Yes, can you believe what happened?!?!? History has been made and life is going to be awesome from here on out. Yeah - that’s right. Liz and I are engaged!

What? What did you think I was talking about?

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ESPN - Vandy stuns South Carolina for 1st home win vs. ranked foe since ‘92 - NCAA College Football Recap

Chris Nickson for PRESIDENT! How sweet it is…

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No, not that Surly. This one. I now have an ideal situation where I can bike to work via nothing but bike trails, and it has totally been bliss. I have a bike locker at the office, a shower and a place to keep clothes. I’ve been riding my road bike to work, which has been great but it’s a bit of overkill methinks. I have an 18 mile commute each way from Liz’s place and I think it will be about the same when we all move to into my place in Stapleton. I will be going up the Sand Creek Greenway to the Platte River Trail to the Cherry Creek Trail. Yeah, there are shorter routes but where’s the fun there - I have this itch to join in the Ride the Rockies trip with TW and want to get into shape. I figure that riding a single speed almost 40 miles when I commute and doing some climbs on the weekends will get me into SOME sort of decent shape before 2009, right?

Anyway, I went to Bike Source since it’s on my way home and talked with Joe, the manager. He and Stephen spent a lot of time talking with me about single speeds and decking it out however I wanted. I want to throw some panniers on it because a laptop in a backpack sure gets f’ing heavy on the ride home. I also want to ride it rain or shine and fenders would help out there. They basically said I have one excellent choice - the Surly Cross-Check. It will accept gears or single speed, road tires or MTB tires, etc. It’s the all-around winner for do it all frames from what I can tell. Joe tells me that the steel frame will ride a little better on my commutes and is a little cheaper than aluminum. That’s fine with me since I’m not looking to duplicate the cost of my road bike. I just want something to ride every morning, be able to throw my laptop in and occasionally ride to the store to pick shit up. In other words, an actual COMMUTER bike. Don’t get me wrong, I love my other bike but I get a bit freaked out about leaving it locked up outside. The Surly is totally not flashy and will hopefully not attract a lot of attention.

I’ll post pics when Bike Source is done building it.

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Liz and I head to LA tomorrow to board the Diamond Princess bound for Hawaii. This will be my first cruise so I’ll let you know how it goes. Apparently I get to eat, drink and get large. I am totally going to kick someone’s ass at shuffleboard and bingo. Seriously…

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Yeah, I’m totally excited that Battlestar Galactica is back for its fourth and final season. If you haven’t seen it and want to get on board, check out the 8 minute synopsis of the previous 3 seasons.

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Lately I’ve been on a quest to rip my entire DVD library to my Mac mini in order to more effectively utilize the Front Row feature. It’s on borderline obsession but it keeps me entertained, because who doesn’t want all their entertainment in one place? Why would I use a Mac mini over an Apple TV, you ask? Well, I bought the mini before the Apple TV even existed - had it been around at the time, I probably would have saved the cash and picked up the ATV. There are advantages and disadvantages to each but the main disadvantage I see with the mini (as of 2/24/08) is that HD content is not available from iTunes (rent or own) for any machine except the ATV. An advantage is being able to use Remote Buddy to control the mini with my iPod Touch via AJAX interface and my Wiimote for 3D spacial cursor control. Here are the things I have hooked up to my entertainment center:

Samsung 32″ HDTV (circa late 2006)
Mac Mini (1.66 GHz core duo; 768MB RAM)
Lacie Rugged External drive (100GB; 7200rpm; triple interface)
Motorola DCH3416 HD DVR (Comcast)
Sony DVD player

I just wanted to share some things I’ve been doing and any progress I make down the road. I use Handbrake to rip my DVD’s to mp4 or m4v’s and share the movies out to all my other machines. The beautiful thing about being a hardware junkie is that I have 3 macs ripping movies almost constantly. This will necessitate the need for the Time Capsule (1TB) when it comes out but to free actual real estate (a 4-drawer cabinet full of movies) will be well worth it. More as it comes…

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Let it Snow…
We went up to Mike’s place in Keystone at the end of November and didn’t really expect there to have any good runs because there was 0″ of natural snow. The night we got up there we got 7″ of snow for some great runs. I’ve been battling a cold so I took two runs then about threw up from coughing so much. Liz rode all day. Show off.

