My good blog buddy Brad Ward was quoted in Guy Kawasaki’s new book Reality Check. And really he wasn’t quoted, but was the subject for the chapter “The Art of Sucking Up” (p.269). For those not connected to the nerd community, Kawasaki is a widely known technology evangelist and one of the Apple employees responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984.

Brad had written Kawasaki in a plea to have his site bloghighed.org moved up in rankings on Kawasaki’s education.alltop.com, a link aggregator site similar to spfldbloggers.com. Bloghighed is a site that aggregates blogs focused on higher education. I wrote the software that powers Bloghighed. It’s also the same software that powers Spfldbloggers. So in a sense of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, I feel like I got a little tip of the hat in Reality Check.

Pretty cool when a friend of yours is quoted in a book. Even cooler, when you know you had a little to do with it.

*Catchy title stolen from a talk show phone caller.

I think I wore out my AM radio in my truck.

Last weekend I tackled the stopped up bathroom sink drain. This weekend I upgraded the lighting configuration for the basement. Before the basement lights were controlled by one switch at the top of the stairs and there was no light in the stairwell.

This weekend I put in two new switches at the bottom of the stairs and a stairwell light. Switches at the bottom and at the top control the stairwell light. The other switch controls the basement lights. Eventually, I’ll put in two more switches to divide the basement into regions. Right now, one switch controls all the lights. That’s another project for another weekend.

It should be man-law that any self respecting man have a tool belt. I got mine at Xmas from my parents. It made a huge difference in my work flow. Before, I’d lay a tool down, walk away, and then spend 15 minutes trying to find it. With the belt (as silly as it looks), I had everything right there. I wonder if I could get away wearing one these at work?

Now with a stairwell light, I can be reminded on a daily basis that I need to paint it.

Sarah Borges and The Broken Singles from gotshoo on Vimeo.

An excellent show last night. Thanks to Dan and Russ for the invite and front row seats.

Pandora. It’s an online music streaming service. Type in a band/artist or song you like and through the magic of the intertubes it starts play music you’re bound to like. I’ve known about Pandora for ages (at least in internet time), but this is the first time I’ve actually gotten into it.

You have of the option of listening through an iPhone / Touch app, flash player for your browser, or a Vista sidebar gadget. I even believe there are even some other phones besides the iPhone that you can stream music thru.

Tweetdeck. It’s a UI for Twitter for handling all of your tweets. It’s better than some of the other services out there because you can see all of your messages in one screen in three columns (All Replies, Friends, Direct Messages).

It beats trying to hit refresh every 30 seconds.

SmashingMagazine. It’s an online mag filled with all kinds of nerdy goodies about CSS, PHP, graphics, tips and tools, and a monthly background feature. It’s updated on a daily basis and has a pretty good following. If you do anything with the web, you should be checking out this site.

Evernote. It’s a clip all note / screenshot taking application. After Google announced that it was shutting down Google Notebook at some point in the future, I started looking elsewhere to store my random url’s and logins.

It would have been a great app if I was still in college. I could copy, tag, and keep all of my online sources in one place. It too also has an online that allows you to access your notes.

Any creative captions. The obvious one that sticks out in my mind, “That’s what she said.”

A few quick notes for the blog:

1. It’s getting lighter out. It was 5:30pm tonight and there was still a glimmer of light.

2. Lost was awesome tonight. I’ve already got a few predictions on how things are going to play out.

3. Some things just get lost in translation.

What are you doing Saturday night? I’ll tell you what you should be doing. Buying tickets at the Hoogland for the Arts to see Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles. It’s not every weekend that good music makes it to Springfield. $15 a ticket, you can afford it.

See you there.

Be prepared for the internet to grind to a hault with everyone watching video feeds, twitter streams, and blogs about tomorrow’s inauguration.

I’ve come across a few lists of sources to follow tomorrow, but I thought I put together a list of local people attending the event.

Ben Handelman – News Channel 20

Blog – Video

Jayette Bolinski – SJ-R

Twitter – Article

Illinois School for the Deaf

Blog – Twitter

If you know anyone else streaming to web. Let me know in the comments and I’ll include them in the list.

The dogs are at war with us. Everyone knows war is disgusting, it stinks, it affects the environment. It’s just darn right messy.Their ammo; anything they can poop, pee, or expel.

For some reason both of our dogs, Buddy and Clancy, have had a darn right horrible time doing their ‘business’ outside. Bud especially. We can’t tell if it’s because they’re mad at us or we’re bad puppy parents.

Just before we left for vacation Bud took a piss on one of my shirts lying on the floor. The night we got back from vacation, just after being outside, he pissed on a pile of clothes.

I do have to say after thinking about it, Clancy has been doing a good job of keeping his end of the bargain outside. But he had a episode last night where he was throwing up. It was about 1am and he started up chucking. Sarah got up and saw the mess and went straight back to bed. She can’t stand the sound or smell of puke. Lucky me.

The poor dog threw up about 7 times. He really had a sick look on his face so I curled up with him on the couch and surrounded him with a bunch of old towels. He was better this morning.

And tonight, again after the dogs had been outside, Buddy took a crap on the stairs going down to the basement. We can’t confirm it was Buddy, but he’s number one on our list.

It’s unbelievable. I just hope it’s the cold weather that’s making them do this to us.

Replaced the bathroom drain today. It didn’t occur after the fact that I should bust out the camera to document. But then again, I rather the internet not looking at the gunk in my tubes.

The drain wasn’t that hard to fix. My goal was to only take the pipes out and try to clean them. Instead I ended up breaking the the drain pipe by trying to loosen the lock nut. So, I had to replace the whole drain outfit. It was about $50 in supplies and a few hours of work, but worth it.

Thanks to the old man for stopping by and giving a hand.

Today Sarah and I took a meaningless drive up to Bloomington. Dogs in tow. We had actually headed up to get her a book for her class. But when we got there the book store was closed despite what the bookstore’s hours said on their website. Nevertheless, it was a good day to just take a drive.

Sarah and I really had a great time in South Padre. What’s great is that we like to do touristy things, but that we also like venture out into the wilderness.

One the cool things that we discovered was that we could drive on the beaches (legally). When I found out I was like a kid in sandbox with Tonka toys. There were beaches on the north part of South Padre Isl. that have not been developed, so we drove up and down passing many families fishing, having a picnic, laying out in the sun. They were great, but there was a lack of quality seashells.

I kept looking at the map and noticed just south of where we were staying was a highway that went directly up to the shore into a state park. We had a rental car and unlimited miles so it had to be investigated.

We realized we were pretty close to Mexico, but it didn’t sink in till we passed a border inspection stop on the way to our unknown destination. I felt a little uneasy going past the stop, almost like it was a DUI checkpoint, but continued down as we kept seeing signs for the state park.

When we reached the beach, it was different from the beaches we had been on before. There were tons of shells as well as a lot of garbage. We kept driving down the beach and got to a point where the shells replaced the sand.

We drove all the way down to the point where we were at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Sarah couldn’t believe that just a matter of a few hundred feet was Mexico. It was a sight that we had never seen before.

This video was quoted and requoted several times during this weekend’s bro-weekend.

@govblago is everywhere.

Downloading pictures from my camera and realized I forgot to download pics from Xmas…

My parents must like Sarah because you don’t know how much of a stretch it was for them to give this hat to her.

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The girl who replaced me at my parents’ house.