Watch This Wednesday #33: How Not to Make Bread

Words cannot describe. Enjoy.

FSS 6: Viva Las Vegas!

Sorry to be a day late with this, but I just had a lot of catching up to do yesterday after having spent Fri-Sun in Las Vegas. We took off Friday morning early, Jon, Ben, Ed, and myself in Jon's just-barely-purchased Mazda 6. We made great time, making it to St. George around 11:30 and stopping for lunch at Utah's very own In-N-Out, which was as good as always, except that like everywhere else right now, tomatoes were off the menu. (How is it possible that every tomato is unsafe? Do they all come from the same location? Whats the deal? If I can't have tomatoes on my sandwiches/hamburgers/etc, the terrorists may have already won.)



Anyway, we cruised the rest of the way to Vegas and were able to check in a little early into our room at the Luxor. After relaxing a bit, we hit the pool for an hour or so trying to beat the heat a bit. Later that afternoon we met up with 3 of the 5 girls who were coming as well and walked most of the length of the strip to get to the Venetian where Jon and Ashley were seeing the Blue Man Group. Since we all wanted to spend time with them, we walked up there with them and found a place for dinner -- The Grand Lux Cafe which is run by the same people as The Cheesecake Factory, and was pretty tasty. We had an Asian Nachos appetizer that was really good, and I had a Kentucky "Hot Brown" sandwich that was an open-faced turkey sandwich with bacon and gravy. Once again the lack of tomato was a downer.

After dinner, those of us who weren't going to show wandered around the indoor Venetian Canal while we waited for the other two girls to arrive. Once they got there, we started our trek back down the strip toward our hotels (The girls were staying at the MGM Grand). Along the way we enjoyed the fountains at Bellagio, probably my favorite thing in Las Vegas. We also wandered around inside the New York New York hotel/casino for a bit, looking for a mythical ice cream parlor that seems to have disappeared since the girls were there last.














Finally we ended up back at the MGM Grand and watched some TV in the girls' room for a while until they decided it was time for us to go home.

Saturday morning, we were pretty lazy, eventually ending up at the Luxor brunch buffet around 11:30 or so. Good food, but maybe a bit on the pricey side. After that, we wandered around the Luxor and Mandalay Bay, flirting with the notion of checking out the Shark Reef at Mandalay, but deciding against it. We took a tram over to Excalibur where the guys bought our tickets for the "Tournament of Kings" dinner theater show there for later that night. Then we walked over to New York New York because some people wanted to ride the rollercoaster there. I was still feeling pretty stuffed from buffet brunch and wasn't really in the mood to ride a rollercoaster, but was happy to tag along.

Before we made it to the ride, though, we stopped in the arcade and played a few games (Dragon's Lair, anyone?). Once we got to the rollercoaster, there wasn't enough group enthusiasm for it to convince anyone to actually pay the $15 it cost. At this point, Jon had a genius idea that we ought to go see a movie. And it was a great idea. We got to spend a couple hours out of the heat, and it only cost $7.50 at the matinee price. We saw the new Incredible Hulk movie, and I found it fairly enjoyable. No real complaints. And given that I fell asleep every time I tried to watch the first one, I guess thats an improvement.



After the movie, it was time for the guys and girls to part ways (they were going to see Phantom of the Opera) and we headed to Excalibur for our dinner show. At the show, each section of seats was assigned to a different "country" and its corresponding "king" to cheer for in the competitions. We were in the Ireland section and our king pretty much sucked at everything he did. He lost every single competition he competed at. At one point he did have a pretty cool hand-to-hand combat scene with another king, unleashing a sweet ninja kick. But then later the opposing king pulled off a sweet rope swing move that was just too much for Ireland to handle. Overall it was a fun show, and the food was decent (although the choice of drinks was just water, Pepsi, or Diet Pepsi), albeit a tad greasy for eating without utensils.







