Adam & Amber’s Blog

Every year Lanesboro holds a festival in honor of rhubarb.  It is one of the many small town festivals around Minnesota in the summer and it gives a great excuse to visit one of the best small towns in Minnesota.  The festival itself is pretty small, they have Rhubarb Olympics where you can throw, toss, and hit various forms of rhubarb, a small farmers market, live music/entertainment, and all the rhubarb you can eat (which isn’t much).  The festival itself is very small (contained in a park) but the reason we go back is to experience all of the small shops and restraunts that Lanesboro has to offer.  Check all my pictures here.

I posted my hail pictures a couple days ago, I also sent some in to the local news and one of them made it on! I admit it isn’t the most artistic of shots, but it is still cool to get something on the news

Well after some searching and Jon finding the right checkboxes on the google help pages to get to the right form I was able to submit and get my email address back (after providing lots of info to google to prove that it was my account).  I apologize for the spam everyone got and thank all those that were concerned about us being stranded in Africa :)  I assure you Amber & I are safe at home and are not in need of your money.  I am still going through and checking accounts and changing usernames and passwords, but for the moment it doesn’t look like anything else was compromised.

I am trying to put this everywhere I can to let people know that it looks like my gmail account has been hacked. I know that there has been some spam sent from it and other messages. Please disregard all email from that address! I am working on getting this fixed but Google’s support is pretty slim, I will keep updating as I get this figured out.

As you can see from the pictures above we had a large amount of pretty good sized hail today.  Amber was at home during the storm, while I went through the storm twice, once on a bus driving on highway 52 and then again in my car in the parking lot at work.  Other then some broken pots and lots of broken flowers it looks like everything made it through the storm OK.  We will survey the roof and my car more tomorrow. Check out more pictures here.

I know I should have posted about Thanksgiving before posting about Black Friday, but BF seemed more relevant this morning (by which I mean early afternoon). Amber and I are in Dayton, OH to spend the Holiday with her side of the family. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt B’s house, turkey, stuffing, casseroles, pies, etc. After dinner the entire family took part in a Wii Bowling Tournament.

Top 3 Results:
1. Adam
2. Amber
3. Ben

I didn’t post this so that I could gloat about my winning, I posted because of all the embarassing pictures of Aunt B… Enjoy

See the entire gallery here.

One thing Amber and I have in common is our love of good deals. I am a big purchase deal lover, meaning that if you got something that retails for $500 on sale for $200 I am interested. Amber is more of a small purchase deal lover, meaning if you got something under $5 or over 75% off in the craft or apparel world watch out (don’t even get me started on the $1 section at Target, or worse when the $1 section goes 75% off. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that has come through our door because, “I got these for only a quarter each”.) The point is, we both like a good deal, which makes Black Friday Perfect for us.

Our 2008 Black Friday in Dayton, OH:

Thursday 10PM EST: We arrive at CompUSA to look for a good deal on a LCD monitor I wanted ($150 for a 22″ LCD). When we arrive, I am dismayed by the completely full store and the small line of people forming for their 5AM Sale. It took me a second to realize what Amber apparently knew the entire time, you can’t show up at 9PM CST for a sale that starts at 9PM EST. I am not sure how I made the time zone mistake (other then my watch and Amber’s car are still in Central Time), but needless to say I left CompUSA empty handed. Which means no new LCD for me, I convince myself I really didn’t need it anyway.

Thursday 10:15 PM: We find a Dunkin’ Donuts that is open until 11 on the same side of town as CompUSA and plan the rest of our evening. A steady stream of people from the already 75+ people line out front of the nearby Best Buy (which opens at 5 AM) come in to buy coffee and use the restroom. The guy behind the counter, that already had to give up part of his Thanksgiving to work short staffed at a Dunkin’ Donuts looks thrilled. A few of the line waiters stop and talk with us, and I learn that people who wait all night in a line are usually Crazy (as in Certifiable) and very friendly (but still crazy).

Friday Midnight: I am sitting in the car at a mini-mall parking lot watching the snow fall outside and “Pushing Daisies” on my iPhone, Amber is waiting in a small line of mostly middle-aged women ready to bum-rush the doors at Simply Scrapbooks (ok, maybe not bum-rush, but they were standing out in the cold/snow waiting for a scrapbook store to open). The sale? 50%+ off all sorts of crafting supplies, PLUS TRIPLE CARD PUNCHES!!! You would have to talk to Amber to find out exactly how good of a deal this is, but she was excited.

