new orleans, lori, asu, and bloglines
Well it's been a few days since I've updated. I have all kinds of interesting things to talk about.
Most importantly, there is New Orleans. I'm not sure I can say anything insightful on the subject, so I will simply give you a few links.
First there is the New York Times' pictures. As you navigate through them notice there is a hierarchy to the menu of what pictures you're looking at. Click a category on the top bar, then the same on the next bar.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/09/03/national/20050903_STORM_FEATURE.html
Next, we have some employees of directNIC.com who are holed up in their datacenter in downtown, in the central business district. They have been blogging, taking pictures, and have a live webcam set up. It's pretty amazing.
First we have the blog, I would suggest going back a few days before beginning in order to see the entire story unfold. You can read it here;
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/
Next there is the webcam. There are multiple mirrors of this in the blog as well. During the day it was pointed on the streets below where you could see fuel trucks, army vehicles, and a TON of federal/undercover cop/cop vehicles. There were plenty of other things like school buses, tow trucks, RVs, and just random unmarked cars as well. You can view it here;
http://wss-vip.adv.xc.advection.net/event/adv/evt20050902/new_orlean/0250?ext=.a
There are also a ton of picture links throughout the document. Some work, some don't. I'll let you find those yourselves.
I'm not exactly sure how I can transition from a horrible natural disaster to the rest of my life, but I owe you all some sort of an update. On the subject of natural disasters, I am watching The Day After Tomorrow right now. I didn't think it was that great the first time, and I'm even less impressed this time.
Let's see. I got a bunch of yard work done on Sunday, which was a long time coming. I have plenty more to do of course, but every bit helps. I've gotten in three bike rides so far this week, but I have slacked on the weight lifting (only once). I did find a solution to my tricep kickback problem though. I was extending my arm too far, and also my hand was slipping. The slipping made me grip harder which stressed the muscle the wrong way. So when I wrap a towel around the handle of the weight and do the lift properly, problem solved!
I spent quite a bit of time with Lori this week. She just keeps growing on me.. First we must discuss the food.
She introduced me to two things. The first is tobasco covered popcorn. I like spicy things. I get bored easily with popcorn. What's her solution? Douse it in tobasco while still in the microwave bag, shake it up, serve. Quite tasty if I do say so myself. The second was Spinato's Pizza (between University and Rio Salado / Mclintock and 101). Per her recommendation we got extra cheese, and well done. Unfortunately they didn't exactly cook it well done. This made the crust still a bit soft, and the cheese too chewy. I will have to return again to get a properly cooked one. The sauce was very tasty though, so I see it has plenty of potential.
Next, we have bundtlettes. This is technically a Dan recommendation, but Lori went out of her way to go pick them up and surprise me. A bundtlette is a mini-bundt cake from "Nothing Bundt Cakes" off Ray/48th St. She got banana, lemon, and chocolate. I wasn't a huge fan of the banana, but the other two were great. I am hard pressed to pick a favorite between them.
Now we must move on to alcohol. Monday night we went to a couple Ahwatukee bars to check them out. The first stop was Shenanigans off Desert Foothills Parkway and Chandler Blvd. I did not like that place. It looked like they had a big bar for the weekends, but they only had this little small side bar open that night. Then it looked like it was trying too hard to be a restaurant for the rest of it. I wasn't too impressed. Next we went to CK's Tavern and Grill just off 40th st, also on Chandler Blvd. This place was called a few other things over the last few years, but it's pretty much the same bar. This felt much more like a bar, and they had Kiltlifter on tap, so I was happy.
Also on the alcohol front would be the new martini glasses she got me from Crate & Barrel. Talk about a great girl. I mentioned while at Ikea the other week that I wanted new martini glasses, and she went and got me some really nice ones. She played it off like the box at the front door was there when she showed up, so I assumed it had been a shipment. I think she likes toying with me =). Of course, as long as she's doing nice things like that for me, she can toy all she wants.
So, ASU won their season opener last night 62-16. Granted, it was against Temple, so that isn't that exciting, but a few good things were seen, and the team got comfortable, in preparation for #5 LSU next weekend. That is, if LSU (Louisiana State University) can play at all due to the problems in that region. UofA played tonight, and lost 24-27 to Utah. Not bad actually, but still good to see UofA start off with a losing record.
I'm sure there are plenty of other interesting things I've left out, but that's what I can remember for the moment.
I will leave you with a useful geek feature. Bloglines. Bloglines is your friend. You can see it at http://www.bloglines.com/. I am currently using it as an RSS Aggregator. What the hell is that, you might ask? Well, RSS is Really Simple Syndication, a XML format that is used to syndicate news headlines, and other such items. Most every major news site supports it. You can use it to pull down news from 50 different sites and display them on a single web page. Bloglines does this for you. My left hand frame lists the 37 feeds I'm subscribed to, from the New York Times, to azcentral's ahwatukee news, to the daily dilbert, to this blog. It informs me when there are new articles, and lets me view them. VERY useful. I actually found the site because someone who reads this blog had signed up for it and I saw it in my web server logs.
Anyways, you can see the list of RSS feeds I'm reading at;
http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=mikeb
And if you wish to subscribe to this blog, you can use;
http://www.disturbed.org:8888/rss.php
If you want the URL for anything else I'm subscribe to, let me know!