06.05.07
The Big Apple
This last weekend I went to New York for the first time EVAR. Here’s what happened:
Thursday night
- I took the train from Philly to Manhatten. It was not too expensive, so I went first class. I’m a huge fan of the train. You get on, like, 5 minutes before it leaves, you can use your phone/computer the entire trip, and there’s no crazy “Must have your explosive liquids in a ziplock bag before we can let you thru security” crap going on.
- Reshma picked me up at the station and we went to her place to pick up her best friend Shaun. He’s a cool guy, even if he does work for the enemy…
- We all met up with Tiffany and [insert other members of our party here]
- We decided to go to a restaurant that is super old and has old (sometime famous) people’s pipes on pretty much every wall and the entire ceiling. It was super-tasty
- Went and saw times square at night. I mean, I assume it was night based on my watch and tiredness level, but it was so brite I’m not convinced.
Friday
- Slept in to around 10-ish and then took a shower. Pretty much everybody I knew in NY was going to be working, so I was on my own for the touristy stuff.
- I decided to go to the WTC site (more on that below)
- Next I went to the statue of liberty. I had a phone call I had to be on at 2, so I didn’t take the farie over there, but I did see it from a distance. Turns out, in that case, the photo’s do it justice just fine
- I started walking around the financial discrict, had a street vendor hot dog, and saw the brooklyn bridge
- All in all, it was a good site seeing trip
- I headed back for my phone call, and then I took a nap.
I was up a little late chatting the nite before, and Chris needs his beauty sleep
Friday Night
- Had a hot date.
- We went to [insert name of place I can’t remember here]. It had awesome food. I was way impressed.
- Next, we had tickets to see Mary Poppins on Broadway. Now, if you know me well at all, you know that the Mary Poppins movie is consistantly in my top 2-3 favorite moves of all time. I have to say, I was impressed. They took out a few things from the movie, and added a few things from the book (there’s a book?!), and technically it was pretty amazing. Bert even walked all the way up the arch on stage right, along the top of the arch and down on stage left. It was pretty sweet.
Saturday
- Got up and took care of some email and errands I needed to do. Reshma woke up at 2pm. Yes, 2. Seriously.
- Headed to brunch (If you can call 2:30 brunch-time) with Shaun and Reshma. We ate at a french restaurant (they were out of quiche.
) - Next we decided to go to the Museum of Modern Art. I wish I could say it was amazing, but by the time we got over there it was only going to be open for another hour.
- Instead, we went to Central Park, stopping on the way to see the coolest apple store in the world. Awesome.
- We walked thru Central Park for a while. This place is awesome. I was seriously blown away. The insane contrast between how packed and fast paced the city is, compared to the open and mellow park is exquisite (I even looked up how to spell exquisite. That’s how much I love this park)
- We headed back to get ready to meet up with some other friends later that night.
- Met up with the other friends. For the record, Julia is the funniest person in the world. Seriously. I haven’t laughed that hard in a very long time. (Now it’s on the internet, so it must be true)
- We had wine on the terrace (with an amazing view I might add), and then headed out for sushi. Good stuff.
- We went to a little bar in some area or another (I know, very specific, eh?) and had a few drinks.
Sunday
- Went out for brunch again, this time to a place called Cafeteria. It was pretty fun. Good food.
- Next, I was on my own again since my friends had to go back in to work (insane, right?). I decided to go to the moma for real this time.
- Didn’t go to the moma again. I got there, realized that in order to get back to get ready for my train I was only going to have 1 hour to see the museum again, and decided not to (again). Instead, I walked in the park. I totally [heart] Central Park.
- I decided I was going to walk the long way thru the park. I get all the way thru it and reach the street. I was pretty impressed with myself. That was, of course, until I discovered that I had gotten turned somehow and ended up on the west side of the park, only about half way thru it. Dang. I decided to give up, since time was slim and it was starting to sprinkle.
- On my way back, I get a voice mail (phone didn’t ring for some reason) saying my train was canceled. So, I get back to the apartment and find my ticket and get the time changed.
- Went to dinner with Reshma and Tiffany at a chinese restaurant they call Room (only because the chinese characters look like the letters “Room”). It was pretty good.
