I write, occasionally

Alright, I've got some blogging to catch up on...

Sooo, 3 Fridays ago, Nathan, Josh, Chuck, Nick, Tobbie, Kari, and I all headed down to KC for Nathan's 30th Birthday. ... I guess Ando and Twee came too - but once we got to KC we saw them for about 36 minutes. And if I remember right, Jeff and Iulia may have been there for about 14 minutes as well.

But anyway, once we got into town we shopped around the plaza, had dinner at Tomfooleries, and finished the night partying it up at Blonde and The Falloon. It was a good time; dancing, drinking, running around, saw JJ and Eboni for a minute, and Chuck even met a girl.

Saturday (Nathan's birthday), we just sorta goofed around all day... hot tubbed for a bit in the morning, got lunch …

So I got an ipod classic a few weeks ago, which is the 4th ipod that I've owned (5th if you count Kari's nano). And even though my first ipod classic went completely corrupt and I had to replace it... I really do love this ipod. The metal front is nice, 160gb rules, and the soft/firmware on it is definitely awesome.

I know it's been reviewed 1,000 times, but I figured I'd talk about some of the features I like/don't like.

Price point. $350 for 160gb isn't bad at all. $250 for the 80gb is really nice. I mean, remember when the 30gig was like $500? ha.

The random album art on the home screens are awesome. However, I wish that you could somehow choose to listen to the album that's on the screen. Too many times a random album …

Bachelor parties with my buddies and I are a little different than what you expect from a normal bachelor party.

We don't really do the whole stripper thing, mainly because strip clubs are sort of played out. I mean, I guess people go to strip clubs on bachelor parties to remind you that there are other naked (and sluttier) bodies out there... and how you can't have those anymore. It sort of fits the bill, but whatever. Strip clubs aren't really a ton of "fun" so... we don't do that.

Instead, we basically just celebrate. We drink more than we should and run around like we own the place. You could say that we just act like college students, but richer.

So anyway, Jeff, Chuck, Nathan, and I headed up to Morgan, MN on Friday to …

So my wife got her masters and is now officially qualified for the job she's been doing for the past 3 years. ;)

I'm proud of her - even if she doesn't really see it as that big of an accomplishment.

I guess when you love school as much as Kari does - it's no thing. But also - apparently Drake is way easy not as awesome as Cornell College... I don't think she learned a whole lot of new things at Drake, which is a sad thing for a person who loves to learn. I'm not really sure how I feel about that. I mean, we basically just paid a lot of time and money for a piece of paper (which is the only thing that counts, of course).

This could mean that Cornell's education department is amazing. It could also mean that Drake's graduate …

I've been an avid sidekick supporter since I got my Sidekick 2 back on 04. I upgraded to a Sidekick 3 in 06, and I bought my wife a sidekick slide earlier this year... but now, I'm switching.

Why? The Sidekick is just moving way, way too slow. For every new release, Sidekick users were anticipating changes that kept up with the rest of the mobile phone industry, but Danger kept failing to impress. It was always something like, "With this version, you get bluetooth! and... it's shinier!" It was dumb. The sidekick LX was a pretty decent jump though. That screen is super nice... but still, the phone is so locked down.

You could get around the locked downedness and install normal apps by getting a developer license. But most …

So, I'm not really sure what I think about this economic stimulus package, but I sure as hell accepted it and decided to use it just like the government told me.

When our check came friday, Kari and I decided to do a mini shopping spree.

I upgraded my personal electronics with a 160gb ipod and a blackberry curve. Kari, on the other hand, is buying fancy clothes. It was a lot of fun. I wish we could do this once a month, haha. Next month I'd get a wii and the month after that, I'd get a macbook. ;)

But anyway, mothers day was nice too. We met up with mom, Teresa, Jeff, and Vic in Amana. I'd never really been there, and it's sort of in the middle of all of us, so we decided to check it out. Amana is an interesting little …

I've gotten really, really, really bad at blogging lately. I hope it's not because I've been less awesome and have less to talk about. Hopefully it's just because I'm being so productive on other things... or something.

But I've also been taking way less pictures than normal and I don't really know how I feel about this. I've always been a big advocate for documenting life, but man I am sucking at it lately. ...I need to figure that out.

So yeah, we've been sticking around town a bit more this year, which has been sorta nice. I actually seem to be getting a little more done.

