (and Kari's) life. We had some huge milestones going on this year... all of which sort of overshadowed each other, and moved too fast for me to fully appreciate them like I should have.

    Either way, Lollapalooza was a giant, super expensive blast again this year. There's the standard eating of great foods, dealing with crowds, late night dinners and even later night partying, so I won't get into all that… but here's a breakdown of the shows we saw this year.

    Friday
    • Tinie Tempah sounded great. We only stayed for a few songs of his set, but I wish we would've stayed longer.
    • Skrillex was …

  • My New Gig: Helping Reelect the President

    So my buddy, Harper is currently serving as the CTO for the 2012 Obama Campaign. This spring, he told me I should interview to join his team. However, after taking the 5 hour commute and a couple other minor details into consideration, I declined.

    … and regretted it immediately. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, working on technology for our president with a team of baller engineers. There would've been a lot of sacrifice, but the experience and knowledge I could've gained would have been completely insane.

    So fast forward a few weeks... I began talking with Harper and his team again.

    Today, I accepted an offer with Obama for America - so did my friend, Nick.

    Most of you probably know that I'm not a very political dude. …

  • How I lost 20 pounds to let my pants hang

    Let me start off by saying, I don't care about diets and dieting (I think most diets sound completely awful and unhealthy). However, I do care about being healthy, so I thought I'd share a bit about how I lost 20 pounds over the span of a few months.

    The extremely short version is that I stopped eating like a dickhead.

    And all that really means is that I began snacking less and started paying attention to my food portions. That's it. No gym, no additional excercise - I changed 2 simple things and now I get to sag my pants until my ass shows!

    Feel free to leave now, haha. That's it!

    But if you want to know a bit more about it, here's the rest of the story.

    I got back from a trip to Ireland last fall and weighed 199 pounds. This is about the 4th …

  • Sorry to have to write this

    This is one of the best, most condescending emails that's ever been written about me. Back in my corporate days (circa 2007), a director sent this to all of information management.

    Subject: Sorry to have to write this...
    Importance: High

    Folks,

    I'm confident that it's no one in our group - given your maturity and professionalism, but you can help me by spreading the word that the reoccurring stupid and immature prank of taking, or tearing, a "bite" from Friday donuts (and other food) and putting the remainder back into the box is a thing of the past, starting now.

    If you see anyone doing this in the future, please politely ask them to take the whole thing and not replace the remnant.  Please also politely inform …

  • 2010 Was Good

    So a couple weeks ago I put together a timeline of my 2010 with plans of writing a year end blog... so now that you've forgotten about everyone else's 2010 retrospectives, here's 1 more.

    Every time I write these I start out thinking, "man, I didn't really do a whole lot last year," but after looking back through photos, blogs, and tweets... I'm quite happy with last year. I traveled a lot, saw a lot, became a bit healthier, and progressed professionally. All awesome things.

    So 2010 in a nutshell...

    Work...
    At the start of the year, I began doing some contract work at Dipity, a San Francisco based timeline tool startup. After about 5 months of contracting, I decided I really liked working with the folks at Dipity so I left Red 5 …

  • Snow Leads to Geo Detectives of THE FUTURE

    And now for a story about Josh and I geolocating a random YouTube video - and how I'm amazed by how easy it was.

    So, this all starts with a conversation with my dad over the recent snowfall we've been having... He tells me about this Toro Power Shovel thing, which sorta looks like a vacuum sized, cheap snowblower. My dad said that he was super skeptical of this power shovel, but he tried it out and wound up being thoroughly impressed.

    Soon after, I passed this info onto my buddy, Josh. He's gotten around 3 feet of snowfall this winter, so he was immediately interested. We discussed how dumb the power shovel looks but started reading reviews and looking for videos of it in action (such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJ8L…

  • Ireland 2010

    So I guess I should blog about Kari and I's amazing 5 year anniversary trip to Ireland...

    Starting off with travel... the flights weren't that bad at all. I mean, they were 6-7 hours, but having my ipad and an exit row seat made everything much nicer. If you're ever going on a flight this long, try to get an exit row seat (but beware - exit row window seats do not recline all the way). Another quick international travel trip: bring a 3G iPad, buy prepaid 3G SIM cards wherever you go. This kept us connected without roaming and saved us a countless number of times with google maps, etc.

    Day 1 - Kari's birthday
    We landed in Dublin around 8:30am, caught a bus to Dublin city centre, found our hotel, checked in, and went to explore …

  • Lollapalooza 2010

    Soooo, Lollapalooza is starting to make some really nice changes.

    First of all, the space. They expanded the fest grounds across Columbus (adding 4 city blocks of space) and moved some of the small stages over there. It definitely, definitely opened things up and made the entire weekend much more comfortable. Everyone was gushing over the new grounds.