After the show, we went back to our room and chilled until the girls were done with their show, and then we drove over to the MGM and then they followed us over to downtown Vegas to the Fremont Street Experience, basically a four block section that has a huge LCD ceiling over it, and its lined with lots of cheap-looking casinos and reeks of cigar smoke. There was a cover band playing a lot of fun songs, and we saw some guys ride around in one of those motorcycle-sphere-of-death things. After seeing two of the on-the-hour shows on the LCD ceiling, we made our way back to our cars and headed back to the hotel. The girls wanted to watch a movie or something somewhere, so I suggested we do it at our room, because I just wanted to go to bed, which I did.






Sunday, we slept in again, and filled our daily quota for nourishment at the Bellagio's brunch buffet. A little better food than the Luxor (e.g. prime rib) but our server was pretty slow with the drinks, and the hour long wait to get in was kind of annoying.



Anyway, after that we drove over to MGM again to meet up with the girls one last time and say good-bye. Well for one of them to say good-bye to one of us (not me). And once that was done, we were ready to hit the road. We made good time getting back to Salt Lake, stopping for gas in St. George, and for a quick potty break in Nephi. I didn't even need to eat again until Monday morning.

More photos from the trip can be found here.

Watch This Wednesday #32: Alan and Jerome...Thats Us!

With the NBA Finals in full swing, it seems like an appropriate time to bust out these old school Fox Sports NBA commercials with two white guys shopped in. Good times.

I'm still gonna punish ya--Unn!--punish ya!


Knickerbocker Please!


Watch my Kobe Bryant, no-look-confusion-maker


Alan and Jerome...Thats Us!

FSS 5: A fairly low-key weekend

Hello again,

I'm cranking this post out while waiting for a query to finish running. Just trying to polish up some data for a meeting I have next Monday, quite possibly to get my committee to sign off on everything for the last part of my dissertation. I'd still need to write it of course, but at least I'd now for sure what they expect me to write.

Anyhow, this last weekend felt pretty low key. Friday night a friend from the ward invited us over to his parents' house to swim. In the process of inviting people to join in the fun, I got a counter-offer of a concert and movie from a girl that I'd met last week and was interested in getting to know better. Since I'd already invited a bunch of people to come swim, I would have felt bad not going to swim at all (plus swimming sounded fun), so I made a compromise and agreed to meet up with her and her friends for a late movie after they were done at the concert. So I went swimming and it was fun. We played beachball volleyball in the pool and there was a lot of fun people there. Then it was off to the movie. These girls had chosen to see "You Don't Mess with the Zohan", which from the previews I expected to be pretty silly but maybe funny nonetheless. Sadly, it was pretty silly, and at times funny nonetheless, but mostly the movie was way too raunchy and crass to be enjoyable. I wouldn't recommend seeing it, even if you've enjoyed other Adam Sandler movies. Just too much of the raunchiness in this one.

Saturday, the original plan had been to go boating, but given the cool weather, and the high cost of gas these days, those in charge decided it might be better to wait for a more enjoyable day. I was alright with that, and took advantage of the day to clean up the house a little bit as we were having the ward over for breakfast on Sunday morning. That took up only a little bit of my morning and then I quickly proceeded to run out of things to do. After a day full of odds and ends, in the evening I went to dinner at Red Robin with a group consisting of mostly strangers, but it was alright. After that I got a call from another friend and we ended up driving out to Draper to check out a birthday party for a girl he knew. Again, kind of ho-hum...there were about 20 people there sitting around a firepit getting smoky.

Sunday morning we had the ward fellowshipping committee come over to cook our monthly ward breakfast. I was a little nervous about having enough places to sit for everyone, but it didn't really seem to be a problem in the end. I had my regular church meetings, and spent the late afternoon watching USA-Argentina play to a 0-0 tie, which has to be considered a big coup for America. Team USA's goalie made some great stops in the first half and really saved the game for us. After the game I headed to ward prayer, and then went to a friend's house to watch a movie, "Live Free or Die Hard" which I hadn't seen since seeing it in the dollar movies a year ago. I have to say I enjoyed it again.

Now that I've got this new template, I probably should work on getting my camera out again. Luckily, I'm headed to Vegas this coming weekend with some friends, so that ought to be a good excuse for some photography.