Friday 2 AM: I am still in the car at the same mini-mall parking lot, the snow has slowed down (or at least I can’t see it as well because at 1AM they turned the parking lot lights off), my iPhone’s battery all but drained 20 minutes ago, and Amber has been craft shopping for 2 hours. Soon after Amber returns to the car with a smile on her face and a card full of punches.

Friday 3 AM: We are back at Amber’s house. Amber is showing me her spoils, and I have to admit compared to what she normally spends she got some really good deals. We are staying up the rest of the night because I want to go to Staples when they open at 6AM (which means get their at 4:30 AM). I then realize the only difference between me and the people outside of Best Buy is that I am sitting inside a warm house right now, it is a small difference but I hold on to it.

Friday 3:30 AM: Staples posts some of their Black Friday deals online, I pounce and get some of the things I wanted. Now I am feeling elated that I won’t have to wait in line after all! I then notice something so fantastic that I had to reload to make sure it was real. Staples online has their own 22″ LCD Monitor for $150, a deal not available in-stores. Needless to say I pulled the trigge, buying the last of the items on my black friday list. I then did something I never had done before (mostly because I have never been up shopping online at 3:30AM before). I posted my deal on Slickdeals.net, which is the online deal site I (along with tens of thousands of people) use all the time (it helped me get my laptop for $800 off). The way slickdeals works is you post a deal on a forum, people rate the deal and if it is good enough it gets put on the front page (kind of like a mix of slashdot and digg, only for deals). I was heartened to see positive comments on my post immediately, but I was also very tired. At about 4:30 AM Amber and I finally went to bed.

Friday 1:30 PM: We wake-up, realizing in full what we have done to our sleep schedules, and I go online to see how my post did. And I see this:

That is right, my deal made the front page of Slickdeals! By now reaching 14,000 views and over 100 comments! You can look at the thread here, but the deal is unfortunately dead now. I will admit it isn’t my finest writing, but it was 4AM and I was very tired.

So that is my story of Black Friday ‘08. We ended up getting everything we wanted (except sleep) and didn’t even have to brave many crowds to do it! I hope all of you had similarly good experiences (probably for most of you it involved sleeping and laughing at people like me).

A while back I posted about a pizza vending machine and made the point that food preparation could easily be done more efficiently by robots. From a business standpoint I still agree with this, there will come a tipping point where it will be much more cost effective to maintain a robot, then employ people.

Recently, this topic of conversation has come back up around the lunch table and it got me thinking of another aspect of this robotic society. In a world of ATMs, Coffee Vending Machines, and Online Ordering we are quickly coming to a day when there is no reason to directly interact with a human all day. It is not hard to imagine a very efficient world where every non-internet business involves just a touch screen and a credit card swipe. I am not sure how I feel about that, this world would allow the introverted to stay introverted (which would make them happy), and the businesses could charge extra for the extroverts to get human interaction (which would make the businesses happy), but is anything lost?

I remember when I was in middle school one of the most uncomfortable things for an introverted youngster like myself to do was order pizza (probably not where you thought I was going). On half days a couple friends would usually come to my house (yes, introverts can have friends) and we would order pizza, for some reason making that phone call was nerve-racking. It seems idiotic to me now that I would be afraid to call and order pizzas, but it probably had to do with the fact that as a middle schooler I never really had to directly interact with “adult” strangers, alone, before that. It took some time, but I got over it (as most people do), but if it hadn’t been for that experience, or others like it, would I have ever broke out of my introverted shell? To put it another way, if all I had needed to do was go online and order the pizza, then I would have never been forced to face that irrational fear. This makes me think that the side effect to this ultra-efficient future, is a psychological one, and I am not sure this world needs more adult introverts (except, maybe for population control).

