Bad Juju

The third attempt to find new sandals failed today. On our shopping spree, Jen and I had looked for new sandals, but no dice, even at the big shoe warehouse. Tonight I went out for shoes and a haircut. I got the haircut, but all the sandals they had were the wrong size. My plan had been to get deals as they got rid of sandals for the winter, but I think I am too late.

I also found out this weekend that my bank, Washington Mutual, went belly up like East River trout. I don't even have close to $100,000, so the FDIC has got my back. JP Morgan Chase bought it, so I think it'll still be around, but I wonder if I should shuffle my banking around. Of course, then I heard that Wachovia got sold off today, too. Man, when major banks like that are going down I have to admit I'm getting a bit skittish.

Gonna Dress You Up in My Love

The weekend is drawing to a close and I end it with more clothes. Jen and I went on a shopping spree on Saturday and got me about a half a wardrobe, maybe more. It's been so long since I have gone clothes shopping with anyone. It's a task I don't generally enjoy, but doing it with Jen was fun, especially since she put most of the clothes back on their hangers for me. She also broadened my taste by being a bit more adventurous than I allow myself to be. So I've got some new togs to freshen up the closet.

We also hit the Concert in the Park put on by my church and then came back for popcorn, movies, and games. It was a fun day to spend with her and I looked all spiffy going to church this morning. I finally have dress shoes that I can wear without shame, as my last pair look like they've got through a rock tumbler.

At church we had a baptism today, and one of the pastors had asked me to take pictures, so I got to go all shutterbug at church. It was a beautiful day for it and three people proclaimed their faith in Jesus, which is always an awesome thing. God's love is a wondrous thing.

I had planned on staying down in Littleton to avoid having to make a trip back down there for the last membership class, but ended coming back up here to make cheese biscuits for the pre-class potluck. But before cooking, it was time for a nap.

I'm not sure how long I slept for, but when I woke up, I was groggy and it was after 3:30, so I tried to wake up and make those biscuits. The last of them came out of the oven just in time for me to race down to the church office and finish up the membership class. I've never actually formally joined a church before. I always have stupid excuses, usually based on the fact that I'll be moving in the future. I can't be a member of this church! I'm going to move in X number of years. Sheesh. Even though that is more the case now than it has been in the past (I figure in June I'll prolly be moving further north and out of feasible attendance range), I figure I'll go for it. I can't keep letting temporal excuses get in the way of me getting fully involved.

Numero Uno

Last night Jen and I met up in Westminster. I brought her some peach pie and tiramisu and we grabbed something to drink at a coffee shop. After some chatting we had dinner with her friends Kevin and Diana at Uno Chicago Grill. I hadn't eaten at this place despite its prevalence in Florida. We had a good dinner and ate the thick slabs of pizza with crust like a pie. Pretty darn good, and very rich. Afterwards Jen and I meandered through a bookstore and enjoying hanging out with each other after a week of deprivation.

Very early this morning, the pizza struck back. I seldom get heartburn, but this pizza came through in that department. I even broke out my bottle of Pepto Bismol, which I found was distressingly close to empty. I stopped short of sticking my tongue in the bottle to get more, but I was glad for every little drop of relief it afforded me. Note to self: you can't gorge yourself on pizza before going to bed any more.

Phones, Cell Phones, and Smart Phones

Thinking about phones has inordinantly occupied my mind recently. Important details like where I had parked my car or how to get to Jill and Dean's house had been pushed out of my crowded and leaky head to make way for speculations about the HTC Dream and considerations about the iPhone. I am looking at other phones than those two, but they are the main contenders. And yes, I am nerd enough that I have started a spreadsheet comparing the phones.

My contract is up with Verizon, and I am eager to slip away from this company's slimy grasp. They have given me enough trouble, neutered their phones, and mistreated customers enough for me to cut ties with the big network and go looking elsewhere. I've been flooded with entreaties to sign another contract and get another phone from them. They offer phones upon phones, then move on to hookers, crack, and tiny crystal unicorns. But I say no to them. No! I am done with you, Stinky Verizon. You have taken advantage of me for too long.

