The Net Monkey

I was reading an article tonight at IndyStar.com about a woman who discovered she had some unclaimed dividends from stock she purchased back in the 1960s worth over $100,000 waiting for her at the Office of the Indiana Attorney General.

As such, I became inspired to search for unclaimed property belonging to members of my family. As it turns out, my paternal, long-dead grandfather has approximately $1,000 due him waiting to be claimed. Turns out it is some kind of cash dividend from Prudential Financial, Inc.

Grandpa has been gone for 25 years, but this unclaimed property wasn’t reported until 2003. It would be very interesting to learn the history of this case, but, in the meantime, all I can do is say, “thanks for helping us out, Grandpa,” and hope that I get some kind of finder’s fee from my folks for hooking them up with the cash.

I’m taking tomorrow off and heading to Ohio!

I’m driving to Akron to meet my friend Steve (who is from that area, but currently living in San Francisco). He and I met up back in February when I was out in SF attending a MAAWG conference.

Anyway, he’s coming out for a trip to Cedar Point and invited me along with him, so I’ll be heading over there tomorrow and will be returning to Indianapolis sometime on Sunday.

“Weeee!”

Title: The Family Reunion

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

I attended the annual Counceller family reunion this past weekend with my parents, sister, and nephew. It was held in Memorial Park in New Castle, Indiana, which is about an hour east of Indianapolis.

It was good to see everyone, including the people I didn’t know. I played a lot of frisbee with Dad and Jake, and ate a ton of food.

Grandma was not able to join us this year, which is strange and sad. She’s just not in good enough health to come to such things, but I do expect to see her in a few weeks at my uncle’s birthday party, fortunately.

In light of Pluto being recently demoted as a planet, I figure it is appropriate to tell you that I watched the William Shatner roast on Comedy Central this past Sunday, and I must say that William Shatner doesn’t look like he’s 75 years old.

Anyway, I think Nichelle Nichols is fabulous, to say the least, and there really is nothing more surreal than Betty White making cock ring jokes. But that’s just me.

I don’t mean to be negative and all, but I don’t want to see World Trade Center.

I remember that day vividly; just watching the trailer freaks me out, so I’m not sure I could sit there for 125 minutes and relive the whole experience on the big screen.

Maybe some day I’ll rent it on video? In ten years? Something like that.

Title: Aug 9 2005 - White Castle

Uploaded By: keaggy.com

I’m unsure which is worse: the fact that we call White Castle burgers sliders (and knowing why); or the fact that the company itself embraces the use of the name in their commercials.

The RSS functionality provided by the IndyStar.com site has had a history of not working well, at least not for me.

The last time I checked, the auto-discovery feature in Firefox found one feed while the RSS icon on their side pointed to another one.

It also seems that every post to the site makes in to the RSS feed (the one that updates), whereas I only want headlines.

So what am I to do about this problem? Well, I recently discovered that Yahoo! News republishes the Indianapolis Star and you can get it as an RSS feed, too.

Perfect.

This is probably the longest I’ve gone without posting anything. Well, I had a great trip out to New York, to let everyone know.

I ate very well, to say the least. I had amazing pizza in Brooklyn with Devin, really good Thai food in the West Village with Bryan, and excellent sushi at a Korean reastaurant in midtown by myself.

Unfortunately, I didn’t spend much time at the HOPE conference. I did attend a copule of panels, which were alright. I also happened to barely miss the publicized incident of Steven Rombom’s arrest at the conference just before he was due to sit on a panel about privacy.

Firday night of the vacation I took a trip with Bryan to the Dugout in the West Village. It was much smaller than I imagined, for some reason. We hung out with his friend Jorge who plays for the Gotham Knights, and I happened to see a few guys from online on the way out the bar.

Spending time with Devin was very nice because he and I haven’t spent that much time together since about five years ago.

Anyway, I look forward to heading out there again, hopefully within the next six months.