Three Years of The Big Digital

Hard to believe, but I've been blogging for 3 years now. 2 years ago I celebrated the one year anniversary of the blog, but last year, the day came and went without notice. If you want some stats, here you go:

Since I started blogging, I've published 302 posts (303 counting this one). I didn't have any kind of visitor tracking for the first 8 months or so, but in the 28 months since I started tracking there have been 41,613 visits to the site, and 61,186 page views. Early this year, I peaked with 4,722 visits to the site in the month of April.

Nearly all of the visits come from referrals from Google Images searches, especially for McDonalds characters, but also for album cover art for Garth Brook's The Hits, Counting Crows' August and Everything After, and Mana's Suenos Liquidos. There are also a few people who I'll call regulars, even though I don't know who they are. I just see their locations show up repeatedly in the visit log. I sometimes wonder if they are people I know or not, but mostly I just think of them as their location and usual time of the day, as in, "oh, there's Franklin Covey's daily visit."

As far as I can tell from Google Reader there are 9 people besides myself who subscribe to the feed of my blog in Google Reader. I just changed the blog template yesterday for the very first time in 3 years, and the only change was to make it fill up the width of the screen which I've wanted to do for some time, but wasn't sure how to do and keep the same color scheme.

As far as the blog goes after 3 years, I would have to say that I enjoy blogging. Having some structure helps me do it more regularly, so I tend to pick things that I want to write about and then do recurring weekly features about those things. I've cycled through a few lists and lately have settled in pretty good to blogging on Mondays about my weekend, and then on Wednesday finding a video to share, and then just whatever else comes to mind. Its nice for me to have somewhere to just type up my thoughts, and since people comment pretty rarely, it mostly just feels like I'm typing them for myself, which is fine. Its always kind of exciting when someone does comment though, so feel free to post a comment. I promise its really easy, and you don't have to set up an account or anything.

In the time I've been blogging, I've finished 3 years of graduate school, and really hope to be graduating in the next 3 months or so, and find a job, and I'll also be turning 30 in the next few months as well, so I may have to change the description of the blog soon. (Can I count 30 as part of the late 20s? I've been counting everything else as mid-20s) I've been on numerous dates, and even briefly seen the relationship threat level meter teeter around orange for a week or two. :) I've had lots of great experiences in my singles ward, serving in two EQ presidencies, and a year as our ward executive secretary. I've lived in 3 different apartments. I've acquired two new nieces, and seen lots of people I know pick up blogging, although some are more faithful than others. And while I've always been a pretty terrible journal writer, and while most of my blog posts aren't really of that nature either, I at least am glad to have some collected thoughts about the trips I've been on, and other random things that I've experienced.

I think the saddest thing about the blog is that I can no longer find the watch style that the blog was named after. I've been making do with an Armitron that I picked up at Walmart that is functional, but not nearly as enjoyable as the original Big Digital.

More Meta

I'm playing around with my template today. I figured it was finally time I got something that would stretch to fill the width of the window that its viewed in. No more 400 pixel limits on the width of photos and videos. Unfortunately, there was no stretch template with the same color scheme I had before, so I'm working with the colors to get it back looking the way it did before. Bear with me until I get that worked out.

Watch This Wednesday #31: Get some rest Pam. You look tired

I definitely would not say that I am Jason Bourne's biggest fan. Yes, I've seen all of his movies and probably like the last one as well as any of them, but I don't own any of the DVDs or anything thing like that. However, one thing I do like about him is his knack for making phone calls from a place where he can see the people he is talking to. My favorite instance of this comes at the end of the Bourne Supremacy when he's talking to Pamela Landy, and then at the very end of their conversation he says, "Get some rest Pam. You look tired." and then the Bourne theme music kicks in. If there was a way I could get my phone to play that song at the end of all my phone calls, I'd end every call that way. "Get some rest , you look tired." and then have that music kick in. I think that would be awesome.