But now I have to decide which provider to hit up for my phone service. I want good service and I want an excellent phone. AT&T had the latter and T Mobile had the former, but there wasn't a clear winner. So I have been waiting; waiting for that magical, beautiful phone to sweep me off my feet and make me feel butterflies in my stomach and rainbows in my heart. Not that tiny crystal unicorns aren't awesome, mind you.

Anyhow, the iPhone has been beckoning, but I have been waiting to see what the Google Android phones are like. The HTC Dream will be the first phone to use the Android operating system, and its release date will be announced tomorrow. I am giddy and excited far beyond what I should be about tomorrow. For all these years, I have been without an MP3 player or a PDA (remember those?) or a mobile gaming device. Now, having avoided being an early adopter, I can get all of those and heaven too in a single device. Or so I hope. I am looking forward to seeing the initial reviews of the Dream so I can puzzle through whether to live life in the beautiful prison of the iPhone or risk setting sail in the open source seas with an untried operating system. I can hardly wait!

Lethal Luau

On Saturday evening, Jill and Dean had some folks over for an evening of ... MURDER! Or at least a murder mystery game. Close enough. This was the first time that I had been a part of one of these, and it was pretty fun. The theme of the game was the Lethal Luau, so everyone bought Hawaiian-ish dishes and we drank pina coladas and Isaac made a new tasty drink called the white Hawaiian (which as I understand it should be a haoli, right?).

The story goes like this: Chase Diamond is a private detective in Maui. On his 33rd birthday, he dies from poison in his mai tai, and not the fun kind of poison. There are five suspects.

Was it wealthy socialite Holly Day, who had been amourous with notorious womanizer Chase Diamond?

Or was it his disgruntled employee, former surfer Joey Breakers?

Perhaps it was Nadia Seymour, the vindictive swimsuit model who had been canoodling with the detective?

Perhaps it could be the hot-tempered Chief Wiki Wiki?

Maybe it was even the unassuming hula dancer Leilani who was another of Diamond's many lovers? She does dance a violent hula, after all.

Maybe it could even be mysterious (and strangely handsome) tourist Les Baggs who had hired Chase to find his missing luggage. Nawwwww.

Anyway, I'm not going to say who did it, but I did figure it out. Afterwards we chatted and had pie and tiramisu while I basked in my newfound crimesolving glory. It was great to have a good dinner with friends, even while accusing each other of manslaughter.

Aether

It's a two-fer today! After my pie making frenzy, I took some time to revisit an interesting little game I had come across called Aether. It is a short little game that is good to occupy a few idle hours on a weekend. It is about a boy who befriends an octopus type monster and is able to travel to other planets using the monster's tongue. On those planets you solve puzzles to help restore color to the world. It is a very arty game with good sound and a mood and story feel like that of Braid, which I mentioned earlier, I think. The stunning thing about the game was that it was created in 14 days by its two creators. That's astounding considering all the physics involved. It takes a while to learn the ropes, or, uh, tongues of swinging from cloud to cloud and planet to planet, but it is worth the effort. One caveat is that playing on a trackpad makes it much more difficult.

Tri-pie-umphant

Two peach pies are cooling on the rack across the counter from me. I partially forgot my last peach pie experience with rampantly overflowing juices, so the fan is on high and the windows are open to drive out the burnt peach smell. The pies look great though. I made the crusts on a one and quarter recipe to try to seal in some of the juices, but that didn't quite work. This is also the inaugural use of the pi pie plate Laura got me for my birthday.

The third pie in this pie trifecta is not actually a pie, but a peach brandy tiramisu. However, it is in a pie plate, so it's almost like a pie, but without the side crusts. It's merely pie-ish. It is currently chilling (possibly chillaxing) in the fridge.

The tiramisu and one of the pies are heading for a Lethal Luau at Jill and Dean's house tonight. It's going to be a murder mystery dinner. I've never done one before, so this should be interesting. The other pie is destined for work. That's where all these peaches came from in the first place. Well, actually it would be western Colorado, but they were given to me by the folks at work to craft for them peach desserts. They've already had one tiramisu, so the pie comes next. I took the liberty of using the rest of the peaches for my own dessert designs. Hello calories! Here I come!

