12.22.MMXII

The new video "Connsumate with the Constable" is done! Yeehaw! If you're into language jokes you should enjoy this. Its the first little short film we've had the chance to do with Mr. Toddimus' new camera. Thanks go out to John Thompson, our lawman extrodinare, and Dean Timmerman, for an awesome score.

Tomorrow I get to head out to NC for Christmas with the Lindbergs, which was AMAZING last year, and for Van-blan-the-ambulan-man's wedding! That will be followed by some sort of New Year's soiree and then off to the other side of the country to visit V2! I've not had the opportunity to hang out with him in far too long. Then there will be a stop by Palm Desert for more friend visiting! I'm stoked! I'll try to have my camera with me for the good stuff :D.

12.13.MMXII

12.12.12 was yesterday! Woo? It was Mr. Dave's 30th birthday! WoO! Survived 30 years! Go Dave!

And today after a week of feeling like I may be coming down with something I decided to rest. And holy cow, I've never been so hungry! I slept til 7, woke up and ate, slept till noon, woke, ate lunch, read some, slept more, woke up at 4 went and got poke bowls, and then read some more and just ate spaghetti. Still hungry. Egads. Why am I so hungry?

Yesterday for various reasons I was looking back through some old pictures and I found the one below. You're probably looking at it and thinking "IN DA FACE!" but its more than that. Its from a day we went shark cage diving and then to Wiamea bay. The waves were coming in from like 1 to 6 feet. So the small sets would lull the tourists into the water, and the lifeguards would warn "we've had some big sets, if you're not comfortable in the water stay out." Well after hearing the guards tell the same people to keep their toddler from going in the water, and on the 3rd instance calling them out, "What type of horrible parents are you? Seriously. Keep your baby out of the water," we saw the below chick going into the water. She had sunglasses on, we knew this would not end well for her. So we kept a camera on her. Sure enough she proved us right. Something about 3 or so feet came through. You can see the water breaking around her face like being slapped with a bathtub full of water. Classic. FYI, dive under big waves.

PS. She was fine.

11.26.MMXII

Happy belated Thanksgiving! I hope your Thanksgiving was filled with good food and better friends and family! Mine was! And then with the four day weekend I slept so much, it was glorious! However the one thing that bugged me to death was that Walmart and a bunch of other retail stores were open on Thanksgiving. What in the world? I think it's kind of cruel to the employees. Next year I plan on boycotting everyone of those stores. And I'm not sure I'll even go out on Black Friday (not to be racist [did I miss the point of the Black Friday holiday?]), though my new argyle socks from Express are pretty ball'n. Yea. Thats right, hot pink argyle. I do digress. I think next Black Friday will be spent making brunch while everyone that I know sits around in our pajamas and finds the best deals on line. Black Friday online shopping pajama party? I think so.

Also over the long weekend I picked up Natrual Selection II in order to play with the other Combats. It was pretty awesome. I'd definatly suggest picking it up, especially if you played the first one, or you're a fan of Starcraft. Or first person shooters... or video games.

That's not to say that I spent the whole weekend doing nothing. Just most of it, as planned thank you very much. I also got little bits made our of metal that I needed to cut! :D. Additionally I worked quite a bit on my annual Christmas card. Its almost done! I predict I finish tomorrow :D.

Am I the last person to realize that The Arctic Monkeys sound like Franz Ferdinand in particular the "Whatever People Say I Am Thats What I Am Not" . Not the band silly, the dead Russian. Kidding, the band.

11.18.MMXII

Go Quads!

We saw our first draft score for our "Consummate with the Constable" from Mr. Dean Timmerman. It's going to be amazing! Also other projects in the works? I started my annual Christmas card on the 16th. That's like 3 weeks later than I normally start. But so far so good. I think I can finish it up in eight more sittings. Goooooo colored pencils! Additionally I'm well into "Looking For More" the novel that I'm writing. So far my test audiences have enjoyed it :D.

This coming week is Thanksgiving! And I soon will be thankful for pyrex baking pans and sweet potatoes in addition to everything else I've been blessed with :D.

