rhymes with milk

Little Red at the Randy Weeks Conservatory Theatre

We all had a great fancyday in Denver. It started with brunch at Linger, Little Man ice cream for dessert, a quick pitstop at the LoHi playgrounds, a matinee musical (Nora’s first!!), and a game of tag under some gigantic dancing aliens.

Here’s a thumbnail view of our day.

Really fun night. Went with Mom & Dad, and met Jenna & Jeff at the venue. I caught a rubber pint glass 3 inches from my nose during the chaotic intermission swag-toss – it should have made it onto SportsCenter’s Top 10 that night. The show itself was pretty good, but the second half started to drag as every segment started to look like the last.

After the show, Dustin took us all to see the backstage area and green room. That was the first time I’d seen that at Boulder Theater despite having worked events there myself, and it was rad. Who knew there’s an isolated courtyard behind the theater? Wild.

I also got to catch up with Peter, who just got back from selling bespoke ski boots in Austria. Never a dull moment in his life.

Mission Ballroom (with Dustin)

• Teri Gender Bender
• The Mars Volta

Mars Volta’s setlist:

1. Vicarious Atonement
2. Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)
3. Eriatarka
4. Graveyard Love
5. L’Via L’Viaquez
6. Empty Vessels Make the Loudest Sound
7. Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus
8. Blacklight Shine
9. Drunkship of Lanterns
10. The Widow
11. Cicatriz ESP
12. Televators
13. Son et lumière
14. Inertiatic ESP

Ally got me a juniper bonsai for Christmas. It was such a thoughtful gift, but like an asshole I killed it. I over-researched care and what it really means to be a bonsai owner, and ended up cutting off almost every branch and leaving it in the 0°F windowless garage for a few weeks. I thought it was a good idea at the time, I really did.

I gave myself a little time to grieve over the ruined gift, but then I realized Ally’s real gift to me was the empowerment of being a bonsai enthusiast…or something like that.

So I bought a new one!

This time I tried to find something a little more indoor-suitable, and decided on a Common Boxwood. It has a great shape, great partially-exposed root system, and is just the right size for a starter bonsai. To avoid killing it, I’m going to let it grow quite a bit before shaping it. They’re apparently pretty slow-growers, so I’ll wait until its trunk and main branches are thicker and more established before hacking away at them.

I have a goal to ride 10 centuries in my life. Originally I was planning on doing them in 10 consecutive years, but that’s not looking good since my first and last century was in 2009. Despite having not done another century, I still did a ride this past weekend that I hold on the same level. Here are the numbers:

3 days
~140 miles
~10,000 feet ascended
minimum altitude > 9,000 feet 

It was certainly one of the coolest things I’ve done, and I’m really glad I got to be a part of it. I just wish I hadn’t fallen in a 5 mph meeting with a curb in front of 2 national champions. Lame.

Sat July 21, 2012 – Turquoise Lake

Sun July 22, 2012 – near Giberson Bay, Dillon Reservoire

Mon July 23, 2012 – just outside Copper Mountain

I’ve been busy lately, between getting married and spending nearly a month honeymooning in Hawaii, work, Diablo III coming out (!), and getting ready for a bike ride I’m totally not prepared for. But along with that, I’ve started working on several side projects and hopefully I’ll have enough free time to see them through.

One project I’m working on is creating a simple blank WordPress theme. But instead of being totally blank, it’ll be pre-styled with the intention of being re-styled. I’ll include all of the necessary WP-as-a-CMS functionality, and everything will be styled enough that it’s ready to go out of the box, but will also be really easy to apply custom styles to. It’s mostly something I’ll benefit from at work, since I’ll able to use it instead of the annoying and bloated TwentyEleven as a starting point for custom themes.

There’s another project I’ve been mulling over, mostly just the seed of an idea at this point. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at building a large-scale web application, and this would definitely fit the bill. I’m not sure whether it has the potential to actually see a large user base, but I’d still like to approach it with those intentions. That way I’ll learn from it, and if it does actually gain people’s attentions then it’ll be ready to handle it.

This project has forced me to start doing some research into scalable sever solutions, php frameworks, and general concepts of php application development, most of which is new to me. I feel like I need somewhere to dump my new found knowledge, and my process of discovery. This will probably be that place.

