After two weeks off from work and almost as many feet of snow, I’m back.  Last Wednesday was my first day back to work for 2007.  It was hard to get motivated after being on vacation for 2 weeks.  As a result I’ve been in frantic panic mode for the last week. It seems I can’t get caught up and more things keep landing on my desk.

The unfortunate side effect is that I haven’t posted anything for the last week.  Well, this is just a blip to prevent things from getting stale.  I have plenty of stuff to cover from the last week.

Snow covered cars, Savoy Bar & Grill, New Gadgets and Toys, and more…

Albuquerque is under attack by small white particles falling from the sky. This invasion has been successful in disrupting travel and other services. Please stay tuned for more updates.

We have had an unusual amount of snow in Albuquerque over the last couple of days. I have heard conflicted reports of records being broken, but regardless it’s a lot of snow. I wandered out into the streets a little before noon to see what I could find. I began my trek to Nob Hill in virgin snow; I was clearly one of the first people to walk along some streets I chose. However there clearly had been cars in the streets. After a couple blocks I decided it was much easier to walk in the street where the cars had driven. Walking on the sidewalk in what seemed to be 12 plus inches was a bit difficult.

I had expected to see snowmen in yards along my walk, but was sadly let down. I did however encounter two guys building an igloo. Yes, an igloo. At the time I spoke with them they had been working for 2 hours on their new home. I snapped a couple shots and continued on my way to Nob Hill. More on this later…

My friend Randall and I occasionally meet up for Sushi on Saturdays over at Shogun. Actually he is there every Saturday, I only make it once in a while. We decided we would trek over and see if they were open. Unfortunately the doors were locked and the lights were off. I really needed one last sushi fix for the year. Maybe I’ll get some tomorrow. I gave Randall a call as he was still on his way down, and he diverted to run some errands since yellow tail and a super crunch roll were not in our future.

I opted to go next door and grab a coffee at Starbys (Starbucks in the old Arby’s building… that’s a whole other tangent…). They were closed as well so I hoofed it on up to Satellite for a London Fog. Things were just on a downward spiral, when I got to Satellite they were out of vanilla syrup for my London Fog. I ordered it anyway sans the vanilla, not as good but it got the body warmed up a bit. From there I trekked back down Central and caught a bite at Two Fool’s Tavern before making the trip home.

I decided to take a similar route home so I could stop by and check on our igloo friends. It had been almost two hours since I passed them, so I was curious to see how far they had gotten. The igloo was looking much more like an igloo when I walked passed again. The guys were still hard at work. I asked if they had ever built and igloo before or had some guidelines to follow. They had never built one nor had they gotten any directions, they were just winging it as they went along. Seems they plan to spend the night in the igloo tonight. I wish them luck and hope their instincts in igloo construction serve them well.

Well, I’m in for the day and relaxing on the couch with the dog. She has worn herself out playing in the snow. This is only her second winter but she is clearly enjoying the snow this year. The snow is still lightly falling outside and I am anxious to see what tomorrow brings. I may be walking over to Nob Hill to celebrate New Years tomorrow night.

Boost Mobile has introduced a new service called Loopt. This service allows you to see where your friends are on a map right on your phone. The system uses GPS to locate where you are every 20 minutes and updates the map.

Afraid your significant other is cheating on you? Just follow them around with your phone and see for yourself.

Granted, you control who can see where you are and you can turn the feature off from the phone. However, I can see so many ways to abuse this service. To many people are naive about what information they make available about themselves. Look at all the people who put their phone number and address on a facebook profile, myspace profile, or other web page. Combine this with the common trend to add as many people as you can to your friends list. This could easily carry over to the phone and people will be adding others they don’t really know to the list of people that can see where they are.

So, if anyone out there actually looks at my blog you may notice that is seems to change every day or so. Not to say that I’m adding new content, but rather I’m moving things around and adding other items to the sidebar. The main lings I have added in are: PhotoStream, MusicStream, and various links.

For the PhotoStream I went out and finally setup a Flickr account. It’s been ages since I took any pictures. For now most of what is there is a bit random. Hopefully, this will encourage me to get out and start snapping some shots. We got a really cool new camera at work, a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, which I am still learning to use. You should normally see the four most recent pictures in the sidebar. You can either click on them or use the “Photos” link at the top of the page to go to the photo gallery. We will see how it goes…

The MusicStream is basically a list of the music I am listening to. This is not always up to date as it takes some manual intervention to get it to log everything I listen to. I’ve become a big fan of Audioscrobbler and Last.fm. Basically Audioscrobbler is the tool that powers Last.fm. Last.fm is a social music network that allows you to track your listening habits and find new music and other people with similar musical tastes. There are Audioscrobler clients that allow you to upload what you are listening to, to your Last.fm profile. You can then pull the data from Last.fm to display on your webpage, blog, myspace profile etc. The problem arises that the combination of my computer platform of choice, a Mac, and my primary music source, Rhapsody, don’t have many options for an Audioscrobbler client.  I found a small java app called audiothinger that does a decent job.  However, it crashes on occasion and often it duplicates tracks when it posts.  As a result you might see a song in my list of recent tracks multiple times.  In some rare cases I may have just listened a single track that frequently, but not likely.  I’m not sure if this is a bug in the client or a problem with the RSS feeds that Rhapsody provides.  Regardless it works well enough for my intended purposes.

The last bit of personal touch to the blog is my list of links.   Currently the list is rather small; mainly links to my various pages with a few other blogs thrown in.  I hope to expand on this more later.  If I know you and you have a page you think deserves a link just let me know.

Now that I’ve started this blog I have realized that writing is not as easy as it used to be.  Over the last couple of years I have found my ability to articulate myself slipping away.  My vocabulary seems to be diminishing, as do my writing skills.  Is writing like riding a bike or is it a skill that dulls without use?  I hope to see a gradual improvement in my writing as I post more and more, hopefully once again doing so with the confidence I had in college.  This by no means suggests that I will have anything interesting to say.

Well, it is that time of year again; UNM closes down for winter break. This year they added an extra day on both ends. Yesterday was my first day off and I don’t have to go back to the office till Jan. 3. YEEHAA!!! However, given my common behavior patterns I will likely work a couple of days over the break.

So, what to do with all this free time? First on my list is to do a little redecorating. My room of focus will be the living room. For those of you who have been to my house, you know that the layout of the living room does not provide many options. I think I tend to shift between 3 possible setups. However, this year I’m adding in a few new pieces of furniture. Hopefully I can fill in the big open space that exists no matter how I position my furniture.

Second, on the list is to relax and have fun. I have a few movies to checkout and plan to dine out a little more often than usual. I promised to take a couple friends to Japanese Kitchen next week to get one of our last sushi fixes of 2006. I’ll probably squeeze in 2 more sushi excursions before the year runs out.

Beyond that, I’m open for suggestions.