Looking at this another way, human interaction cuts down on the inherit stupidity of people. I found this blog today about a guy who decided to test out the Dominos Online Pizza ordering system, which allows you to be very specific about what you order. I am not saying that beef-bread isn’t a perfectly valid order, I just think that you should have to go through the indignity of an “excuse me? what was that again?” if you really want to order it. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand the flip-side of this, in my world of phone ordering an introverted, beef-bread loving, adult may never be able to get their beef-bread fix. Maybe, but maybe today’s satiated introverted beef-bread lover, would have been yesterday’s extroverted beef-bread restaurant pioneer, so we could all have enjoyed this little known culinary masterpiece.

Maybe none of this matters and we will adapt to fit technology into our society, instead of technology replacing our society, but hey, I got to use “beef-bread” in my argument and that has to count for something.

It is hard to believe it has been so long since I wrote a blog post. Blogging is one of those free time activities for me, and when the free time goes out the window so does the blogging. I will use this post to get people caught up on what has been going on in our lives in the last month or so…

Marching Band
This is the biggest reason we haven’t had much free time. As I have mentioned before, Amber and I work with the Lourdes Marching Band (Amber as Color Guard Caption Head, me as Marching and Maneuvering/Visual Staff). We finished our successful season a couple weeks ago, which ended months of 2-3 practices per week plus weekend football games and competitions. Helping with the band is one of the highlights of my year, it is a fun activity, completely unrelated to computers or technology, and I get to spend a lot of time with my wife. That isn’t to say the season didn’t have its problems or frustrations, but it is a privilege to work with such a great group of students and staff.

Body Work
Unfortunately I don’t mean I am on a diet and exercise plan. Last week, while Amber and I were out for lunch and Hubbell House, my car was hit in the parking lot. Left a petty good dent in the driver’s side door. If that wasn’t bad enough, the driver was kind enough not to leave any information so I had the pleasure of reporting it to my insurance and paying my deductible (thank you anonymous driver). The car just got out of the shop today, so I was without personal transportation for much of the week, which isn’t really wasn’t all that bad. We still have Amber’s car to get around in, Andy and Darcy were kind enough to let me carpool (fun and eco-friendly), and as a result I am getting up earlier which is helping break my multi-month sleep-in-a-thon so I am back to a normal work day (and not ‘Jon’ work days).

Polka Music
Thinking that I was done with music for a while after Marching Band season was short lived. There was a need at work for a Polka Band to play for a site Oktoberfest event (the root beer kind). My friend Mike was on the committee that was planning the event and volunteered to get a band together, and me with my vast Trumpet experience (from 10 years ago) was an obvious addition. We were an unconventional polka band with a Tuba (Zane), Two Trumpets (Mike and Myself), and a French Horn (Jim), but we made it work.

I should interject that I am not a big fan of Polka, it is a fun dance in the sense that you can’t really do it wrong (as long as you are jumping around with the music) and I assume its popularity is set by the fact that it is easy to do when drunk. Polka music is ok, it is usually upbeat and fun, but I have always found it a bit hokey. That being said, I haven’t had an excuse to play my Trumpet in a while and playing music with friends is always sure to be a good time.

We played yesterday, and it was a blast. We weren’t perfect, but with only a couple weeks lead-in what can you expect. I’d like to think this would cause me to play my trumpet more, but realistically unless given a reason to practice it will be hard to keep up.

MythTV
I have been meaning to continue my mythtv saga, but with everything else going on it has been difficult to find the motivation. The box is still up and running fine, I recently added a HDHomerun network based HD tuner in honor of football season. Having HD on the Myth Box really makes a difference, unfortunately it also makes me change my recording style, from save everything to watch and delete (750 Gigs goes fast when you are recording as much as we do). I plan to write more soon on the final setup and how we are using it.

That is just a little of what we have been doing, I will try to get back to posting more interesting content now that I have some free time.

Today is Amber and my Anniversary. No, not wedding anniversary, that is in July. Today is that anniversary that is celebrated by unmarried adult couples in years, and by high school couples by days, then weeks, then months. It is our dating anniversary. It was 9 years ago today that Amber and I “started” dating. The year was 1998 and we were both heading into our senior year in high school. I found some old pictures (including the one above) of us from that first year. The only gallery I have up is from my Christmas Dance. There will be more to come later.

Nothing makes you feel older then realizing how long it has been since high school, but it is wonderful to have someone around to remember those times with.

Happy Anniversary Amber!