It does scare me a bit that we’re starting to look back at things in the 90′s – the era of my teenage years – with the same patronization as we are with the 80′s. Does this mean I’m getting old?

I’ll try to describe it, but you really just need to go see if for your self: Imagine having a listening party. You sit in a circle with 4 other people and go around and each pick out the next song you’re going to play. Meanwhile, there could be a room full of people listening to the music you’re picking out. If they like the song you get brownie points, if they hate the song it gets skipped. That’s essentially Turntable.fm. In an era where people walk around with ear buds, this is a great way to socially experience music and discover new songs.

You can simply go to listen and vote, and for many it’s a human-Pandora streaming experience.  Different rooms have different genres, but the ones I’ve loved the best are the “anything as long as it’s good” rooms. Secretly I think many of believe ourselves to be music connoisseurs and experience joy in sharing new music with friends. There’s also joy in invoking great music memories by playing a classic song. At the same time you don’t want to disrupt the musical flow.  I don’t like listening to the radio, but I still desire the discovery of new bands and songs – this site gives a great social element to doing just that.

Simply said: you need to try out this site. Come join me! If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you’ll see when I’m logged in and we can DJ together! Fair warning though: you’re going to lose hours and nights to this site!

I would love some help from my well-traveled friends! In less than two weeks Bethany and I will be boarding a plane to fly across the pond and journey to Ireland for 12 days.  I am so excited in many different ways, particularly because this is the first time I’ve been out of the country longer than a day. 

We have been planning this trip for nearly two years in terms of budgeting and logistics, and while we’ve tried to do our due-diligence with research I’m we’re still afraid that we might miss something that we’ll regret not seeing.

This is where I need help from my well-traveled or Irish friends: What should we do in Ireland? We want to make sure when we come back and tell people about our trip, people can’t say “I can’t believe you went to Ireland and didn’t go there or see that!”

We’re going to be flying into Shannon and staying slightly north west of there.  We do plan on going to Dublin for a few days, but will be mainly based along the western side of the country.

I would love for you to share me any advice you may have, either in the comments here or on Facebook. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with me!

It’s crazy looking over the 660+ posts and realizing just how much things have changed.  When I started blogging, I hadn’t yet met my wife, and I wasn’t drumming with any bands at the time, and I was living in my apartment close to campus.  Now I have been married to my lovely wife for nearly two years, am doing two different bands and various music projects and we live in our beautiful house with Logan our Kitteh.  At the same time, I’m grateful for things that have stayed the same throughout my blogging tenure: I have been employed in a great job and am fortunate to have my health (also weighing less than when I first started blogging is never a bad thing either).

Thank you for continually coming back when I seldom post and for offering your support and your comments.  I hope that I enter into the 7th year of blogging, that I do a better job of keeping this updated.  If you have any ideas for topics, feel free to offer them! I’m just happy to ramble!

Seriously, doesn’t it look like the drummer is wearing woman’s clothing?  Also, I am forever disappointed that the flute/marimba solo is really a synthesizer, and they featured it like it was impressive or something.

The test drive experience has been an interesting one. The environmentalist winds have blown into the auto industry, pushing fuel efficiency standards.  Unfortunately the result of that is that 4-cylinder engines rule the crossover class of cars, bringing fuel efficiency at the cost of power.  However, as Coloradoans know, the terrain of the Rocky Mountains isn’t very friendly for 4-cylinder engines.  If you’ve driven in Estes Park in a 4-cylinder car full of people – you know what I mean by being underpowered.  With our V-6 requirement, we’ve apparently limited our select – this is why we went 8 places and only got to drive 3 cars.  There was no shortage of 4-cylinders for us today, one of them which we drove.  I’ll admit that there was decent acceleration when I slammed the gas, but it still felt underpowered, especially when you consider going up a mountainous hill.

We don’t seem to be the only Coloradoans who think this, because the dealers for these cars that have V6 engines – they don’t have any of these cars in stock – yet they have plenty of 4-cylinders of that model on hand.

One pleasant surprise (at least or us): the salesmen weren’t as pushy as I remember from 6 years ago.  I’m not sure if it’s because they’ve unfortunately been beat down in this economy that they’re now changing their tactics, but it was nice to not have to fight our way out of the dealership. There were a few Jedi Mind Tricks thrown at us, but they were more comical than stressful.

We think we have it narrowed down, but we’re going to let some time and another test drive pass before we draw a conclusion.