And we've finally started watching the Game of Thrones series. Its actually really good and the differences between the books and the series are pretty minute thus far (I'm on book 3, and episode 3 of season 1). The biggest difference is that Tyrion is not as ghoulish as I had pictured him in my head. If everyone is supposed to be repulsed by his face and everyone calls him The Imp, you'd think he was quite repulsive. But the casting agent was kind, he doesn't even have different colored eyes. We'll see how he looks come season 3! Also everyone confuses Arry for a boy in the books, in the series I confused Bran for a girl :P. Other than that the quality is really great! If you've not read the Books (Amazon link) I highly suggest doing so! If you've not watched the series (Amazon link) ... I highly suggest doing so, I'd suggest getting the bluray disks from netflix, as on Amazon they are like $3.99 / episode, which seems high to me.

11.10.MMXII

18 days into a sprained knee. Still sore, still some swelling, still can't play! So today I may go to the beach and do nothing, sounds like a decent plan!

So I revamped EasyDrinkMixer.com to just have a bunch of pretty pictures and recipes. It looks pretty nice and works well :). We'll see how it goes. The functionality however is gone. For the last like 3 years I've been working on trying to make a system that allows you to input a set of ingredients and have the program return a set of recipes you can make with it. I tried to do this with food recipes on fridgn.com but learned a mighty lesson. There are TOO many ingredients with too many synonyms. While I had a decent method for working with the synonyms the vast number of ingredients prooved too daunting for one person. So I lowered my ambitions and applied the concept to drinks. You put in spirits and mixers and it spits back recipes. This proved to be much more managable, but people did not seem to use it. So now easydrinkmixer.com just has a set of recipes on it and pretty pictures, people seem to like pretty pictures. I still think the ingredient set to recipe set is a good idea, and the applications are pretty vast. You could input all of your legos and it could tell you what you can make, our input all your lego sets and it tells you what other lego sets you can make. Or you could put in all the pharmesuticals you're on and it could tell you possible side effects and drug interactions, or you could put in your genome sequence and a potential spouses and it could tell you about your childrens possible defects. Things like that.. I still think there is an application here, but I'm taking a break from it for a while. Enjoy the pictures :D.

11.1.MMXII

Rehab time for my knee. ARP like there is no tomorrow and I'll be good for snowboarding and surfing and playing and all that wonderful stuff, so says the PT. So for the next 3 weeks... none of the above. Instead I'll loaf around and get fat or something. Or I'll make a knife, write a story, and completely overhaul easydrinkmixer.com. That sounds like a better plan.

So this whole Disney buys Lucas out to get the rights to Star Wars, just sounds like a HORRIBlE idea to me. Unless they keep Lucas so far away from the story line its not even funny for episode VII. After episodes I - III, I decided that Star Wars only consists of episodes IV - VI. Everything else is just lies and people trying way to hard to try to make me buy junk. So on the heels of the uber flop John Carter by Disney, I guess they figured they'd just buy out the Star Wars franchise to have something to hold onto. Will they make their money back? Who knows. At this point the only reason I'd buy Lucas Films, would be to hang Jar Jar from a yard arm on the black pearl. Egh.

10.23.MMXII

Noooooo! I sprained my knee! I was running for second base and some guy decided to run into the base line and AT me. I tried to dodge him and when I did my knee buckled inward :(. We'll know the prognosis next Monday. If you're the person who reads this website, please send some prayers my way that its only a sprain, no tearing of my ligaments, least of all my ACL! Thanks.

So I thought that I had blindly sent $150 to India in order to get some damascus steel and that I'd never see it again. I sent like 3 emails asking for the status of the order and never received a reply. Well yesterday it showed up, and it is beautiful! So I'm pretty stoked about that. Now if I could just stand :P.

10.16.MMXII

And the videos are updated. I removed some of the older clips that were funny at the time. But filmed at 640x480 or worse back when we did not have a video capture card that could capture sound... Yea.

Our Sandy's Bodyboarding Video got picked up by Right This Minute a TV show featuring awesome youtube videos. That was pretty steallar :D.

Also the new GoPro HD Hero 3 is out. The sample video they seem content on taunting me with is below. Four hundred dollars, egads. For video reference, we shot the snowboarding video on the GoPro HD hero 1.

10.14.MMXII

Updated my literature! And I am glad to say that in my humble opinion about myself, so you know its unbiased, I think I've gotten better over time. I re-read The Miser's Tale and The NCSU Family of the Year essays. Still hilarious!

