BEST IDEA EVAR!!!!one!!

I have had the Single Best Idea in the History of the Internet™.

I am going to buy this car, slam it into this office, and twitter™ the tinyURL™ of the flickr™ album and YouTube™ videos to my FaceBook™ friends.

Thereby causing the Internet™ to go so meta™ that it collapses the universe™.

I will accept the Nobel Prize for Brilliance whenever you find time to hand that out.

The Archipelago

Sweden is largely a collection of islands, some of them large, many of them tiny. Like backyard small. We have visited several of them in the last few days and they are amazingly beautiful, totally peaceful, and densely wooded.

Yesterday, Talia and I went for a walk and decided to wander into the forest. It was fun climbing around on the mossy rocks, but then I got bit by a couple of mosquitos that caused my hand to swell up. I’m hoping that goes away soon.
The weather has been pretty dumb. Windy as hell, cloudy, and cold. Any two of them would be fine, but all three suck. At least it isn’t raining.
Sorry this post is more like a random collection of thoughts than a coherent string of interconnected ideas.

The Bow & The Sea

Stockholm & the Sea

The third day in Stockholm we got up so Talia could meet with someone who manages the Stockholm branch of Hub (she’ll tell you about that), and then go shopping.
Shopping in Sweden is a little frustrating because everything is designed well, packaged beautifully, and priced accordingly. For example, wooden toys at this small shop were super simple, primary colors, very Playmobil and more than $30 for a little car. Screw that.
After some shopping, we set sail for this museum at the outskirts of Stockholm called Millesgarden. It was pleasant, but not engaging, so I slept in the shade.
Then we sailed out to the archipelago and anchored in this small, placid harbor for the night.
The next day was cloudy and rainy and we did almost nothing but read. Which is fine, but I would have rather spent a rainy day in museums in Stockholm than listening to old people music. Oh well.
Today is being about the same, except that we are actually trying to sail and not use the engine. Sailing, however, requires more time outside getting drenched by both sky and sea. Also, I don’t know what I’m doing so everytime I’m told something about starboard I just try one direction and see what the response is. Sailing by trial and error is not going over well with these experienced sailors. I can drive the boat just fine while powered by engine, though. Grand Theft Auto actually taught me a lot about how boats handle.
Speaking of traveling with septagenarians, we are now listening to a collection of sea shanties. Seriously.

Stockholm, Day 2

This morning I woke up to “Bam, Bam, Bam! Alex there are lots of old cars driving by!”

Now, normally, I’d have jumped out of bed to see. This morning, however, I felt like I needed a few more hours of sleep. I got up anyway, though, ’cause if there’s one thing I love more than women, it’s cars (there isn’t, but if there were, it’d be cars).

It turns out, somehow, that maybe 100 feet from the boat there is a classic car show. Seriously. And I didn’t plan it. I may have wished for it, but I couldn’t have planned it. So I says to myself, “Self, classic cars and Swedish women,” and put my shoes on.

Stockholm Car Show

It was great, lots of old European cars and even more old American cars. Including, I swear I didn’t plan this, a Chevelle SS 396 (the red one, below), a Mustang 408 (orange, must research), and some sweet Aston Martins, including a new Vantage (black). This was short lived, however, as they apparently needed to be a parade, so they all took off. I wish that there was some way to capture the sound and smell of that Chevelle starting up, but it’s something you have to experience. That is my dream car and one day I am going to own one and drive it like there’s no tomorrow.

The rest of the day was spent wandering around “SoFo” (guess what neighborhood that’s like) and then we went to the Vasa Museet, a museum about this ship that sank about 20 minutes after it launched and laid buried in the sand for 300 years. It was awesome.

Now I am enjoying an American IPA in the sun. Pretty awesome.

Stockholm, Day 1

We landed in Stockholm at about 7:30 am local time, which is awesome because we have a whole day here and it’s hard enough getting Talia up to do something.

Unfortunately 7:30 am for them is 1:30 am for us, and not an optimal time to try to get your day started. So after hitting the grocery store and a small museum of modern art, it was time to crash. So we slept on the grass in the sun.

Sweden, of note, is amazing. Beautiful architecture, laid back people, not much to worry about, easy access to everything and everyone speaks English.

Stockholm is much smaller and easier to navigate than I would’ve expected. Except for the fact that all the words look and sound like a random selection of letters, and are sometimes bewilderingly long. You can definitely cover the majority of this city on a bike.

Stockholm

Also, Swedish women are everything they’re made out to be. The long, vicious winters must be wonderful.

Young and Modern

Last night was the Young and Modern party for the opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new modern wing. This was the first time I’d paid to go to a party, and it was pretty amazing.