Anyway, for this week's clip, I've included the only decent clip I could find that includes this part of the movie. Its actually a clip comparing what is supposedly the same phone call from the end of the Bourne Supremacy and near the end of the Bourne Ultimatum and nitpicking the differences. Anyway, if you skip to the 1:50 point you can see the part I'm talking about.

A new friend on the sidebar

Metablogging: I just added a sidebar widget showing the most recent of my "shared items" from my Google Reader feeds. They're just articles or other blog posts or whatever that I liked enough to share with the generic public. If you aren't familiar with the concept of Feed Readers, let me know and I'll set you straight.

FSS 4 featuring BBQs, Drive-Ins, and Other Sundry Events

This last weekend began with an excursion to my hometown of Grantsville for a BBQ with some high school friends. Back in March, we had set some parameters for food assignments based on performance in an NCAA basketball tournament prediction pool. As my picks went horribly awry I was tasked with providing the meat for this BBQ. As such, I would have felt a little bad begging out of the BBQ, even though at times its not the most fun hanging out with a bunch of married people and their children. Anyway, it turned out to be a nice evening and I also spent some time chatting with my parents and siblings at the end of the night. After returning to Salt Lake I ended up swinging by a friend's house to watch a couple episodes of Flight of the Conchords on DVD, and then enjoying a relaxing soak in his hot tub.

Friday's late night was followed by an early-starting Saturday. We had a stake service project at 9, and our ward was meeting up at 8:30 to car pool over to the location. We ended up at a place called Bend-in-the-River along the Jordan River parkway pulling weeds for the most part. They split the large group into smaller groups and my group ended up pulling rye grass from around some rose bushes. Saturday afternoon was used up in resting, grocery shopping, and printing some home teaching assignments at the church.

Saturday night marked my first trip to the Redwood Drive-in of this calendar year. Approximately fifteen of us gathered at my house and then we headed over to see Prince Caspian, which I found to be passably entertaining. It had been long enough since I read the book that I really wasn't sure what was going to happen for most of the movie. The second feature of the traditional drive-in double feature was the Patrick Dempsey-helmed "Made of Honor" which from the trailers I'd seen appeared to be some kind of "My Best Friend's Wedding" retread, and as such I figured I'd call it a night and check out early. Most of our group was of a like mind.

Sunday morning and afternoon were filled with my usual meetings, and then in the evening I was pretty lazy. I finished the night off with ward prayer at Robin's, where I met some cool new girls in the ward, and then headed to Jason's and ended up watching the Bourne Ultimatum, a fitting follow-up to last week's Bourne Supremacy.

A little too ironic...and yeah I really do think

Had a random thought in the shower this morning...if liberals are so sold on evolution, isn't it a little ironic that they are the ones most in favor of government intervention/regulation/etc? Evolution seems like the biological equivalent of a free market, or I guess maybe that's natural selection I'm talking about, but still. How do the United Steelworkers feel about that? Was Mother Nature passing out foodstamps to the dinosaurs? I'm sure there are some subtleties that I am missing (I guess believing in evolution doesn't necessarily make you a proponent of it), but on the surface it was an interesting thought.

Watch This Wednesday #30: Even Stephven

Today, I bring you another clip from Comedy Central, this time from an old recurring segment on The Daily Show called Even Stephven, featuring Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell making a mockery of political debate television. There are several more of these if you go to Comedy Central and dig around, but this is the one that I remember best.

FSS 3: Lots of stuff going on

This past weekend was full of stuff, and yet somehow I still managed to feel lazy. Friday night I saw the new Indiana Jones movie, and while I've since read negative reviews that I can understand and somewhat agree with, I did still have an enjoyable time watching it, so I feel like 4 stars (out of 5) is fair given my experience. I probably won't go see it again, but it was still worth seeing. I went with a friend, and it was a nice evening.