10.10.MMXII

Fact: I am addicted to snowboarding. Fact: We made a compilation video of our last trip. Fact: We shot it on a GoPro Hero HD, so you can watch it in HD. Fact: When you done gonna make sweet tea, take a five gallon bucket, fill it with hot wata, add one five pound bag o sugar and lot of tea mix. Fact from the south.

What?! You're from the south? And the above is an affront to you as a sweet tea connoisseur? Oh yea well then, I worked in a Golden Corral when I was in high school. I made the sweet tea. Revere ME!

That is to say we've finally procured a boom mic! So a while back we had plans to make a series of videos called 'facts from the south.' Now maybe we just might.

The calendar! Its done! We took the last picture for February titled "Oh, Really?" Check it out!

Also the Photography page has been made to look a bit nicer as well as added a nav bar to the hawaii page. Looking over the photography page makes me cringe... such horrible html. Maybe one day I'll fix it.

10.7.MMXII

Tomorrow is Columbus day! And its the only holiday in October. However, here in Hawaii Columbus day is not recognized as a federal holiday, and I will go to work. The onslaught against Columbus day continues in other states, where they have deemed it 'Discoverer Day.' I guess that's cool, cause I always found Ferdinand Magellan cooler. Plus his ghost helps me find my way around town. But I still feel that we should celebrate this day, so I'm going to give all my friends blankets.

I've archived everything from the previous years. I stuck 2006 to 2000 all in one lump sum. Looking back through there, I found some hilarious stuff. Good times. Also allow me one second to nerd out. In the continuing project to host this off of Cloud Front, I need to make everything static. I found the quickest way to turn dynamic content into static content is to send requests to a Sintra server, have it parse the .erb files and then write the html to an output file. Its up and going. Now I just have to make the ERB files. Egh.

10.4.MMXII

So I decided to update my site a bit. I'm going to try to get it all in the same format and then throw it on Amazon's Cloud Front. Downloading all the images from somewhere else is Soo incredibly slow from my current server. Though its a reliable little server! yes you are, you little server, yes you are!. Any ways you're looking at the new format. Its essentially ripped in part from Easy Drink Mixer. I've tweaked it a little bit, to oversize the buttons and what not, small details.

Work continues on Looking For More, I'm now over a quarter done :D.

And I'm trying my hardest to get a video on YouTube monetized while using 3rd party creative commons content. But thus far, regardless of having all the copyrights, licenses and attributions - no luck. Though our most recent video grabbed near 400 views in 48 hours, which was pretty sweet. See it ... well here.

9.18.MMXII

Been to Peru. So I'll go ahead and cross that off the list, pft.

Just kidding! Peru turned out amazing! We hiked the Choquequirao ruins, and I should have a slate of images of the place up soon or later. Its so much easier to make a silly album on facebook and be like "done" but so much quality is lost!

So the hike, yes, it was epic. Apparently the Choquequirao hike is substantially harder than the Inca trail hike to Machu Picchu. Its 66 kilometers and then some, so around 40 miles in 4 days. There is a 5 day option, I'd suggest that in hindsight. But day one you drop from an elevation of 10k ft to 9k. Then you go back up to 10k. And you're all like that's not too bad. And then they're like, nope not done sukka, and you drop another 3000 ft before you sleep. The outpost is swarmed by some sort of death legion of sand flies. They bite and draw little blood blisters that if they pop they swarm and drink from, else if you scare them off the blisters itch like the dickens for about a week. Day 2 continues on the trek, down another 2000 ft to the river, which you cross in a little basket on a steel cable, and then up. Up 5000 feet to Marampata. And you're still not done, you'll continue out the trek to Choquequirao. The distance is irrelevant as long as you're not going up. The ruins are insane. There are no people up there, when we were there I'd estimate we saw 10 other people. Nothing is roped off and you can explore to your hearts content!
Night 2 is spent below the ruins by about a half hour, and morning three is a return to explore the other 50% of the ruins and see the Llama wall. You have to hike down some hellish distance to view the wall... I'd have taken their word that all the llamas face the same way. But I'm glad I did it. The later half of day three is spent hiking down 5000 ft and then back up 2500 ft on the other side of the river. And finally day 4 is up (literally 2500 more ft) and out (with a 1k ft drop and gain). Would I do it again? No. Am I sorry I did it? Super no! It was epic and amazing. The mountains are insanely large, I had no idea of their scale. And its absolutely beautiful! If I were to go again I'd do some hike (Sultans pass? I'm not sure what it was called) that gets you close to the glaciers capping the mountains. Apparently at night you can hear the glaciers breaking and avalanching! Intense! And there are some sick glacier hikes and I've been told Lake Titikaka should have been explored. So my eight days down there were not enough, and a return trip would include some other hikes through glaciers and a trip to a really high lake. Machu Picchu? Yea we did that. We took the train and bus in, which was nice. The ruins were cool, but Choquequirao ruins were way more cool, though the majority of them lie still covered in vines and little trees (Yea that is awesome.).