First of all, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there:

Second, they’d turned entire galleries into a night club:

There was an open bar about every 100 feet, and, comically, because they hadn’t yet put the final finish on the floors, you could only get light-colored drinks – heineken, amstel, champagne, white wine, clear liquors with clear mixers, etc. You could get a vodka-cran, but it was white cranberry juice. I think the white wine was the darkest thing they were serving. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed it, but I thought it was funny.

Also, strangely, there had to be at least three girls for every guy. At least. Did I mention open bar? I’m not even that kind of guy, but any single guy who didn’t leave with at least two girls failed miserably.

The new modern wing is amazing. Gorgeous, spacious, tons of great stuff. I’m definitely going to have to go back there to check it out further.

Open Season

Today we went up to Talia’s family’s place in Wisconsin to open the house – basically to get it ready after a winter of being unoccupied. This consisted largely of doing some yard work, having lunch, and getting the sailboat into the lake.

The weather was perfect, I got to caber toss a log down a hill, ride a four wheeler, almost fall in the freezing cold lake, jump on a trampoline, play with a tiny toad, and found two tennis balls! I may actually a seven-year-old.

And for some reason someone brought a crowbar, so I had to take this picture:

If you don’t get it, don’t worry about it. If you do get it, wanna come over and play video games?

Home again, home again

I’m in the apartment of a couple of my best friends, hanging out after having some of the best Indian food (from a cart) and the best beer (Deschutes) in the country.
We’re relaxing in the sun and about to head out to one of my favorite breweries (Hopworks) to meet even more of my closest friends for some more fantastic beer.
I can’t believe how great this town is.

Getting in Sync

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of information in a lot of places – personal email, personal computer, work email, work computer, iPhone, etc. Today I decided to spend some time figuring out how to connect them all together to keep my information in sync and accurate. Mostly anyway.

While the primary goal was to get all of my data in sync, the secondary goal was to protect my data from loss or exposure.

Here’s what I’ve done:

• Work PC (Outlook) syncs email & work calendar with Work Server (Exchange 2007)
• Work PC (Outlook) syncs work calendar with Google Acct using Google Calendar Sync
• Google Acct syncs all calendars (work, home, holidays) with iPhone using Google Sync for Mobile, (which, stupidly, only does calendars and contacts)
  
• iPhone pulls work email via IMAP and sends work email via work SMTP
• iPhone pulls Gmail via IMAP and sends personal email via Google SMTP
• iPhone syncs with Address Book via iTunes (the only cabled connection)
• Address Book updates iCal’s “Birthdays” calendar
• iCal syncs work, home, and holdiay calendars with Google via CalDAV

The final result is this:

• My personal and work data are visible from home or work and on my iPhone.
• My personal data are on my personal equipment and not my work equipment.
• I can lose my phone without losing any data.
• I can lose my job without losing (or exposing) any personal data or having my data wiped by my employer.
• I can lose my personal computer without losing any data (Time Machine, FTW).
• I can lose my work computer without losing any data (Iron Mountain).

What is lacking

• iPhone does not have my birthdays calendar (so no reminders, sorry everyone).
• Outlook on my work computer has to be running in order for Google to get my work calendar.
• Google contacts does not match Address Book or iPhone.
• I still have to use a cable to sync my iPhone with my Mac when my phone and my computer both have Bluetooth. WTF, Apple!? Fix that.

Google’s contact management still needs some work. I tried sync’ing that at one point and it screwed everything up -  lots of duplicated contacts: Google had their email, iPhone had their phone number, so now I had two contacts. Google has finally given us the ability to merge contacts (and it works well), so I’m going to work on getting that cleaned up. What really needs to happen is that Google updates my contacts automatically when they update their own contact info – like Exchange.

If anyone wants more details about how I accomplished any part of this, post and I’ll fill in the details.

Killin’ Zombies

I wanna kill me some zombies.

courtesy i-hacked.com

Really bad.

But I have a PS3.

Therefore, I can’t play such sweet shovel-into-cranium games as Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, Stubbs the Zombie, etc.

I have even considered buying an Xbox360 to play those games. But I don’t want to buy a system with a failure rate so high I’m virtually guaranteed to have to mail it back to M$ and wait several weeks to get another POS back. People accuse me of being anti-Microsoft, and I have a hard time denying it. Especially since their console scratches disks so bad they have to be replaced, their flagship game ships too scratched to play, and their failure rate approaches that of an after school special about drug use.

So I’m really glad to hear this: Dead Rising 2: in development and multi-platform.

I know Sony’s screwing up the Playstation brand left and right and couldn’t market their way out of a wet paper bag, but I still have one and want to kill some damn zombies.

And a big thank you to everyone who called, texted, and emailed to make sure that I knew someone was hacking road signs to say “ZOMBIES AHEAD”. Zombies are ahead.

Just how far ahead is anyone’s guess.

Update: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is almost enough to get me to read a Jane Austen novel.