Saturday I was mostly lazy during the day, but did make a jaunt over to Wal-Mart to have a key made for our new roommate, who then proceeded to call me and back out of moving in with us. :( We've (and by "We've", I mean "I've", as my roommates haven't done anything to look that I can tell) been trying for the last two months to find someone to rent out our master bedroom to, but have not had much luck in finding people, despite a lot of people wanting to come look at it. I would think that if they had a problem with the price they wouldn't even come look, but that doesn't seem to be the case. If we don't find someone before the end of June I'm going to start thinking hard about moving somewhere else.

Saturday night I went with a group of friends over to the U of U institute for a BBQ/Dance/Drive-in, where the BBQ consisted of hot dogs only, along with generic chips and pretzels. And I managed to spill catchup on my shirt within the first 20 minutes. Luckily I had a sweatshirt with me and was able to wear that over. We hung out for a couple hours and split about the time the movies were starting up, and headed back to my place where we enjoyed some Brian Regan on DVD.

Sunday was fairly full with church stuff, and hunting for roommates, and then Sunday night a large group was gathered at my first counselor's house for movies and fun. The end of the evening featured a fairly awkward situation involving myself and two girls, one of whom said, "Oh, I forgot something in the house", and the other of whom said moments later "I'm thinking you need to take me out either this Saturday or next. Which works best for you?" The whole story along with some other comments on dating probably deserves its own post, but for now suffice it to say that I felt put on the spot and somewhat manipulated into an uncomfortable situation. Also hearing girls complain that "guys need to date more" is starting to get pretty old for a variety of reasons.

Yesterday was Memorial Day and after a lazy start to things I headed out to my parents' house for the middle of the day where we played cards and Phase 10 Dice, and had BBQed chicken for dinner. I made back to SLC in time to catch up with some friends for dessert at Chili's and some Mario Kart Wii to bring the long weekend to a close.

Quick question for those of you who read this far: Are you enjoying these updates? If so, take the time to make a quick comment and say so.

Watch This Wednesday #29: Pre-Taped Call-in Show

Those of you who are familiar with Arrested Development are probably well aware of the comedic genius that is David Cross. If you aren't, and I know that the show can be a little off-color sometimes, here's a great clip from the Mr. Show show that David used to be on. In it, he's the host of a TV call-in show that is taped a week in advance. Yes, it does seem a little complicated, and as you'll see the host is really having a rough go of things. Make sure to stick around til the end, where the comedy goes to another level.



Upon rewatching this, I really have to say I love the old man who just sits there through the whole thing, as well as watching the transformation of the host from the first show to the current show.

The Return of Fin de Semana Stories

Remember when I was going to try to give more updates about what I'd been up to? Well its never too late for a second chance, right?

This past weekend was a pretty fun one. Friday night I went to Cafe Rio with about 10 people from my ward, and then after that we headed over to another friend's to watch Game 6 of the Jazz-Lakers series. The Jazz trailed by a lot for most of the game which made it pretty hard to watch. Then at the very end, they made a tremendous comeback only to fall 3 points short, with two chances to tie in the last 5 seconds. And thus ends the Jazz's season. I feel like it was a successful season, although if our goal is to win a championship, we need to make sure we've got all the pieces in place that we need. Right now, my hope is that they can hang on and stay healthy and outlive all the other current Western Conference contenders, but that seems like a bad way to try to win.

Anyway, Saturday I spent catching up on some errands that I needed to run (grocery shopping, paying bills, etc.) and then had a blind date Saturday night. It felt like a pretty typical blind date -- nothing to write home about, but thankfully not too painful. Maybe I should have a better attitude, but I rarely go into those things with high hopes. Not entirely sure why, but it does seem like if I have a hard enough time finding girls that like enough to want to pursue a relationship with, choosing from girls that I know, the probability of someone else (who in this case, doesn't hardly know me either) picking someone for me to go out with that I'm going to end up being interested is pretty low. I still feel like I went in with an open mind, but lets just say my expectations are pretty low on those things.