This weekend Bethany and I flew out to Minnesota to watch our friends Joel & Katie get married, and while we were here on Sunday we tried to kill some time before our flight by going to the Mall of America.  We originally planned to spend a few hours at the Mall, but given our disappointment in the attraction (which probably warrants a future blog post), we cut our trip short by 1.5 hours.  At that point we were trying to figure out how we could kill another 90 minutes, while feeling fatigued and wiped out.  At that point all we really wanted to do is sleep, but it’s not like you can go get a (reputable) hotel room for that amount of time, and there aren’t a lot of places where it’s acceptable to sleep in public.  The airport is one of those few places, but it’s an awkward and uncomfortable experience.

The light bulb came on in my head: Why doesn’t someone start a business where one could essentially get a cot or a simple bed for a nap – at the airport?  Imagine that on the terminal there is a room you could go into which houses many cubicle-like partitions.  Each partition has two things in it: a bed/cot and an alarm clock (or a phone for wake up calls).  You check in at the front desk, reserve your partition for a period of time and catch some Zzz’s before your next flight. All of the sudden these painful layovers aren’t as bad, you have an answer for those awkward few hours between being hotel-less and waiting to get on the plane. Bethany even came up with a name for the business: Nap on the Fly

Some questions arise from this business model – but fear not, I have (half) thought this through:

Why wouldn’t this be a cheap hotel?

Because you have a set time limit – you can’t rent a cot longer than 4 hours.  We all know that in reality any nap over 2 hours takes you well best the groggy stage where your next night of sleep is pretty much ruined.  If you have a layover that’s more like 8 hours, then you may be better justified in getting a hotel room anyway.  This isn’t meant for those airline snafus that keep you in a city over-night, so you’re not really competing or replacing hotels.  Also the rooms are incredibly spartan: no TV, no furniture, and the lights are incredibly dim – because after all you should be napping.

What about your bags? Aren’t you supposed to keep an eye on them?

Yes you’re right, and the way you can do that is by supplying the partitions with a locker-like case where you can store your bag next to you while you sleep.  It’s one of those cases where a key locks it and you can pull the key out and pull it in your pocket.  Now your luggage is in a safe place.  Yes there is not an additional component in your partition, but we’ll draw the line at these three things and allow nothing more.

What about couples and families traveling? Will you have rooms for them.

Sorry, but these are individual napping quarters.  Each cot is a twin size, and each person must have their own partition.  This will also ensure that people are not doing other things besides sleeping in these cots.  I know this leaves families out of luck, but maybe the next expansion of this business will include a solution for families.

This sounds great, but how much will all of this cost?

I don’t’ think it would be too unreasonable to charge $10 for the first hour, since there are inherent costs with changing/washing sheets.  Killing an hour with $10 is cheaper than spending that same hour in an airport bar somewhere.  It would be up for debate how much the additional hours are, maybe after the 2nd hour the price drops by half.  $30 for 4 hours of quiet rest should be decent trade off, especially for business travelers.

What other holes would you poke into my idea? Feel free to ask any questions you’d like to fully bake my idea.  Also if you like this idea enough to run with it, go for it – I just ask for a modest founder’s fee

June turned out to be quite a busy month. We started out in Boston and had a fun time hanging out with my sister and exploring the city. I especially loved Fenway Park.

Also in June we celebrated our first wedding anniversary by playing golf in Estes Park, wine tasting, then exploring Boulder.

I spent last weekend in Crested Butte celebrating my good friend Joel’s Bachelor party. We had a fun few days playing golf, duckying, playing cards and drinking beer.

So June was eventful, even though my blog has nothing to show for it. I promise to get back into the blogging rhythm and cranking out some more posts.

Apparently there were a lot of big soccer stars in this video, but all I could say was "Hey that’s Kobe Bryant & Homer Simpson!". Go check out this write up though to get all the details on this awesome video.

Update: Looks like Vimeo somehow took down the video, so I found the replacement on YouTube.

Wow, now I’ve seen it all. I think I’m busy on the 16th.

Watch out as you may now see some posts from my Droid!

I’m not going to lie: at the start of the month, it was a real chore to start blogging.  There were nights when I sitting in bed next to my sleeping wife as I was typing away, anxious to hit “Post” before 12am.  It was about the end of week 2 I finally caught my second wind and it became easier to block out time to blog.

Not all of my posts were must-reads, but some of my favorite ones over the month included:

• A rant against those who sell their tickets to opposing fans
• Comparing how sports screw up their playoff scheduling
• A random-thought post heading into the weekend
• .and more thoughts on baseball scheduling screw-ups
• Sharing stories and images from Austin
• A reaction to the “3 unrelated” law being revisited in Fort Collins
• A statistical listing of my favorite artists

I’ve really appreciated the experience, and hope that this will continue to ignite that blogging spark that I found when I started this blog back in May of 2005. Thank you for all of your support be reading my blog, and I hope that this was as fun for you as it was for me.