A nice little storm was brewing last week and culminated in over a foot of powder last weekend. We battled the 3 hour drive (each way) to take some turns and it was fun-nominal. I was still sick and only able to do 2 runs but it was beautiful - fat flakes during the day and champagne powder toward dusk. If this is how the early season is, we’re going to have a fun year.

Vacation
For the second time in my life I am taking a vacation longer than a week. Liz and I bought ourselves a couple of tickets on a Hawaiian cruise in April. I’ve never been on a cruise or to Hawaii so I figured this is an opportunity to hit the high seas and eat myself silly for 15 days. We are f’n stoked, brah.

Virtualizing large cats
I upgraded my laptop to Leopard and really like it. Here are a few thoughts:

• I’ve been an Apple fan since my Apple IIc and have enjoyed tinkering with the OS. I had to learn PC’s for work and enjoyed tinkering with its OSes. Now that I’m older I’m tired of tinkering with the operating system to get it to work - I still enjoy TWEAKING it to make it better. It’s the difference between working on your car to make it faster versus working on it to make it start. Leopard is working well and seems very solid (i.e. no crashes yet).
• Coverflow and Quick Look are awesome for viewing all files. Those features, paired with a halfway decent way of searching, make hierarchical folders less important for filing information. I’m so bad at creating nested folders then never being able to recover files because I forgot my brilliant naming scheme 6 months later. At least this way, I can search for what I want then quickly browse through the results. Google desktop is still the best app for the habitually unorganized.
• This has less to do with Leopard but I didn’t have anywhere else to put it. I have been running both Parallels and VMware for Windows virtualization since both were in beta and I now have a clear winner. VMware Fusion just flat out works better and faster. It may be Leopard but lately it’s just been more stable than Parallels. I keep getting the big spinning beach ball and it really started before the upgrade but has gotten considerably worse.

OK…time for bed to get some rest.

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I earned my first stripe yesterday and I must admit that it’s one of the most satisfying things I’ve done for myself in a while. In terms of going for a Black Belt it’s such a tiny step but I’ve learned a bunch since starting last month. Your first stripe means that you’re not lost during warm ups and you show some control. Basically, if anyone attacks me I can defend myself by jumping-jacking my attacker. Actually, it’s pretty cool to know how to defend an attack then turn it into an offensive.

I’m pretty happy with getting my first stripe in 3.5 weeks because I’ve busted my ass to get to classes and to get up to speed with the rest of the people there. I’m now stalking my second stripe…

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I have been AWOL from here for a while and haven’t had a chance to update y’all. Here’s a quick rundown of the last couple of weeks.

* I got to go to game 4 of the LCS thanks to JR. What a blast - I’ve never felt that much electricity in a stadium before. I never thought I’d get back into baseball so hardcore again. Now I’m thinking about weekend season tickets.

** I decided I needed to get in shape and would like to kick some ass doing it so I have taken up Brazilian Jui Jitsu at Easton, a Renzo Gracie school. I talked BR into going with me to try it out and now we’re both hooked. So far it’s been a blast and I’ve dropped almost 10 lbs.

*** It was time to replace the my iPod nano that got stolen when Mike was in town last year. I picked up the iPod touch and have to say that I’m amazed. Honestly, I think of it more as a Wi-Fi Internet device that manhandles multimedia than primarily a music device. I threw down the cash for the Invisible Shield and now I carry it around everywhere.

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Who would have thought that we’d still have baseball here in Denver on 14 October? Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you know that the Rox are on one of the hottest streaks in baseball and can turn downtown into a cauldron of roiling purple tonight despite the weather. It’s supposed to be in the high 30’s but it’s the first LCS game in Denver. Ever. They have a 2-0 lead and can turn this city upside down with 3 home games to try and close out the LCS and their first Series appearance. It’s just awesome to still care about baseball this late in the season.

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