What else is up? I'm about eight chapters into Looking For More. So far its hilarious and my friends have been good enough to sit through me reading it and giving me feed back. Its coming along quite nicely.

I'm also doing some redesign work on this site to pretty it up a notch. Stealing some of the code I put together for ToddFink.com which can be seen on the Hawaii Desktop Images page and the Visual pages. So far so good.

And finally I'm onto book 2 of the A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire. So far I've enjoyed the series! I'm trying to read through it before watching the TV series which everyone has been raving about. In that fashion we've created our own Winter Is Coming image. I started reading the series on the plane down to Peru and back to Hawaii. Its the first book I've read on a Kindle which I borrowed from a friend. I actually enjoy reading it in this format, through I've no clue where in the world I am through the book. The little progress bar means nothing to me when I'm 24% through 4 books. But all the same I've enjoyed it, if you've not tried it you should just to see. And carrying the little Kindle to Peru was much easier than carrying a billion page book.

8.7.MMXII

Congratulations Richard and Katie Thompson! Two years after bringing Katie to the islands Richard has married her! The wedding was great! I was a ring bear(er). So I made a Ring Bear(er) Pillow! It was a fun task :D.

So that is about the extent of what I've been up to recently. That and putting together some stories for a novel that I'm going to write :D. "Looking For More." So far so good :D.

7.25.MMXII

What a long while between updates on here. Why because there are things outside to go do! I lie, I sit inside most days and toil in the dark. Toil on hilarious things! Like our newest rap video! Well... Our newest dubbed over rap song: Tupac ft. Spock and Tuvok - Only God Can Judge Me (below). I find it hilarious, and at the very least that is enough. Oh yea and surfing. Lots of surfing.

Also since I was like 12 I thought that the Chevy Camaro is a beautiful car. So as Todd says, I have lived out one of my childhood fantasies, and by waiting 16 years I was able to pick one up for 1/10th of what it originally cost. Score.

On the programming front, I have had the darnedest time getting Easy Drink Mixer to work on an Amazon AWS Micro instance. When I try to compile, make and make install ruby 1.9.2 it just starts throwing up errors. So with a little help from my friends I'll get pie. Erm, that up and running soon and hopefully saving some money!

On the pictures front we got to shoot some engagement pictures for some wonderful friends as well as some baby pictures for other wonderful friends. Their wonderment was cloned though the people remain unique. AND I just got a top hat and a monocle! The calendar will be done soooo soon!

6.17.MMXII

"Bridesmaids." Its like "Hangover" but for chicks. Lie. One was funny.

In other news Bouncing Souls just released their new album Comet (Amazon). It is fantastic. Like Argyle mixed with the Gold Album. Some sort of criss crossed meshed precious metal... from space. Its amazing. You can also stream it on myspace if you're cheap and won't support the Souls. Only sad news, it does not look like their tour will grace Hawaii. And as I'm going to Peru in August (yay!) I don't think I'll make the trip to California or Washington to see them. Oh how I wish I could!

So if you're one of my dedicated update readers... hello you... You're wondering what really inspired me to open up an html editor at some obscure hour. Well the answer to that: Simply to say Bridesmaids some how needed to be cleansed from my brain before bed. The only take away from that movie is to feel bad for the future of the cop. egh.