    Secondly the water. They made a big effort this year to conserve bottles - so there was no more $3 smart water or wedging your water bottle into the crappy fountains. You could buy a little cardboard water bottle thing (or bring your own bottle) and get it filled for free at all these Event Water stations. We loved it.

    And most importantly, the shows..

    Friday
    • Devo - The dudes a…

  • Thoughts and Suggestions for Working at Home

    So a couple months ago I took a job that allowed me to work from home, and I wanted to share my experience so far.

    There are plenty of great articles and blogs out there like Goodbye To The Office, Your Office Chair is Killing You, Top 10 Home Office Hacks, Jeff Atwood on Working Remotely, and many, many others. Just google working remotely or telecommuting tips and you'll see what I mean.

    So after doing a bit of reading and making a few small changes in both my work flow and my home office, here are my suggestions...
    1. Make your home office shine
      or better yet - make your home office make you shine. Having a comfortable and versatile work environment is huge. Not only are you working at home, but you're also living at home... …

  • Dipity Doo Dah!

    So a lot of you have probably heard by now - I started a new job last week. I've actually been contracting for this company part-time since the beginning of the year, but last week marks the start of me going full-time for a San Francisco based startup called Dipity.

    This whole process sorta started last November when Harper introduced me to a dude named Derek Dukes - the CEO of Dipity. After a bit of conversation, he had me talk to some of his team, they gave me a couple programming tests, and actually offered me a full-time position. Getting that offer was super exciting, but I wasn't quite ready to jump into the startup world. So, I opted to stick around at Red Five and do some part-time contracting for Dipity. This Spring …

  • Big Omaha

    A couple months back, I started seeing things pop up in my Twitter stream about a little conference called Big Omaha. Some tech dudes and entrepreneurs that I follow were speaking, the content seemed interesting, and with Omaha being so close to home, I really had no reason to not attend. Plus, we rarely get baller tech guys speaking in these "fly over" states.

    So after talking to Nick a bit, we ordered our tickets. I'm so freakin glad we did.

    I haven't really ever been to any startup/entrepreneur conferences before, so the content just blew me away. So inspirational, so motivational. I'm pretty sure Nick would agree.

    It's hard to really pick all my favorite speakers, but the ones that REALLY blew me away were Scott Harrison of …

  • Leaving Red Five

    So, two and a half years ago I left my cushy corporate job to join a small marketing/web development company called Red Five Interactive. I made that move primarily because corporate politics bothered me... but I also wanted something with a little more freedom that would encourage me to learn new things. Red Five was exactly that.

    See, when I started at Red Five, I was an anti-mac guy; I hated the Apple fanboys. I had also never seen a line of Ruby code... and Linux sys admin was definitely not one of my strong points. Red Five, on the other hand, was an all Mac shop... that built Ruby on Rails apps... and would force me to become proficient in linux/unix sys admin.

    If that doesn't give you an idea of how in over my head I …

  • Introducing Garth Brooks

    So, most of you have probably heard by now that we adopted a new dog, but I still haven't given him a proper introduction to the internets. So here it goes.

    Kari and I weren't really looking to adopt a dog quite yet, but the situation sorta just fell into our (well, my) hands. See, Kari's mom is friends with a woman named Amy, who's a foster parent for a rescue league. So, one time while Kari was in Cedar Rapids, she and her mom decided to visit Amy for some "puppy therapy." ...sounds like a great idea, right?

    Shortly after Kari's visit, I got a call saying that she met "the sweetest dog" who "just needs a home" and that she "put in an adoption request." Gah! Was she seriously trying to adopt a dog that I hadn't even met? Oh, …

  • Gee One to Nexus One

    So, my buddy Harper is hooked up with all sorts of the right people. Sometimes it makes me a bit jealous, but a lot of the time I get to benefit from his hookups as well. This is a story of another one of those times.

    Last spring, Harper got hooked up with some G1 dev phones - you know, the very first Android phone. He basically had so many that he didn't know what to do with, so he hooked me up with one... He was sort of like the Google Phone Santa Claus.

    Fast forward to this February, Harper wound up with a few of the hot new Google phones. Having so few, he couldn't really be as generous with these, so he had a little programming contest with this group of tech dudes we chat with... and this is no lowbrow list of dudes; this …

  • IE6, The End is Near

    About half of my readers are techie enough to share in this enthusiasm. If you're not in that group, just know that something awful is coming to an end. ...Like the end of of a war. The people - the big people, are killing all support of something horrendous. IE6.

    Check out this wonderful email that I (and probably a lot of us) got.

    Important Notice: Google Apps browser support

    Dear Google Apps admin,​

    In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for …