I'm in Chicago!!!

Like, right now! I'm in Chicago, baby! On business to Chicago, I hopped on a plane at 6:44 this morning and, well, there's not much more to tell. I'm in Chicago. I'm working in a skyscraper. Here are some pictures taken from one of the corner offices I stopped in for a few minutes:

The office building was sitting right on the river. I was in awe of the view.

I was working from the 14th floor most of the time.

Some poor soul actually has to work with this view staring him in the face all day. Poor guy...

2 Pix 4U

Here is the very first look at my new piano. The bench. The piano is actually still at the auction house and it should get picked up sometime this week. I can't wait to get it in my house!

Kinda long story here. I made these pants. I was testing the pattern for size on me by making a crude pair of pants. They fit fairly well, so I'll use the pattern for my Halloween costume. I'll share that later...

And I really was on the phone when I took this picture.

VBlog - Junk In A Box

What will I pull out of the box next??

Rant - Lack of Eloquence

First and foremost, I will warn you that this post is not well written. Well, as always, I will do my best to spell everything correctly and toss in the appropriate punctuation, but don't expect fine reasoning or a well-spoken wag of the finger.
Bing. You've heard of it probably. Microsoft's new search engine. They're really trying to push this out to everyone. I'm not sure if it's working for them or not, but boy are they trying. The first time it bothered me was when I saw their TV ad. A real person speaks a search query. Then they mimic the "other search engine" by rattling off a ridiculous string of nouns or phrases which are seemingly linked through poor logic. I'm sorry, but my Google searches don't resemble my click-trail on Wikipedia. When I search for "candle dipping" I don't receive "Pierce Brosnan" as one of the results (I just made that up. Clever, huh? - Please, please, please someone prove the existence of that chain in Wikipedia; 25 clicks or less preferably).
The other thing is MSN's news page.
Sorry. No.
It's not news. I don't know why I get sucked into it. It's horrible writing. Sometimes it's a catchy picture or maybe a title that I think somehow relates to my life. But I find myself reading MSN articles. Not news. Junk. Mindless, time-wasting garbage. But I find myself on that page everytime I log out of Hotmail. Sometimes I wish Hotmail was still privately owned. It was. Learned it on Wikipedia.
So they get me to read these articles and regardless of what it is, they have links pointing me to Bing. One type of article might be a series of interesting stories or facts, only half told. The other half posed as a question with a link to Bing where the question is supposedly answered. WHY NOT JUST TELL ME? I know the authors of the articles must know the answer, but why waste my time? And why does this work for Microsoft? It just sounds lazy. Imagine it in a school setting: "...then Washington began crossing the Delaware. To find out if he reached the other side and what happened if he did, please see what happened next. Actually, I might have to check that out. I'm not too clear on all the details.
That's all I got tonight. Looking back, that actually wasn't such a bad rant. We should do it again sometime.

VBlog 1 - Get to know your handhelds

Good luck, Chum

On Wednesday my friend Chum - that is, Sara - will be taking her GRE test in Iowa City. Since I live much closer to the City than she, I will be playing host to her tomorrow evening so that she won't have to drive nearly so far come Wednesday morning.
I'm really excited to have a guest. Even though in all reality this is probably how the entire evening will go:

"Wanna play cribbage?"
"Sure!"




"Well, I'm bushed. Call it a night?"
"Yep. See you in the morning."

So good luck on your test on Wednesday Chum!
Aside from that, I bought a kitchen cabinet which I will place under the piece of countertop in my kitchen that conspicuously tops nothing. I just realized that a couple of in-progress photos would have been nice right here, but I'll have to get a shot or two of the finished product. Especially once it's in place. No promises though.

Woot! I'm on Woot!

If you've never been to woot.com, I would recommend it. I go there nearly everyday because they sell one thing on their website until it sells out or until midnight. After midnight, they put another item up for sale and the cycle repeats itself.
They also have a discussion board for each item and certain notable posts get marked as quality posts and they are highlighted on the main page. In essence, that sums up what you see in the picture I posted above.
I saw the item being sold, recognized it as something I already owned, and thought that I could share my experience with the product, which I thought was worthy of a quality post, albeit in poor literary form. No more than 30 seconds after submitting my post, I see that it was indeed selected as a quality post. Wow, those Woot guys must watch their discussion boards like hawks!