Animated Seattle
Joseph is back in Dallas right now visiting family and I am enjoying a much anticipated Bachelor Weekend. Actually, I find that I am not that much fun anymore as for the most part I have just been a shut-in working on work stuff or preparing for finals next week but one thing I have done is watch a lot of movies, the lowbrow type of movies which Joseph doesn't enjoy.
- While it's actually probably a little further out in real life not putting the Space Needle in the middle of downtown earns them big points from me.
- Also points for it not raining in the picture - it doesn't always rain here, it is just easy to forget that in the winter... or this "summer."
- A few recognizable buildings, although Two Union is conspicuously absent.
- What could be a ferry boat is a nice addition but the waterfront absent of piers would give it few places to dock at.
- Way to flat to be Seattle!
- Mountains are a little much.
- Completely fictions train tracks - I can understand their prominence as story-line driven since The Simpsons are on the train but where are they exactly envisioned to be heading, it's all water out there.
Accuracy Rating: 7/10
Sunday, June 8, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Getting Things Done: rememberthemilk.com
Joseph is amazing at work, always exceeding everyone's expectation.I (just in time for graduation) have learned to be a good student, being on top of my classes and keeping up with work.
With such individual track records you would think that when it comes to our personal lives together we would combine our awesomeness and really be on top of our household/joint tasks... but no. We have been together nearly four years now, and have lived together for the three or so and yet this is still an area which we haven't really learned to work well together on (or really learned how to do individually even.) I think the problem is that we both view the house as expendable, when work or school become more pressing we focus on those things to the exclusion of everything else.
Sporadically we try and combat this with a "new system."
A little over a year ago we both read Getting Things Done, the organizational book with a cult following on the web. After we moved to the condo we tried having a paper to-do lists on the fridge. Most recently we have tried using the website Remember the Milk. Remember the Milk is basically an Outlook style to-do list that you can share between users and can access on-line. It is ok - sharing tasks between users could be a little easier and the site design is a little sleepy but it has served as a good reminder of things to get done or to follow up with Joseph about. I am sure that any system would do the trick if we used it.
As always though I am torn between my desire for just pen and paper verses the advantages of digital - a dilemma which has only gotten harder not that my phone syncs up with my schedule and tasks in Outlook. More than one every proving the unequivocal superior to the other I think I just suffer from the "grass is always greener" complex. Now that I am using a digital system I want nothing more to run out and pick up a moleskine notebook to track things in. Being in school though the main thing holding me back from the pen and paper are the repetitive elements - not wanting to enter my class schedule every week.
I will stick with Remember the Milk for now and see if Joseph and I can't bring our super successful natures to bare on our home lives... but as always I am keeping my eye out for a new system, which I am sure will fix all our problems.
Monday, June 2, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Internet Stalking 101
Recently I have been having trouble sleeping so after Joseph has head to bed I have been entertaining myself on the internet by looking up past friends to see what they have been up to since I last talked to - and then either feeling smug or bad about myself based upon our relative levels of success. I figured I would share my online stalking toolkit.The tool of amateurs! Actually it can be effective if you are searching for someone with a unique name, or try using their full name but most of the time... not so much. Take my common first and last names as an example searching for me reveals a hip hop artist, a baseball player and a gay porn star (no relation.)
Facebook is the main social network that I use and while it allows you to search for individuals based on name or e-mail address a new tool that they have, People You May Know, is a very effective way of finding people. Based on the reasonable assumption that if five of your friends all know a person it is likely that you know them too, it uses the vast pools of data it has about who knows who to suggest people to you. This tool is a bit distorted by couples (as it gives two connections to people who I often don't know) but facebook puts a nice little 'x' by people's name so you can just cross them off and they won't be recommended again. I am not sure how the algorithms used by facebook determine who to put on your list and who not to but it is interesting how I have been recommended a lot of people just based on two connections (those darn couples) but yet have found people using upscoop (see below) who have 5+ connections to me but who did not make it onto this facebook feature - but usually it works well.
Most interesting connection found here: the older brother of someone I was a camp councilor to (at Kanakuk) had my brother-in-law as his orientation advisor at the University of Texas.
Upscoop
Upscop doesn't do anything that you can't accomplish by just going to a site like facebook and searching for a friend's e-mail address but it does automate the process allowing you to search your entire address book across a range of social networks by logging into your Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail or AOL accounts. Once it as searched through your stuff it then allows you to sort the information by the person (showing each person and what networks they belong to) or by the network itself (showing each network and listing all your friends who belong to it.) This is a fairly new service, and as such is fairly bare bones: there is no way to limit which networks you want to have it search, and while you can add new addresses in for it it search for in addition to your address book there is no nice little 'x' here for you to remove people from your search results - a real problem with gmail's auto populating address book. There is also a security concern here since you are logging into either your webmail account through upscoop. This has become an increasingly common practice, used by sites like twitter and facebook, and while I have never had a problem with it apparently some have.
Ok that's all for now, I will save the scary amounts of information that can be found in public records for the advanced class.
Friday, May 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Site I Love: foodnetworkaddict.blogspot.com
So this is why people read tabloids! Ina and Jeffrey are my Brad and Angelina!
While I don't intentionally watch the Food Network that much myself anymore it is on a good bit in our home as Joseph keeps up with Ina Garten, Giada De Laurentiis and Paula Deen - often undertaking the completely confounding task (to me at least) of cooking one meal while watching a completely different meal get made on the television. And well, I guess sometimes in the evening we will watch Ace of Cakes, Throwdown! with Bobby Flay or Iron Chef. ...ok fine, we watch it all the freaking time! We even watch those people on the network we love to hate (Rachel Ray for me, Sandra Lee for Joseph.)
While Joseph has long been laughing over the discussions of Ina Garten over at the Television Without Pity message boards, and the Paula Deen Coronary Watch at TVgasm I had managed to keep my Food Network addiction strictly limited to the TV, until my Google Feed Reader recommended a new blog for me to check out: food network addict. (Although you would think if the Google Feed Reader was really paying attention it would recommend that I try to keep up with the feeds I already have rather than trying to add a new one.)
So as usual, I did whatever the Google tells me to do and checked out food network addict. What's this now, food network scandals?!? While there is much more to the site than just airing the network's dirty laundry (dishes?) that is the element I found most addictive and easily spent an hour that first night reading about Robert Irvine's inflated resume and about how Sandra Lee's statement that she "trained at the Cordon Bleu" actually means that she took a 2-week course there that she didn't even finish.
The only disappointment that I had was that there was nothing on the site about the back-story Joseph and I have built up about how Ina overlooks Jeffery's many homosexual indiscretions. A piece of fiction that we are so committed to that we have even envisioned the material cut from the show proving it...
Ina: Today I am surprising Jeffery at his office. His male secretary isn't at his desk so I guess I will just go on in.
*Opening door*
Ina: Jeffery I brought you a Cornish game- oh my god!
*Ina drops picnic basket, knocks cameraman over as she runs out of the office.*"
Well I can only hope that story will break in time - and when it does I am sure that I will be able to read about it on the newest feed I am following, food network addict.
Thursday, May 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Hello Out There!
I turned 26 yesterday.
I must say I had a good time, had some friends over, some wine, some cake - one of my better birthdays. It was also good because I didn’t care about being another year older for a change, felt no need to make a big commitment for this coming year to be different. I had a good 25th year; things are heading in a good direction and well I’m happy.
Contentment I am sure is not exactly the most powerful motivation to start a blog but having had one in the past I missed having a site to tinker around with and to share my ill informed opinions with the world.
So consider this my introduction.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)