For now I’ve decided to tag these posts PHP App Development, so my progress can be followed there. Geek on!

google music

This is awesome. I got a beta invite about two weeks ago, and I’ve used it nearly every day since. Here’s why it’s awesome.

I spend about 90% of my weekly computer time on my work computer, far away from the hard drive I’ve worked so hard over the years to cram full of music. Sure I have my iPhone, the Hype Machine, Pandora, and (until they made the move that turned me against them — restricting their mobile app to paid subscribers only) Last.fm, and they’ve all done a great job of keeping my musical needs covered, but all have fallen short in some way. They never have exactly what I want when I want it. It’s always hard to find or bookmark specific songs. I was missing MY music library.

Then Google comes out with what I believe is their most selfless and philanthropic use of their gigantic servers. Over the last two weeks (yeah, it took that long which was lame, but c’mon, it’s a once-and-done process) I’ve been able to upload nearly 100GB of music. I’m sure it gets compressed heftily, but as far as streaming compressed music goes Google Music sounds pretty darn good. Imagine if every user uploaded a similarly large music library. That’s a lot of space Google is giving out for free. Sure sites of theirs like YouTube will surely always top Music’s disk-space needs, but it’s covered in intrusive ads. None of those on Music…yet at least.

Sites like Mashable have come out and said they’re not really excited about Music and think it leaves a lot to be desired…but what the fuck do you want from a FREE service? They cite things like the inability to purchase music from the site like you can on Amazon’s comparable service, and you surely will be able to from Apple’s forthcoming iCloud. But you know what you CAN do? Go to those other sites (that would charge you long before Google would to store the same amount of music), buy the songs you want, and upload them to Google. Now was that too difficult? And the lack of offline caching? How often are you not connected to the internet and really itching to hear that one song? Yeah, never. Mashable, get off your high horse.

Anyway, now I have my whole music library accessible from my work computer and my home computer without an external hard drive tethered to it. That is awesome right now.

github

This is mysteriously awesome. I can’t figure out why it’s useful to me, so that’s why it’s a bit of a mystery that I’m so infatuated with it right now. Maybe I like it so much because it’s the only “social network” that I’ve signed up for that requires you to enter terminal-style commands to set it up and create updates. That’s badass. [Side note: working with terminal commands is pseudo-awesome right now. I’m really excited when I type in a totally geeky command to a black and white window with mono type font and see shit happen.] Their entire site forces you to use https. It’s secure, and they flaunt it. Are you listening, Facebook?

If you care to follow me (and improve my code, I guess. Is that the point of the site? I really don’t know…what is it good for?!?), check my shiznit out at https://github.com/kohnmd. It is awesome.

being engaged

This is romantically awesome because my financé is awesome. I’m so excited to get married!

Broomfield Event Center (1STBANK Center)

• Local Natives opened up the concert, but Ally and I were at a party at her mom’s house a little late and missed them. We weren’t too heartbroken.
• Arcade Fire

Ally’s former babysitter (Rebecca) from nearly 20 years ago posted on Facebook that she had two free suite tickets up for grabs to the concert. Ally tried to get them, but somebody beat her to it. Then she got a message from Rebecca saying that the person that got the tickets couldn’t find a babysitter, and couldn’t accept the tickets. So Ally was next in line. Apparently Rebecca and her husband run a branch of a mortgage company, and they own a suite (like, their company name is written above the door to the suite…that’s how hard they own it) at the Broomfield Event Center so that they can give their clients tickets as gifts. Whenever they don’t have anybody to give them to, they pass them on to friends (or Facebook friends). We got to sit in awesome leather chairs in a suite that smelled like nachos (we didn’t feel comfortable eating their fancy food since it was never offered to us, so we just drank ice water out of the sink in the suite’s minibar/kitchen…yeah).

The concert itself was amazing. Arcade Fire rocked, and played all of their best music. We moved around to behind the stage for then encore. This was the first concert I recorded with the iPhone4, and am impressed with the quality over the 3GS. It’s still shit, so I recommend searching YouTube for a better version.

If you zoom in really close between miles 19 and 20, you’ll see a little jog in the line. Not coincidentally, it’s right next to a ditch. It was dry before I got to it.

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