This weekend, my dad was in town, which was a good time. We got to hang out quite a bit, landscape, and party pretty hard.

Friday, Doug hosted a …

Oh man.
What a good visit to Chicago.
So, if you didn't know, I went with Bob, Todd and, Tiny (who's really like a 6'5" dude) for a Cubs game.

As soon as we got to town, we went to Threadless to see Harper, hang out, talk tech, etc. Then we all got stuffed pizza at Chicago pizza, had a beer at some sketchy bar and parted ways.

Harper and I then dropped my stuff off and went to Charlie's for some social interaction. I really wished I lived in Chicago. Their social scene is amazing. It's almost like college.

Anyway, Harper stole Rachel (one of his coworkers), from Charlie's, and we ran over to Debonair to meet Tag and James.

Debonair was good. Good music, not packed, saw more of Harper's clique, etc. Then after a …

So, last night was my first night of broomball. I missed the first 2 weeks due to being on vacation, so it was actually the 3rd night for most everyone else on my teams.

...yeah, that was plural - teams.

See, last year we just had our rookie half-ice team, District 5. We were decent - especially for a first year team. We ended up .500 at the end of the season. Not bad.

So at the end of the year, Team Mitsubishi (a full-ice team) had about half their team move out of town and - long story, short - half of District 5 joined their team, which was renamed to The Shams.

We didn't want to kill off District 5 so we decided to play in both leagues this year, half-ice with District 5 and full-ice with Team Shams. This would mean …

If you've been paying attention to my photo stream, you've probably noticed that we had a jam packed vacation. 8 days and 250 photos of Key West and Miami Beach.

Man, it was a great time. Jeff and Teresa took us down there as part of a giant celebration trip. Kari, Victor, and I got new jobs. Jeff and Kari graduated with bachelors and masters degrees. Vic got a house. Jeff and Teresa celebrated a 30th anniversary. It was a big year that deserved some celebration - and that, we did.

So, it's going to be nearly impossible, but I'll try to keep this as short as I possibly can.

Saturday

• Flew to Miami from Cedar Rapids with a stop in Chicago. GPSs totally work in airplanes, btw.

Sunday

• Drove to Key West. It was quite a cool …

Lately, I've been writing lots of services for some of our newer Rails 2.0 projects. And one of the quickest/easiest ways I've found to debug these web service apps from a Mac is by using cURL. I'm not exactly an expert on the subject, so I'm documenting this half for myself and half to help anyone else out....

First of all the cURL parameters I usually use are:

-X [action]
Pretty straight forward... let's you specify an action (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to take on the URL.

> curl -X GET http://localhost:3000/sites
> curl -X GET http://localhost:3000/sites.xml
> curl -X DELETE http://localhost:3000/sites/1

-H [header]
This lets you specify your HTTP headers. I usually use Content-type and Accept here.

> curl -H "Accept: …

Welp, I've now been free from the corporate world for a little over 3 months now.

Ha. Man it rules. It was scary and a little stressful of a move, but I am so, so glad that I dove in.

No more Microsoft Office, no software audits, no B.S. meetings, no re-orgs, no safety e-mails, no ethics surveys, and most of all no seemingly pointless PHBs in upper management.

It's funny, ever since I left Pioneer, I feel like a real live adult employee rather than an intern. Everything I do actually affects the company. Everything serves a purpose and we don't waste energy on the things that don't. I mean, in 3 months I've worked on more projects than I did in over 4 years at Pioneer. wtf.

It's interesting how much I've improved as a …

One of the main reasons I'd really love to be wealthy (aside from obvious reasons) is that I could do hilarious/expensive things. I've always envied celebrities like Bam Margera for this reason.

But one thing that I've been thinking about for a bit. Have you seen those Chevy HHRs without rear windows? The panel side or whatever.

If I had the money to throw around, I think it'd be hilarious to buy one, lift it, add huge wheels, and paint it up like a mini Gravedigger.

That's all.

So last week at work I had to learn the Flickr API for this rails site we're doing. It's been a lot of fun and really got me more excited about Flickr.

I've always loved Flickr and its community. However, I've never used it for my personal photos because I really like having full control of my images. I like to have them stored them locally, I like to run queries on my photos, and I like how I have no limitation on integrating them into my personal site.

