Blog archives

A collection of all the nonsense I've posted to the internet over the past 24 years of my blog life

  • Lollapalooza 2011 posted - 3 comments

    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... read more

  • My New Gig: Helping Reelect the President posted - 19 comments

    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... read more

  • How I lost 20 pounds to let my pants hang posted - 5 comments

    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... read more

  • Sorry to have to write this posted - 3 comments

    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 them that if I ever see someone biting, or tearing food to resemble a bite, and replacing the remainder, it will be a very bad day for that person... read more

  • 2010 Was Good posted

    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... read more

  • Snow Leads to Geo Detectives of THE FUTURE posted - 1 comment

    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... read more

  • Ireland 2010 posted - 2 comments

    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)... read more

  • Lollapalooza 2010 posted

    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... read more

  • Thoughts and Suggestions for Working at Home posted - 4 comments

    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... Make your home office shine or better yet - make your home office make you shine... read more

  • Dipity Doo Dah! posted - 7 comments

    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... read more

  • Big Omaha posted - 3 comments

    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... read more

  • Leaving Red Five posted - 7 comments

    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... read more

  • Introducing Garth Brooks posted - 3 comments

    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? read more

  • Gee One to Nexus One posted

    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... read more

  • IE6, The End is Near posted - 1 comment

    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... read more

  • I am awesome at sleeping posted - 6 comments

    So last night I dreamt about going somewhere with Kari, who (in my dream) routed our trip on my phone using Google Navigation. So in my sleep, I got my phone out, somehow unlocked it with my magical Android unlock pattern, and was looking at maps. The only thing I really remember is that the brightness of my phone woke Kari up, she wondered wtf was going on, and I couldn't explain it to her. I could not for the life of me figure out the words for google maps, gps, navigation, directions, etc... The only thing I could come up with was "the nightstand alarm map thing." I got pissed about my lack of sleep communication skills... read more

  • From Sea to Shining Sea posted

    2009 was the first year that I visited both the east and west coasts... And actually, I also touched the northern border and was only 30 miles from the southern border. I know I'm a geo dork, but I think that's pretty rad... and while we're on the subject, I'll just go ahead keep gauging the success of last year based on travel... so here we go... read more

  • Where Did December Go? posted

    Holy Month... I've been meaning to blog so freakin hard but have just been swamped beyond swamped. The main thing that I wanted to write about was my trip to Long Beach for Pragmatic Studio's iPhone development course... but now that's a month past and a lot of other stuff's been going on.... I'll try to keep this semi-short... read more

  • Ninja, The Million Dollar Bionic Legged Dog posted - 19 comments

    I don't even really know how to start this... But as I'm sure you all have heard, our dog Ninja died this morning at just over 5 years old. He'd been battling what we think was Addison's disease for the past couple weeks. Addison's disease is a disorder in which his adrenal glands don't produce enough steroid hormones. This basically sent his electrolytes out of wack, causing him to lose his appetite, become very weak, etc... read more

  • New York City Speed posted - 4 comments

    My dad has been living on the northeastern shore of New Jersey for a while now. He's actually just a short ferry ride from New York City. And uh - I'd never been to New York nor New Jersey, so I figured - it'd be a great time to check out the city at a cheaper rate. So Kari and I flew into NYC last Saturday and took a cab from the airport to dad's friends' place. As soon as we left the airport, I started to realize how giant NYC is - it's ridiculous... read more