- Went to the train station and headed back to Philly (after another hour of it being delayed…)
World Trade Center
I have to say that the thing that surprised me the most about this trip was seeing the world trade center. The entire time I was looking at the site, or at the pictures that were on the fence, or the timeline that was there, I didn’t feel a thing. I was really expecting some sort of emotional flailing, but nothing. My guess is it is a little bit of me being out of touch with my emotions (what, me?) and a little bit of complete desensitization by mainstream media, but it really did surprise me. It felt like just another construction site. Weird.
05.31.07
Parenting Lessons from Animal Husbandry
This is pretty funny. This guy used to teach animal husbandry to teen volunteers at a wildlife rehabilitation center. Later he had a kid. He assumed that his experience teaching the teens would help him understand raising his kid. Turns out, his experience working with animals was better training.
Favorite quote? “Besides, the coolest things in life are gross.” Too true…
The take away for me? Babies are animals.
05.03.07
m15m
I recently rediscovered the wonderful Movies in 15 Minutes. If you’ve never heard of this, you really need to check it out. Cleolinda Jones is a genius. *joygasm*
She also has a book out. The odd thing is that while she’s born and raised here in the united states, you can’t actually buy her book here. I bought my copy from amazon.co.uk.
Here are a couple of excerpts from a couple of the online movies: DUMBLEDORE: We are gathered here now to choose one person (who is not Harry Potter) to represent each school, but only one (who is not Harry Potter) will achieve eternal fame and glory in the Triwizard Tournament, in which Harry Potter is not old enough to compete! [Only characters we’ve already seen in closeup are chosen: Krum, the famous one! Cedric, the pretty one! Fleur, the uppity one!] SNAPE: Professor…? About that… THE GOBLET OF FIRE: *coughHARRYPOTTERcough*
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in Fifteen Minutes
The Champion Is Selected
The Trophy Room [All the professors race downstairs so everyone can shriek at Harry in privacy, while the newly-chosen champions watch uncomfortably.] MOODY: Oh, come on, Potter didn’t do it! Look at the kid, he can’t even comb his hair! HARRY [choking]: This—this is not mellow! FLEUR: L’awkward.
DUMBLEDORE [throttling]: DID YOU DO IT, HARRY? DID YOU PUT YOUR NAME IN THE GOBLET? ANSWER ME, YOU LITTLE SHIT! JUST GO AHEAD AND DIE IF YOU’RE THAT STUPID, SEE IF I CARE!
BORDEN: YOU TAKE THAT BACK! [And thus, a rivalry is born.]
The Prestige in Fifteen Minutes
Julia’s Funeral
ANGIER: WOLVERINE COULD TOTALLY KICK BATMAN’S ASS.
Angier’s Cunning Plan OLIVIA: So what you’re saying is, you want me to go to Borden, offer to work for him, tell him you sent me to find out his secrets, and then somehow actually get him to tell me his secrets? ANGIER: Basically, yeah. OLIVIA: You realize that this is probably going to involve me sleeping with him? ANGIER: Ride ‘em, cowgirl.
Angier’s Plan: Not So Cunning As Previously Thought BORDEN: So what you’re saying is, Angier sent you here to work for me and fake me out by telling me you really came to find out my secrets, but you really really came here to sell him out? And I’m supposed to believe that? OLIVIA: You’re forgetting that I also kind of hate him now. BORDEN: Hey, we have something in common, then. OLIVIA: So, sex? BORDEN: Sure thing.
05.02.07
Chris-mas comes early?
I just received an email from Hammacher Schlemmer announcing their brand new sale:
Words fail me1. I’m just wondering who decided that May 2nd was the best time to sell/buy pre-lit chris-mas trees… I suppose the bigger question is, “Will they stay lit all the way into December, or should I just open my presents now?”
1. Which, of course, won’t keep me from commenting
04.11.07
New Twitter badge
So, I just recently (about 3 hours ago) discovered the wonderful site Twitter.com. The gist of it is it allows you an easy (insanely so) way of letting people know what you’re doing. It’s pretty addictive. There are three things I especially like about this service.
- You have only 140 characters to type what you’re doing. This way not only do I not feel obligated to go on and on about what I’m doing, I’m actively forbidden to. Nice.