With Flickr you lose some of that control. That is, until the Flickr API came along, which is a really nice API. A lot of my friends have used it to display their flickr pics on their blogs. But damn it's slowwwwww (at least slower than running all your stuff locally on your …

What a random/weird weekend.

Kari and I made some last minute plans to celebrate Teresa's birthday in CR Friday night, visit my sister in the QC Saturday, then bust back to DSM to have at least 1 weekend day at home. 2/3 of our plan worked.

So Friday, we drove out to CR and had dinner at the Red Lobster, ha. I hadn't been there in years, but it was actually quite good.

Saturday, we woke up and drove to my mom's house. Bre'anna was in town with the baby, so mom hosted an open house for friends/fam to come hang out. We had a nice time. Bre'anna's baby is huge. Plus I got to see some family/friends that I hadn't seen in years. 1 of which being Michelle Springer, my mom's friend from HS. I think the last time I saw her was my …

It's Tuesday after Bockfest and I think I'm finally awake enough to blog.

So.. Bockfest was good again; not sober, and everything a beer celebration should probably be... and more. Maybe even a little too much more.

Friday, we (Me, Nathan, Jeff, Rico, Chuck, and Nick) took Kari's grandpa's old minivan up to Josh's new place in Morgan, MN. As usual we were way too excited to see each other and went completely nuts - all night long.

First, we walked to Front Street Bar & Grill for dinner and a game of 7-14-21, which is, of course, a drinking game played with dice. I told Josh before we came up, "no shots on Friday night" ...yeah right. That worked out real well.

After Front Street we walked over to the City & Country …

Man. It's been nearly a month since I've actually blogged about life. So let's see... what's happened...

First of all, dad visited at the beginning of January. We hung out, worked on my truck stereo, did some Christmas stuff, visited the cousins, etc. It was nice - rushed, but definitely nice to hang out.

Oh, and I finally finished my first tattoo. My final session was January 11th and it was awesome. After we were done, both Budha (my artist) and I were like, "weird... welp, I guess this is it." Then we cried, hugged, and parted ways. No, it's pretty crazy to just be... done. I think I'll make sure my next tattoo is one of those "single sitting" type of things. The words "vive vitam" shouldn't be too tough. Now I just …

Oh man, I love lists. I really do.

The "notes" section on my sidekick is always full of lists that I can add to while I'm out and about. One of those lists is always a "to buy" list... AKA, a "wish list"

It's really handy when I'm out with some money to spend and I think to myself, "which DVDs do I still need?" or "what was that random tool that I needed last week?" So, I quick whip out my... phone and BAM, I got it. Man I love notes.

But even though I love notes on my phone, they don't always stay up to date. Things like my Amazon wish list stay more up to date, because it's much easier to just click "add to wish list" or whatever. Man, I love wishlists. It makes giving and receiving so much easier. I don't have to buy …

I just installed my Alpine CDA-9886 last night and since it's so new, there's a serious lack of online reviews, so I thought I'd contribute.

First of all, let me outline what I was looking for.

• A deck that would let me play my iPod in some way, either via AUX in, or actual iPod connectivity/control.
• If the deck should have iPod control, it couldn't suck horribly like most of them do.
• It has to somewhat match my interior. I've got a clean looking tan/black interior, I didn't want some ugly silvery/grey deck dirtying it up.
• It has to be versatile - just in case I want to amp everything up, etc. I need pre-outs, maybe bluetooth, etc, etc.
• It has to be a noticeable upgrade from my stock deck and also from my last Alpine.
• It can't cost a …

Kari and I's New Years Eve was quite interesting this year. We had these plans to make it a fancy/dancy night, which sort of fell through and left us stranded on a curb in some -4 degree wind chill weather. Aside from that though, it was a good night.

We kicked it off with a fancy 5 course prix fixe dinner at Sage. It was amazing. That place... man. It never fails us - I love it. Check it out, here's what I had:

• Grilled rare ahi tuna block atop a waldorf salad, pea tendrils & veal demiglaze
• Bristol bay crab bisque with pancetta croutons & chives (Kari had: Roasted butternut squash soup with pumpkin bread croutons & browned butter)
• Braised iowa beef short rib atop braised winter vegetable mash with a braising liquid reduction (Kari …