austria trip podcast part 2

2007.04.28 7.06

I've finally gotten around to editing down the second half of my Austria trip. My videocamera is mounted on top of my iRobot Scooba vacuum cleaner in the intro. The chill music is from a french group named AIR. It's a track called ''Redhead Girl'' on their recent album Pocket Symphony. After that, we pick up where we left off in Berlin, Germany standing in front of the police station. This station is located on the former East German side. This video is quite heavy on the Amy this time around. I think she got tired of running the camera. From there we're back in our car and Amy is trying to get her service provider to come up in her phone. The next scene is in Sarah and Greg's house. They're friends of Amy from Philadelphia with Greg stationed in Bavaria Germany. Amy is writing postcards and I'm prompting all questions. Then it's onward to a Sanifair Tank & Rast auto-cleaning toilet. Yes, you read that right. You have to watch the video to see. These places are the rest-stop of the European world (or the lay-by as the UK folks call it). Quite interesting. Finally, the last half of the video is a quick trek to the hot dog stand near Amy's house where we buy these specially prepared kaesa kreiner (cheese hot dogs) that are stuffed in french bread. I went off my chicken-seafood-egg-dairy exclusivity to eat these. Quite tasty! I'll only eat them when I'm in Austria, however. This episode is just under 10 minutes in length

lazy sunday

2007.04.22 11.49

Sitting in my Minneapolis condo with 3 windows wide open, mini-blinds up, and watching a light rain pour down. SIRIUS channel 35 ''Chill'' is playing relaxing tunes. Mildly entertaining to watch people go in and out of the Cheapo / Applause record store that's directly across the street from me. Doing PHP programming and general ''me'' stuff until 6 PM tonight. After that I'll be catching up with my documentation writing for work, ticket management, an expense form I need to fill out, and even more programming tasks that are all JavaScript related. I'll try to post another more in-depth update on the latest happenings of the Super Genius for this past week. In addition to the other half of my Austria podcast, I've got a DeLorean heavy podcast that I made last weekend. Freak alert! Yeah, it's like that.

the age basement

2007.04.10 7.11

I am officially coining a new term today: The Age Basement. Here's my definition. Tell your friends.

age basement
–noun 1. describes a particular age group and how it is not on the same level as a more mature age group;

minnesota pop

2007.04.07 20.37

I was driving to work on Friday morning and was startled to witness a white bird with grey wings literally racing the car in front of me. The bird was easily flying 60 miles per hour. I kid you not. At first I thought tragedy would occur at any moment. I've seen birds unexpectedly fly into traffic only to get splattered against someone's grill. That wasn't the case in this instance. This bird was freakin' crazy and was *definitely* aware of what it was doing. In the back of my mind I considered that maybe this was some teenaged bird that was getting cheap thrills by taking risks and racing cars. Or maybe he'd found a bottle of beer and was FUI (flying under the influence). So weird. After a full 90 seconds of chasing alongside traffic and swooping across every lane of trafic, the bird finally took off. It was one of the most impressive things I've seen an animal do.

I'm going to see BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE at the Uptown in 30 minutes. I'm waiting on fellow coworker Aaron to show up. I haven't done much today other than lounging around. Last night I went into downtown to hang out with the guys. I did manage to get a girl named Amanda to convincingly repeat the words ''Mark Shields Super Genius'' several times upon my departure. I don't know why I don't just exchange my phone number. I've done weird things like this in the past. My old phone number was 713-466-6007. I would actually ask someone to remember it by saying, ''Just remember: 713 - Four - Satanic - James Bonds.'' How's that for a tangent?

spider genius

2007.04.05 16.51

It was cold last night so I figured I'd kill some time. I recently purchased an extra camera battery for my Canon Digital Rebel and I hadn't really shot anything with it. I dragged my old Spider-Man costume from 2004 and slipped it back on. Fits well. I'm not that far off. I did a ton of pushups and some arm curls to get properly pumped up. The funny part is that now people are saying I photoshopped in my muscles. Riiight. If I did that then I'd make them gi-freakin-normous. Here's one of the shots (out of 46).