- You can send a text message from your phone to update what you’re doing. Perfect for when you’re out and about.
- You can set it up to remind you if you haven’t updated it in more than 24 hours (by text, natch). Should keep the updates from getting stale.
I searched around and found this post about how to get a list of the last 10 tweets on your website. Since it didn’t quite work for me, and I’m kinda anal when it comes to code, I fixed it up a bit. Essentially I fixed the bug in it that would cause it to fail if you have less than 10 tweets in your account and I removed the duplication of the count of tweets the javascript returns. Also, I added in a few extra “span”s for my css to make it all pretty.
You can find the code after the jump…
09.10.06
friend showering pics
So, every once in a while I get curious and take a gander at my web stats. This gives me such useful information such as:
- Browser variety
- 1/3 Firefox (read: me)
- 1/3 IE
- 1/3 Misc (read: search engine spiders)
- Operating System variety
- 1/3 Windows
- 1/3 “Unknown” (Not including correctly identified Mac/Linux/Unix/Symbian)
- 1/3 “Known robots” (Such as Iron Man and Bender from Futurama I’m guessing)
- 2/100 Misc (See “Unknown” above)
- Status Code (It turns out that only 75% of hits on my site are “OK”)
There are two other reports (my favorites) that I really want to focus on now. First of all, we have the “Referring Site Report”. This is a list of where people were at when they click on the link to my website. The usual suspects are there; Google, MSN, Blogger, Technorati, etc. Every once in a while you’ll get a good one, but it’s rare.
The jewel, and actually what this post is supposed to be about (no, seriously), is the “Search Query Report”. This marvelous report gives me a breakdown of what people are searching for when they end up finding my website. By far the most searches are for ThoughtWorks. More specifically, they are for the interview practices at ThoughtWorks. That’s not all that interesting to me. The fun, as usual, lies in the outliers (Lies in the outliers? Hrm…)
friend showering pics: Not only is it shocking that there are people on the interweb searching for pics of a friend showering, but either they were using a search engine so awful that it skipped over all of the porn and jumped straight to my site, or, even worse, they had looked through all of it already and finally reached me. I’m really not sure what post they ended up on, but I really don’t want there to be a single post known as the “Red Light District” of bestfriendchris.com
fedex number mysore: While I’d like to think I provide a little bit of information on this site, I do think it is a little unreasonable to think that I would have your fedex number posted. And seriously, why are you shipping Mysore anyway? It seemed to be just fine where it is.
germany flight itinerary: If I’m going to be providing the fedex number for shipping ancient cities, I may as well provide the flight itineraries for countries as well. Does this mean that you can ship a city, but for a country you have to by an extra seat on the plane to bring it with you? Interesting…
hindi phrases cricket: Unfortunately, I barely know any cricket phrases in English, let alone Hindi…
jennifer love hewitt true.com: This is a good one. My guess is the searcher (search-ee?) found my guilty pleasures post (see below), which, sad to say, does not give you any information on how to date JLH.
name some guilty pleasures: Um… Ok. Hopefully, they weren’t looking for seedier (more seedy?) items…
what are the interview exercises given by thoughtworks: At some point, it’s just cheating…
faraday vs everlife: Obviously some brilliantly observant individual has also noticed this insane scheme to take over the world. (Step 1: Produce a product and market it with two different names, with the same ad campaign. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Take over the world.)
typhoid going to work: Yeah, you probably shouldn’t go to work if you have typhoid fever… But, I’m not a doctor. I just play one on TV.
how to get your best friend back for children: So, I looked. I really, really looked. I simply can not find the post I wrote on reconciling problems with your best friend in order to impregnate them… If I could find it, trust me. I’d link to it.
my lunch break: So, was this person looking for information on their lunch break, or mine? I hope the person searching for this found something to eat and wasn’t waiting on me to write about it…
So, that’s it for now. Honestly, the friend showering pics search made me laugh so hard, I had to go pour myself a glass of milk, just so I could laugh it out my nose. Hilarious.
08.10.06
“When we crashed, my entire life flashed before my eyes. It didn’t take too long.”