Finally, Sunday was pretty full of church stuff: ward breakfast, EQ Presidency meeting, church, three home teaching appointments, and ward prayer. In between some of those things, we managed to finally have someone come over and look at our room for rent and decide that they were interested in moving in. I'm not counting my chickens until they at least move some stuff in, and maybe not until I see that first rent check, but it sounds like a pretty done deal. So that was a pretty good thing to have happen. Finally, I finished off the night watching "School of Rock" with some friends, and got to point out the Spider move to some people who had never noticed it before.

Speaking of optimism, I'm tagging this post with "weekly feature", so we'll see if I can't keep it up.

Slowly but surely...

Last night my department had a graduation dinner to honor people who've recently graduated or who will be graduating soon. I was invited to attend. Thats right, I'm in the "graduating soon" category. How soon that will be depends mainly on how much I can buckle down of the next few months and do the writing that I have left to do for my dissertation, but I guess at this point, the fact that I will someday graduate with my PhD in Informatics is pretty much an inevitability. And that thought is still pretty foreign to me. I've been in school pretty much my whole life (not counting the mission), and the thought of finally leaving school behind and getting a "real" job actually feels quite welcome to me.

Anyway, the dinner last night was nice, despite my not feeling like a graduate at this point. My advisor was out of town, but another member of my committee had some nice things to say about me. That was nice, because its rare that I have much interaction with any of the faculty these days, and I don't get much feedback as far as what people think of me and how I'm doing with my project.

My current goal is to finish writing by July, so I can defend in August. I guess we'll see how that shakes out, but I figure its better to shoot for August and miss than to shoot for September and miss, right?

For all your hard-hitting news...

Browsing through the D-News tonight and read an article about David Archuleta and his dad being banned from being backstage or something or other. Anyway the second half of the article was about his visit to Utah, and had this gem of a paragraph:

The singer and his family declined to be interviewed at the event, but David Archuleta did speak with the Salt Lake City Fox affiliate, KSTU-TV. "Wow," he exclaimed as he viewed the cheerleading squad outside his stretch limousine.

Thats all the information they give about his "speaking" with Fox News. Glad they included that.

I don't know if this means if I'm doing better or worse

So...in the past week, I've had 4 separate people want to set me up with someone they know, and its happened at least 6 times in the past month. This is a huge surge in the frequency of this happening to me. Generally I don't get super excited over the idea of being set up, and I sometimes feel like it means people think I need some help (maybe I do need some help), but on the other hand, I guess I should be happy that people either care about me enough to be interested, or think highly enough of me to consider me for someone else that they are worried about, right?

Watch This Wednesday #28: More Mockery...this time for the Guammy Bears

I know I said I'm busy, but thankfully, my good friend CJ has had the foresight to recommend a video for you all to watch, featuring Stephen Colbert interviewing the congresswoman from Guam.



P.S. Iron Man gets two thumbs up from me! Feels like summer time at the theater.

Old Book, Old Book #5: Bringing Down the House

While I'm still working on GEB (hence "Old Book, Old Book"), and trust me its something that deserves a good, long read, I recently took a break for some lighter reading, and read the book "Bringing Down the House", the book that served as an inspiration for the recent film "21". Generally when I see a movie that is "based on" or "inspired by" true events, I like to find out the true story behind it. Often I find the true story to be more interesting, sometimes for the mere fact that it actually happened, but usually I just enjoy it better for other qualities.

I enjoyed "21" and I cruised through "Bringing Down the House" in a matter of days, so if you enjoyed the movie, or even if you didn't see it, I'd recommend checking out the book. It does have some adult language, so if thats a problem for you, you might want to skip it.

Busy Times

To the few of you who regularly check my blog and aren't just directed here by Google image searches for cartoon stuff or old McDonalds Characters, I just wanted to post a quick update. I've been kind of all over the place the last couple weeks. I went to Wisconsin for a job interview for half of last week. The first half of this week I went fishing/camping with my dad and older brother (and caught a fish with a flyrod for the first time), and today and tomorrow we'll be enjoying a family vacation to...a little place called Salt Lake City. Then next week I really need to get back to hitting the whole "trying to graduate this summer" thing pretty hard. So I probably won't be blogging tons, but maybe I'll just post a few shorter update-type blogs like this one.