Responsibility

This morning in the gym, I went to one of the weight machines to continue refining and toning my Adonis-like (Bubba Adonis of Shreveport, LA to be exact) physique. Unfortunately it looked like someone had gently puked on it; just a little sick up, nothing chunky or thick. How does one not know that you should clean this up? How does one walk away and not care that someone else is going to come upon this and be quite grossed out? Who are these irresponsible jerks?

Apparently they are the same people who will let their dog crap in a public, heavily-traveled stairwell and then leave it there to be kicked around for several days. This happened earlier this week in my building. Who are these people and where are the wolves who raised them? I would like to kick their butts and rub their noses in their messes. Actually, that is an insult to wolves. These people must have been raised by cockroaches or Visigoths.

Gosh dang, I can't wait to get out of here.

That's ... Funny

This last weekend was nowhere as exotic as the previous one in Florida. Friday night was ... uh ... I think it was mainly laundry and chores. My gosh. What did I do on Friday? Uh. Huh. Well anyway, on Saturday Jen and I had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and went to see Burn After Reading. Isaac, Elsa, and I had planned on going to Nan Desu Kan, but we couldn't get a fix on what a daily price was and what we thought it might be was a bit expensive for a small convention. So anyway, instead of going to an anime convention I got together with Jen and we saw the new Coen brothers movie. It was certainly an odd one. I wasn't sure what we were supposed to get out of it, and I'm not sure what to think about it. I then spent the rest of the day making tiramisu and failing miserably at trying to fix my bike's brakes. I just don't know how disc brakes are supposed to operate and what's normal for them.

Yesterday I went up to Boulder after church and had lunch with Jen and her friend Kerri at Zolo. I tried some of Kerri's order of Corned Buffalo Hash which tasted like honest to goodness corned meat, unlike most corned beef hash. It was quite good. We followed that up with a walk along the creek, watching a dragonfly maraude a cloud of bugs floating over the water, all illuminated by the late afternoon sun. We then went to the home of Jen's friends Tim and Stephanie and had pizza with them, their kids, and Jen's friend Lisa. We got to see the nifty garden and chicken coop they had going, as well as to experience life with the kiddos. It was great to meet more of Jen's friends and it also has been a very long time since I've smelled that chicken coop smell which brought back memories of mean hens and hunting chickens roosting in the butterfly bushes.

Tonight I went with Laura, Debbie, and their friend Shannon to the Comedy Works, which had a new talent competition type thing, which was pretty good. There were only a couple of cringeworthy contestants. I also got a free can of Roaring Lion energy drink, which sort of tasted like a grandma soap flavored Jolly Rancher that had been liquified and carbonated. Not entirely unpleasant, but nothing I'll rush to put in my mouth again any time soon.

Today was also ruled by my newfound addiction to Fail Blog. Tim had mentioned it during dinner and I checked it out today turning my compile time. It made my productivity asymptotically approach zero, but I haven't laughed that hard in a good long while. Particularly hilarious is this video about the perils of elephant keeping. It's gross, but not graphic, and it's 100% sidesplitting.

Florida Epic Post 5000!

All right. I finally have the pictures up from the trip Jen and I took to Florida. You can see them in my gallery. However, if you want the narrative, you are in the right place. So, okay. Florida.

Jen and I flew down on Friday to Tampa. Jen was going to do some training there, and so we thought we'd go down early and see some friends of mine and do the Central Florida thing. We drove up to my friends Jim and Jen's place in Deltona and stayed overnight there. The next day it was time to go to the Universal theme parks. It's sort of a two for one deal. We went to Universal Islands of Adventure and to Universal Studios itself.

We got some express passes so we could hit as many rides as possible and we started at the back of the park to get ahead of the crowds. We went on both sides of the Dueling Dragons ride first, which are two awesome intertwined coasters. We then went to the Jurassic Park ride and got through its big splash at the end without getting too wet. Well that was going to change. We then went to the Dudley Do-right log ride. Last time I was on it, it was a tremendously long wait because the ride kept breaking. This time we got in and through pretty quickly and got pretty well splashed on its splashdown finale.

