The Net Monkey

My friend Dan from Columbus, Ohio, visited Indianapolis over this past weekend.

This wasn’t just any kind of friendly visit, but a bit of a date — a multi-day date, if you will.

Dan arrived in Indianapolis in time for the tree lighting in downtown, but we were just a couple of minutes shy of actually seeing it in person. Being that we were right there, I took him to see where I work, especially the deck on the roof of our building, which has a great view of Monument Circle and the skyline. It’s choice.

One of my favorite things about having company is taking them out to my favorite restaurants. We got pizza at Bazbeaux’s, Indian food at Shalimar, burgers at the Red Eye Cafe, and Asian cuisine at Thai Spice. Mmm!

Pictures above is Dan sitting across from me at Thai Spice.

We did manage to participate in a bit of nerdery. On Saturday, we met up with Andy and Laura for lunch. Afterwards, we traveled up to Fry’s to buy some parts for a computer that Dan needed help putting together. Fry’s is such an interesting place. I’m quite fond of the Wall-O-Motherboards; it’s just like the one in California I saw back in 2002.

Anyway, I like Dan and I think he’s a nice and attractive guy. We hit it off well, so I’m going to visit him in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, he’ll be able to show me around Columbus a bit since I haven’t seen much of it. And, of course, I am looking forward to getting to know Dan a bit more.

Title: Circle of Lights Christmas Tree

Uploaded By: spartacus13210

I love this photo.

I believe this is the sculpture depicting “war” on the east side of the monument.

How was your Thanksgiving? My Thanksgiving was lovely.

Unlike last year, Grandma was in relatively good health and was able to come to supper with everyone. She wasn’t able to make it the last time because she was in the hospital with pneumonia, but somehow the old bird keeps on going and was able to spend time with us this year.

After arriving back at my parents house, I went over to Tony and Jason’s to have another Thanksgiving meal, which was good. It was nice to spend some time with those guys since I don’t see them as much as I did when we all lived together.

So, another Thanksgiving is over and the Christmas season is upon us.

And the weather has been in the 60s. Whatever!

Office Space is one of my all-time favorite movies!

Found this via Doug’s blog.

So, I’m turning 30 in January. And I decided to ring in this supposedly life-changing event and take a vacation to Europe and visit some friends.

I’ll be flying out to London on New Year’s Day and will spend a week checking things out. My friend John (who is a lovely lad, but has a boyfriend) lives in Reading and happens to be off work that week, so he’s going to take me out and show me around.

This should be a ton of fun compared to my previous trip to London in 1997. I went with a professor and other students, and spent the majority of the time looking at the local sites of interest, seeing bad musicals (and I won’t say which), museums, etc. It was tiresome, but worth because I did get college credit for it and I really did learn a lot.

This time I’m really interested in seeing things from a local point-of-view, as opposed to the tourist vision of London. I’ll also get to experience some of the gay life, which I didn’t really get to explore much back in 1997. However, I did attend the first anniversary performance of the London Gay Symphony, but that’s a whole story unto itself.

Anyway, about a week after arriving in London, I’m going to take a trip down to Barcelona to see my friend Ron. Ron just moved there a few months ago from Minneapolis and is having a really good time, as far as I can tell from his blog.

I’ve always wanted to visit Spain, so this should be really fun. Unfortunately, Ron will be working that week, but he’s going to help me figure out some things to do during the day while he’s busy. Should be fun!

After staying in Barcelona for about four nights, I’m flying back to London and will stay for another two days. I’ll be flying back home on January 13, which will be nearly two weeks since departing. I’ve never taken a true vacation for this long, and I can’t wait to do it.

If anyone has any London or Barcelona experiences they’d like to share in the comments sections, please do. I look forward to reading them.

My friend Jason recently posted an article to his blog about politics and the recent election, saying, while the Democrats have won this battle, to “wake [him] up when government actually does something interesting and positive. It’s not like Democrats are all that great these days.” I can’t say that I disagree with Jason on this one, but I do not share his cynicism.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m delighted the Democrats won both houses of the Congress, but I’m not naive as to believe that having the Democrats in control will represent any kind of silver bullet, in that everything is going to change and the situation in Iraq is going to improve. That is just not realistic; however, I do believe that one-party rule is bad for us.

Our national government is setup with a system of checks and balances, but, in my opinion, those don’t work so well when the leadership of the executive and legislative branches are of the same party. One party should balance out the other.

In the end, the Republicans and Democrats will need to work together and compromise, in order to accomplish anything. I am certain the President will start vetoing more bills, but Congress won’t be so willing to push forward his agenda either.

So, with all that being said, I think the positive outcome of this election is that we have a more balanced government than we’ve had in the last six years.

And I think that’s good for us.

I feel like the shroud of Bush has finally lifted, at least somewhat.

Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

Back in March I wrote about which extensions I use in Firefox. A lot has changed, especially the release of Firefox 2.0, so i think it is time to update the list.

This list covers both my home Mac OS X system and the laptop I use for work which runs Windows XP.

• del.icio.us (home & work) - This is the official extension for the well-known social bookmarking service.
• DNSStuff Toolbar (work only) - This isn’t anything fancy. It just gives me an easy way to access the services at dnsstuff.com.
• Fastefox (home & work) - It … like … makes things faster.
• Favicon Picker 2 (home & work) - I don’t use this to pick out icons for web sites, but rather to clean them out. Sometimes they get screwed up and it drives me nuts.
• Fission (home & work) - This mimics the progress bar functionality found in Safari on Mac OS X. Works in Windows, too.
• IE Tab (work only) - This is a cool extension. You can use it to view a page within Internet Explorer’s engine, but within a Firefox tab. I use this every day at work.
• IE View Lite (work only) - For sites that don’t work using IE Tab, I use this to open a page within an external Internet Explorer window. It can open a window automatically based on the URL of the site.
• Save As Image (home & work) - This extension lets you save an entire web page (from top to bottom) as an image.
• Tamper Data (home & work) - This one allows you to view and modify HTTP and HTTPS requests. I find it very useful for troubleshooting issues at work.

There are a few extensions in my previous article that I no longer utilize.

• Google Suggest - This functionality is now integrated as part of Firefox 2.0.
• SwitchProxy Tool - I got rid of this extension because I found a better one called FoxyProxy, but I don’t use it anymore, either. I used these when I felt like browsing via the Tor network, but I haven’t done that in a long time.
• LiveLines - The functionality provided by this extension is now part of Firefox 2.0.

Enjoy!

Today I accomplished a few behind-the-scenes tasks on this blog.

• Upgraded WordPress from version 2.0.1 to 2.0.5. This seems to mostly include security fixes.
• I started using Subversion to manage WordPress and other files. For those of you who don’t know, version control is delicious.
• Removed unused plug-ins. Who needs a spelling checker when Firefox 2.0 will do it for you?
• Added a new plug-in which provides combines FeedBurner and Google Analytics reports. Nifty!
• Removed FeedBurner’s “FeedCount” chicklet from the bottom of the right column and replaced it with chicklets for Bloglines, My Yahoo, Google Reader, and the newly standardized RSS icon.

That’s all for now.

I don’t recall people from southern Ohio or southern Indiana having anything like a standard American accent.