6.11.MMXII

Added a couple more pictures to Hawaii desktop images. I've now included some iPad 3 retina display resolution images. The iPad 3 has a resolution of 2048x1536 which seems a bit off to me. Most other desktops and widescreen images float around the golden ratio of 1:1.618 (eg. 16:9, 'widescreen' and '1080p' = 1:1.77, and old monitors are at 16x10 = 1:1.6), which just look good. I try to keep all of my images, whether they are for desktop images or print at the golden ratio. Again, it just looks better. However this new iPad 3 'retina display' is at 1:1.33. Thats like a fat kid in the beauty pageant, it just looks off. I'd expect better from Apple. But, alas I'll go ahead and throw these ipad 3 desktops up, because while I'd never buy an iPad 3, one was generously given to me (many thanks), and the first useful thing it did was to force me to update the resolutions of the desktop images I provide. However, only the newer images are at the 2048x1536 resolution.

So last week this story of an alligator sneaking up on a bobcat was all over the news. The guy who photographed the whole thing said something to the extent of "Yea, we live here and we have a respect of the gators, and they have a respect for us." No, no they don't. To them you're just a fat slow meal that is too smart to get in the water for now. Which made me start thinking, its nice to be on the top of the food chain, and that there are no huge animals that would gladly eat me. Which made me suddenly realize, that no, there are lots of them, we are just smart enough to stay away from them, and the large ones we keep around are fairly docile. I don't really worry about walking out of my house in the morning and being gored by some crazed giraffe.

And with that Happy Kamehameha day! Back to work tomorrow. This weekend was chock full of surf, sand, kayaking, secret beaches, ocean caves and a driving range. Woo.

6.10.MMXII

So much to update on! First of all, the reason I have an HTML editor open: I updated Hawaii Desktop Images, and I must say that I like it! Its combining a bit of different things I've seen plastered over the internet and essentially is a rehash of the work I did for www.ToddFink.com, which should be alive soon. But oh my its so much smoother than the old format that my photography pages still use.

Also I finished Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joel Foer. I must say, it was tantilizing. And after a myriad of conversations with people about the book... One sided conversations where I rave about how awesome it is... they always rhetort, "well is there any practical application?" To which I realized there is no practical applicaiton to having a better memory. Wait, no. Some interesting things we've come up with is setting up a memory palace that stores is unique for each year, with a room for each month. Then putting what you did in said month in each room. Also I've started trying to use my childhood neighborhood as 1900 to 2000. There is not too much in there yet. Also as Ad Herennium was suggested reading from Moonwalking, I picked it up. The treatise on memory is only about 20 pages or so, but has one key point that is super useful. Marking every 5th room / area in your memory palace is amazing for quickly recalling say... the 11th thing as you only go 2 rooms instead of 11. Anyway, if you're interested in your memory and making it better check out the link above for a trip to Amazon and pick it up!

Also in late August, early September we are going to Peru to check out Machu Picchu, my excitement ebbs and flows. Lets hope it is amazing.

I guess lastly, this month I want to finish up my damascus knife project, and get some more pictures edited and up for your enjoyment. And we're only 1 photo short of finishing our calendar... so close!

4.24.MMXII

Well it seems according to some random person's some how published opinion, mechanical engineering is the 8th most useless degree. And Chemistry is number 9. Well I guess I have chosen the wrong line of work. Wait... wait... I'm going to go enjoy my salary in little box on the hills side, in my little box made of ticky tacky, little boxes all the same. You'll find me in the red one... with flames on the side. And spinners. In all seriousness, I hope you followed that, because the song is precious.

More new pictures on Easy Drink Mixer and they look pretty... good. That's about all the programming updates I have right now, save that I think we may be launching the Hiphopatoddamus a website here soon. It'll be about rap. Or photography, which ever I deem him better at.

In other news, it seems that the wood I was sent for the handle on my knife is in limbo, or purgatory, or the USPS undelivered mail cubicle somewhere in the middle of nowwheresville. Which sucks because I want to finish my knife!

So in the mean time, I've picked up a Scion TC...'s driver seat. I'm going to replace my current computer chair with it, as it fell victim to horse...play. And we've almost everything that we need for the build-a-router-bear... Everything except the fiber-optic lines and the bear. Details.

And work continues to go well. We're still working on our manuscript for publishing, which is coming along quite nicely. Soon... Soon my precious. Precious? Not so much at this point, I'm ready for this one to be done! I've got science to do!

And so why the random update with no new content? Well that would be because I'm looking over my desktop to make sure that its cleaned up as I've uninstalled Battlefield 3. It was fun, but my gaming prowess... though still mighty and nimble, grows tired and I'd rather play constructive project or 'I live in Hawaii.' Anyways, on my desktop was a pretty sweet little ditty of quotes I took down on the ski trip. So I wanted to add some of those to the quotes page.