Last time I was here, I didn't go on the Popeye ride. I couldn't remember why, so Jen and I decided to go check it out. It was a very good thing that I took my camera, wallet and passes out of my pockets before hand, as we got absolutely soaked on the ride, and I would have had to figure out how to get another print out of our passes. After the ride, we ended up wringing out most of our clothes and squishing around the park.
We decided to air out by doing some outdoor rides, so we went on Dr. Doom's Fear Fall and the awesome Hulk roller coaster. But a visit to the comic book area of Universal is incomplete without a ride on the amazing Spider-man ride. It's an awesome 3-D ride that does an amazing job of simulating movements.

After that ride, we grabbed some lunch and then went to the Poseidon show. It's pretty cool with a walk through a churning tunnel of water and a special effects show with flames and video projected on sheets of water. Afterwards, we wandered over to Universal Studios and went into the Terminator 2 show, followed by the new Simpsons ride. This ride replaced the claustrophobic Back to the Future ride, and was considerably better. After that was Jaws, Disaster, and the Twister special effects show.

Also in there was the Mummy ride. Now, when we were over at Islands of Adventure, we noticed there were a ton of people wearing Christian T-shirts. They were everywhere. We figured it must be a church day or something like that. When we were over in Universal Studios, we found that it was Christian concert called Rock the Universe with a line-up of big name Christian artists. So the parks had been filling up with Christian teens all day. By the time we got to the Mummy, it was jam-packed with adolescents and had reached critical mass. I thought my voice might be changing again just from the concentration of hormones. It was loud, but it was better than say, a smoker's convention. We did get on the Mummy finally and had a blast.

The park closed for normal visitors at 6, so we toddled over into Universal CityWalk and rested a bit before heading back to Deltona. We got pizza with Jim and Jen and played Settlers, where I came from behind and won. Hoo ha!
On Sunday we met my friends Erin and Chad for breakfast before heading to church at Summit. It was so good to be there again and see a lot of people I hadn't seen in a long while. Afterwards we grabbed some Chipotle for lunch and headed over to Sheri's house. Sheri was my supervisor at the library, and graciously hosted a get together of people. We played a lot of games and had a lot of fun. Thanks, Sheri!

While we were at Sheri's, Jen got a call telling her that the training she was going to do had been cancelled. This meant that we had an extra day to play and spend together. We also needed to find a new place to stay, since we had planned on going to Tampa that evening. Jen and Jim graciously let us stay there again.
The next morning we headed down to Leu Gardens. Admission on Monday mornings was free, so we breezed through quickly and saw some of the bizarre plants you can grow in Florida. I of course went crazy taking pictures. We then went to OCLS and met up with some of my former co-workers. We went and got some good Thai food at Thai Cafe and we gave Jen a tour around the library.

After that, we went up to Wekiva Springs and did one of my favorite things to do in Florida. We went kayaking out on the smooth waters from the spring. The water was high and turbid from the heavy rain Florida had gotten earlier. We saw turtles and birds and had a good paddle up Rock Springs Run. I was so glad to get to show Jen this thing I love. Afterwards we swam in the springs.

Then it was time to go and we headed down to Tampa. Jen was going to try to fly out with me, but unfortunately we couldn't get on the same flight, so Jen got back 7 hours after me. We both were surprised though, by how refreshing the whole trip was. It was a great time and we were both quite blessed by God's provision of an extra day together.

Remember, if you want to see more pictures, you can see it in my gallery.

Grousing

Things that I have learned, over the past few days, that I can really do without:

1. Toothpaste in my eye. Don't ask how.
2. Self checkout machines that ask you to see an attendant every freaking time you scan something.
3. The post office marking mail as undeliverable that was sent to the same address I successfully sent something to last week.
4. Firefox 3 shutting down my Flex debugging sessions automatically.
5. Reinstalling Eclipse and Flex ... oh wait, that's sort of necessary.
6. Fellow airplane passengers who smell like last week's seafood special.
7. Cashiers who overcharge me and forget to remove the anti-theft device from the merchandise.
   