- Nick (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids)
So, this last weekend I decided to rent a car for my little trip up to Dows Corn Days. Usually I just borrow whatever car I have available, or get one of my brothers to pick me up, but I figured that it would be more fun this way. Fun was quite an understatement. When I got to the rental agency, I got upgraded to a mid-size, and was handed the keys to a 2006 Pontiac G6. Let me just say it now. This car is fun to drive. I made my way up to Dows, had a good time visiting with family, and then, on Saturday, left to head back.
On my way back home to Cedar Rapids, I swung through Des Moines, bought some new headphones, and had supper with some friends. At around 9:30, just East of Altoona, at about, I don’t know, here, I decided to change the station on the radio. I glanced down just for a second and, it turns out, I drifted slightly to the left. Unfortunately for all involved, I was in the left lane at when this happened, and headed into the left shoulder. Another vehicle (a ‘89 Ford) had pulled over on the left due to a flat tire (Or so I heard from the police. I’m not completely sure, but close enough for an internet story).
I clipped the back right tire with my car, and proceded to spin out. I spun around for a bit, then ended up in the grassy area between the two lanes. At this point, I found out later, my front right tire caught in the grass, which caused the entire car to roll over. After one complete revolution I was back on my wheels again and now sliding backwards. Finally I came to a stop. I started in the left lane on the East bound side, and ended up in the right lane on the West Bound side facing West.
In the end, nobody was hurt (surprisingly). The car I rented protected me, and the people who were going to change the tire were not in the car at the time. When I went the next day to pick up my things from the car (none of which, by the way, was damaged in any way. Including the laptop that was in the trunk), first the guy at the tow truck place says that they were surprised to see me up walking around. They were sure that I had gone to the hospital and was possibly not even alive. As he’s taking me out to the car, he says, “Have you ever seen a 3 wheeled G6? You’re about to.”
03.30.06
About to leave India…
:-(
So, it is my last day here in Bangalore for TWU. So sad… I’ve decided to write all the things about TWU I’ll miss. Here goes:
- Auto-Rickshaw rides. Thrilling, life threatening rides for dirt cheap. Awesome.
- Queens. My favorite restaurant in all of Bangalore. The Chicken Tikka Masala is to die for. (hold the bird flu)
- The other TWU peeps. I’ve made so many great friends (and a few ones that are just all right) since I’ve been here. It’s crazy to think that I’ve only met these people less than 2 months ago.
- Muak!
- Hot Pockets!
- Go Team One!
- The door man at the Royal Orchid. If this guy wasn’t standing right by the door, and you tried to open it yourself, he would RUN to open the door for you. Fantastic.
- Hacky sack at lunch.
- Head Wobble. Instead of nodding, Indians wobble their head back and forth. Genius.
- The guy who cleans my apartment. Cleans is kind of a strong word. What I mean is, he makes my bed, every once in a while he washes my towel, and he reads my newspaper and watches my TV. Oh, and once he was making my bed when I walked out of my bathroom in a towel after showering. It was, well, odd.
- Freaking Learning Log.
- Little Italy. Mozzerella and Capsicum pizza. For when you’re just not feeling Indian food, it always hits the spot.
- Crossing Airport Road. Especially with Clint about to wet himself with fear. Hilarious.
As I think of more, I’ll add them. For now, “Fare thee well, TWU, we hardly new ye.”
03.04.06
My Mom, the author
I know, I know… Two posts in one day! Wierd…
This is big news, however. My mom is now a published author. As in, you can find her book, not only on her publisher’s website, but also at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million. There aren’t words to describe how surreal it is to be related to somebody who has a book on Amazon.
The synopsis, as found on her publishers website, is:
| Once More from the Top DeeAnn Schnack |
| Once More from the Top is a collection of poems and personal reflections about one woman’s spiritual journey to find herself. Her prose paints a vivid picture of her life, which includes reflections of her childhood, the challenges of her alcoholic and abusive marriages, and the horror of being widowed after five days of marriage.
Only when she found herself jobless and living in a shelter for abused women was she able to see the blessing she was being given. She understood she had always been the person she was meant to be, and that her forgiving Father never intended life to be lived perfectly…He’d given her the chance to learn a lesson…she could just do it Once More from the Top. |
I would totally recommend picking it up.