How I Spent My 2008 Tax Refund (Part 1 of 2)

Resume Redux
When I was first dabbling in blogging, I put together a post that was a sort of nontraditional resume of sorts. Even though I'm certainly not looking for employment -- I have an awesome job -- I thought it was time to give it a bit of an update. Sure, I can program. And architect a normalized database. I can write W3C compliant HTML and CSS, and create slick effects with jQuery. I can PHP, e-commerce, and content manage with the best of them. Lots of developers can do that. What sets me apart? I'll tell you. I can sleep for as many as 20 hours at a time and as few as 20 minutes. I have in the p

Foursquare Etiquette
I got a little techincal last week when I mentioned Foursquare, but today I want to talk a little more about the social aspects of the service.  I've been using Foursquare while visiting other cities, such as Washington DC and Chicago, since early August.  When using the location sharing service in these other cities I put very little thought put into the "proper etiquette" of checking in to various locations. I checked in everywhere.  Restaurants, coffee shops, supermarkets, gas stations -- even my hotel every time I stopped in. It didn't matter, I was really just enjoying the novelty of the game. Since I was usually only

Tweet My Travel: A Call for Beta Testers
Earlier this year on our cross country roadtrip to Los Angeles, January and I kept friends and family updated on our progress with a custom Google Map. Along the way, whomever of us wasn't driving would fire up the laptop, tether it to our iPhone, and upload pictures to the server in order to update this map of our progress. I'm really glad we took the time to do it, not only because it gave everyone a glimpse into our progress, but it was also great to be able to go back a year later and remember the journey.  It was, however, kind of a pain to pull out the laptop, get it connected to the internet, uplo

Turkey Trot 2009
Everbody's heard of the Couch to 5k program, and I've whipped up a little program of my own called 5k to 5 mile.  Here's the plan: Register for a 5 mile race Make yourself go run it Last month, after I ran my first ever 5k race, I had bold ambitions to keep up the running. I heard about Columbus' Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot and thought it sounded like fun, so I went ahead and signed up.  Unfortunately, this month turned out to be a lot busier than I

Strangers I Love: The Pug Walker
I have no qualms with stealing good ideas from other people. I've been reading a lot more random blogs this month, and I came across this great post from National Blog Posting Month participant Mitch Blum. His submission yesterday was a sort of love letter to a random elderly runner that he noticed in his neighborhood, and I just really liked the idea of writing about some of the random people that I see on a regular basis, know a bit about, but don't really know personally. It's in tha