Escape from Humidity

So, I've returned from the swamp safe and sound. The travel back was a little interesting, as Jen was trying to get on the same flight as me. However, I am back and glad to be out of the humidity. I forgot what it is like to insta-sweat. Overall, it was a great trip, and I'll have a full account soon. Here's a few pictures to tide you over.

In Tampa

Jen and I are in the Tampa airport right now, taking advantage of the free wi-fi, though the lack of available power outlets may put an end to that. We'll see when we get home, but it may be later than we had hoped. The vacation has been largely good, and Jen's training got canceled so we even got to have an extra day of vacation together. Woot! Of course, many, many pictures were taken, so you will get to see some of those once I get some time to work on them. Of course, if the airport stars align, I may have plenty of time today to do that as I wait for flights.

My New Friends

Yesterday I did something I have never done before. I went to a trading party at the Plastic Chapel. It was in honor of the release of Dunny Series 5. I had plenty of duplicates from other series to trade, so I brought them and my gift certificate along. I got a couple of Dunnies with the rest of my gift certificate and traded one of them right away for one I wanted. I also traded a couple of my duplicate Bamboo Zoo figures for some more Dunnies from the new series. Caught up in the frenzy, I also bought another Dunny. So in total I came away with 5 Dunnies. Then today, I received in the mail a Dunny from a previous series that I unexpectedly won on eBay. I had been trying to get this one for a while, but the bidding had always gone above what I was ready to pay. So today I have 6 new Dunnies.
I also received the new Western Digital external hard drive I had ordered. My laptop has begun making the same scary noises that caused me to reformat it a while ago, so rather than waste tons of DVDs on back ups, I purchased this 500 GB beauty. All my backups that had taken days to make were done in less than an hour and at much less expense and labor.

Work also went pretty well today, with me meeting with some success in my battle to get Flex and Flash to do things they don't want to do. I don't think I can talk about them right now, but hopefully in the future I can lay out some cool discoveries. I need to check my NDA first.

So then I came home to clean up (Never leave a cutting board you cut raw chicken on uncleaned in a sink. Gack.) and do laundry. I also took plenty of pictures of my new acquisitions while watching the Republican Convention. McCain gave a decent speech, but the first half was exceptionally bland for an acceptance speech. It wasn't until the second half that he began saying interesting things and speaking with passion. Nevertheless, this will certainly be an interesting election.

Braid

I just finished playing a game called Braid. This is a creative, devilishly clever, and often hard little game. It is also a beautiful head trip. The gimmick (I mean that in the best way) of the game is that you can control time, rewinding whenever you need to. However, there are some elements in the game that are independent of the flow of time in the game (time-anchored, we'll call it). For instance, there is a time-anchored key in a deep pit. You can jump down into the pit and grab the key. There is no way for you to jump out, but if you rewind time, you will fly back up out of the pit and take the key with you, because it is out of the flow of time.

Things get trippier on each progressive level of the puzzle/platformer game. On some levels time flows based on how far left or right you are, so if you move left, time rewinds. If you move right, time plays forward. On another level, you can use a ring to create a bubble of slow time. The closer to the center of the bubble, the slower the flow of time goes. I cannot imagine what a pain and a half programming this must have been. Jonathan Blow (the creator of the game) must be a very clever man. The puzzles are fairly challenging, and some took quite a while to figure out. They're challenging enough to make you think hard and in creative ways, making them rewarding puzzles to solve. Only one sent me to Game FAQs for a hint.

The visuals of the game are amazing too. The backgrounds are impressionistic watercolor type affairs, and the backgrounds respond as well to the different manipulations. There is beauty in the game's story, too. It is presented in a poetic fashion, which makes it sometimes confusing, but allows the mind to do some work not only on the puzzles of the game but the story too. I particularly like how the story manifests in the final level in a subtle way. The epilogue, however, just left me puzzled. I'm going to have to hit the Internet up for an explanation for that one.

Anyway, all in all, I highly recommend the game if you have XBox Live. I hear it's coming out on PC as well, so you can grab it that way if you so desire.

UPDATE: Oh, and don't take my word for it. Watch this review, which has video of the game and shows more of what I'm talking about.