4.17.MMXII

If you've yet to see 21 Jump Street, you're missing out! With a week and a bit to think about it, I can say that it may be the funniest movie I've ever seen. I genuinely laughed from the beginning to the end of the movie. Amazing.

After doing math all day it seemed like a good idea to do something non-math related. So I placed an order through Bay Photo for their sample of metal prints. I printed something simlar to Magic Island, but cropped down to 5x7". We'll see how it looks soon enough! This I am excited about, if it is amazing we'll get some larger prints done.

And after having advertised on The Wolf Web Easy Drink Mixer's traffic seems to have picked up a bit. The next little bit of content I'm going to be adding will be information on each of the given brands and some more sweet picutres. Its in development and looking pretty good.

The other project I'd like to get finished this month is the calendar project. So close... and I know what I'm going to do as well! So that was the hard part. Next to get some costume or a really old person and shoot this thing. Additionally we've procured the router for the next bear. However its the only funcitonal router in my house at this point in time... so... that's no good. Additionally the damascus steel knife has been put on hold for a bit as I'm waiting for the handle wood to arrive. If its not here within the week I'll go ahead and use the bloodwood I have and use the burl for the next knife. So much waiting!

3.28.MMXII

So March. You've been fleeting, too short, and yet still filled with some productivity. Mega thanks to Melissa from Unleash Studio for being the January Baking addition to our calendar! We've only got 1 more image for our calendar and we're done! Then there is a good chance we can do a gallery exhibit! So I'm pretty stoked.

I finished reading Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain which was pretty good. Not as funny or as well thought out as Sherrif of Yrnamere in my opinion, but still worth the read. It spans our solar system, involves mollusks, and a slew of Earth's lost civilizations in a pretty creative way. Go for it! The next book up on my plate is Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joel Foer. So far it looks like a broad look at classical memorization techniques... to improve your memory. Not to make memorizing things a chore, but to give some pretty awesome practical ways to improve your brain's software to run your God given hardware. I'll let you know how it goes.

Along the same line of thought... there was a paper written on 'fluid thinking,' which essentially is how quickly you're able to solve new problems. Okay - recap, so for the longest time it was believed that this was pretty much static within an individual. But they developed a game, called 'Dual N-Back' which improves this. I played every day once for like a month... It goes from impossible to "yea 4!" to "oh man, I almost got 10 back!"... yes, I was only able to get to level 9... though I figure after level 10 you've won... As you only have to remember the 10 series and recite it back without any new stimulus. Same thing for level 11... but you only have to really remember the first 9... Once you're on level 19... you only have to remember the first sequence. Like cheating after level 10. Good luck getting to level 10.

So March was also supposed to see the completion of my demascus steel knife. Which it still may if I'm lucky... though progression goes slowly as to make the most beautiful knife possible. I'm also waiting on some wood pieces from the Beta version to see if they would make a more amazing handle than Bloodwood. Once I'm done I'll have pictures of the whole process.

What will April bring? Pancakes.

3.14.MMXII

Congratulations ... 4 days ago to Katie and Richard! I guess now I can't pick on Katie for not being engaged. But oh so high maintenance, first a car and now a ring, phew. Kidding - nothing but love!

And what else is up? Well thanks to one of the greatest Christmas gifts ever I'm still running a lot more than I used to. However, my old friend the planters va... plantars fasciitis has popped up. But oddly its not that stabby feeling in my heel, but rather a dull ache and swelling on the ligament. Dear ligament, meet my old friend ice. But oh man, running up Wilhimina Rise is crazy. About a block from the top I'm like 'this is the dumbest thing ever.' Shortly there after the sentiment shifts to 'oh, that was good,' and its back to 'come on Friday!' Friday's all about showing up on time.

So Easy Drink Mixer has started to get some search result hits and some people are using it, which is good. We need to update more pictures, but this month is about finishing the calendar. Friday... oh how close you are, Melissa is coming to be a bonafied pie baking 1950's chick for a wild picture. Stoked.

And on top of all this, in general I'm just kind of stoked... for various reasons :). And if you missed it, The Sheriff of Yrnameer was an awesome read V2 suggested. Along the same thread I've just received in the mail Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain (Thank you Amazon for saving me $'s over Barnes and Nobel!). So what to do now? Go read! Pictures/work/everything else can wait :D. Book!

2.24.MMXII

February! Phew, now that its out there... whats going on? You know, living the life. Just another day in paradise. Something like that!

Actually that is pretty accurate, we've been taking some pictures, and it would seem that my partner based project for February fell through, so I'll pick it up on my own in the near future. But as it fell through...

Easy Drink Mixer is up and running! Woo! And its running pretty well at that. We decided to not run the Fridgn recipe indexing scripts against cocktails on every website ever thus building the most massive comprehensive library of mixed drinks... Because the internet is full of crap sometimes. Instead we opted to only put in the essential and best cocktails. So far so good. Toddimus has also graced the pages with some awesome photographs of all of our drinks (well... like 25 of the 125 so far...) as seen here: Right here...

Now to finish up some pictures, maybe polish it a bit, add a button, mow a cat, and finish a calendar and knife next month!

Off to see Cake!

1.21.MMXII

No update in a long time! And I was doing so well. I guess there are better things to do in the evenings while you live in Hawaii. However, there are not better things to do while you're waiting in the Vancouver International airport. Well I could go looked at stuffed moose but that seems like it would grow old fa...

I've decided I'm not a huge fan of moose. But since the last update a lot has happened. December was FULL to the brim with things to do. I left Hawaii on the 22nd to head back to NC for Christmas, it was pretty good. I'd never read a full book straight through till my first return trip to the mainland three years ago, and it was amazing - Timeline by Michael Chrichton. Its like watching a movie in your head. So this return trip I read through The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Again like a movie in your head, this time without knights, more murderous kids and strange creatures. I'd be keen on seeing the movie when it comes out this year.

Speaking of seeing movies, while at home I managed to go see "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which was fabulous. The book was amazing, and kept me reading three evenings in a row. The movie kept me glued to the screen for three hours. I've heard that the Swedish version was really well done too so I may see that now, I did not want it to ruin the American version, which was great.

So Christmas was grand. Christmas Eve was spent with the Gordon's and included an amazing cheese dish, of which the name escapes me. Delicious! Christmas was spent with Peter's family, which was a traditional Christmas dinner, which included Beef Wellington, which was not raw, but instead amazing! Infact the whole dinner was incredible and now having tried figgy pudding I can vouch for why one would not leave until they got some. Delightful!

On the 28th, my mother, Max and I headed up to Annapolis in order to attend V2's wedding (CONGRATULATIONS!). On the drive up I learned that you can have a TomTom have an audible alert everytime you're near some sort of attraction, or land mark... like it can make a noise every time you pass a school, or a church, or a university. There are a lot of schools, churches, and universities on the way to Maryland from North Carolina. Also I learned that you can tell TomTom to avoid roads with HOV lanes. This lead to the amazing discovery that to get to Annapolis, the only way to avoid HOV lanes is through downtown Washington DC. Like beside the Smithsonian mall and the capital building. This detour takes a LOT of time.

But the wedding went amazing! Congratulations to Paul and Bethany! I saw some relatives that I had not seen in years, like since I was four. So that was also really neat. And Bethany's side of the family is pretty cool too. So I'm sure that I'll be seen a lot more of them with any luck. Paul and Bethany have since moved up to Seattle, where I am currently sitting ontop of them like a hat for the next two hours.

So why am I in Vancouver? Well this year's ski and snowboard trip has taken us up to Whistler / Blackcomb, BC. It was amazing. Tuesday and Wednesday it pushed -40 (peak temp) to -15 C. Cold. Very cold. We had some cheap Smith and Oakley goggles freeze up and perform really poorly. But that being the worst part of our experience, it was AMAZING. Monday night it snowed, Tuesday it snowed, Wednesday it snowed, Thursday was clear with amazing snow and Friday it snowed again! I had some of the best powder runs I've had, it was great! The snowboarding addiction has been fueled and decently satisfied, though I'm sad to go (last night there was another 5 inches of snow dropped on them...). With any luck I'll have some good pictures and video from the trip very soon.

And while refraining from thinking about work come the end of January I hope to have EasyDrinkMixer.com up and working. February will bring its own challenge, and March will see the conclusions of our calendar.