In honor of an extended weekend on the slopes starting tomorrow, I give you my Obamicon. This is an image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster. I’ve titled it “SLOPE” as it is a picture of me out snowboarding from last season. I think it turned out pretty cool despite the lack of much detail. I actually created two separate designs, one with the unedited photo (seen below) and another with the background removed as the directions indicated might produce better results. Follow this link to see the other image. Take your picture with a webcam or upload a photo, choose your own message, and submit to the gallery. I’d love to see what you come up with.

It has come to my attention that there has recently been a problem with my site feed. Apparently, it was not working in Opera, Safari, or in Bloglines. I’m pretty sure this boils down to a wordpress plugin that I installed not too long ago that I hoped would improve performance, WP Super Cache. This plugin creates static html pages for viewing instead of the more resource heavy dynamic php pages. I’ve been fairly impressed by the performance benefit so far, has anyone else noticed faster loading pages? But I guess this plugin was destroying the feed. To fix this, I added “feed” to the list of Rejected URIs in the WP Super Cache settings, and deleted all of the existing cache files. I know this fixed the Opera and Safari issues and I’m hoping it will resolve Bloglines as well.

I was supposed to have jury duty this morning, however my number was not in the range of those picked to report. I’ve found that most people are relieved to hear this news, but I actually wanted to go and see what it’s all about. I’ve yet to report for jury duty in any city I’ve lived, even after receiving the notice at least twice. How can you argue against a day off from work, yet still getting paid?

Our weekend events have slowed down recently now that we are fully into the ski/snowboarding season. I think we were in bed by eleven Friday night, so we could get up early Saturday and drive up to Breckenridge for yet another day on the slopes. This was our fifth day out so far this season, and with some overnight stays coming up shortly, that number will double very soon.

The past two weekends we met up with Ilona, who is married to a long-time friend of mine on OARfans.com. Her parents have a condo in Breck, and she enjoyed something like day days in a row on the slopes. It was nice to meet up with her since she knew where all of the good snow was, even though it had been a couple of days since some of the bigger storms had hit.

This coming weekend my brother and a group of his friends will be coming to town and we’ll be spending the majority of the weekend up in Breck. Should be a great time!

I installed a home security system into the house last night from SimpliSafe. We had always tossed around the idea of having a system installed, but were put off from the high costs associated with companies like ADT or Brinks. When I first read about SimpliSafe, I was immediately impressed not only with the low cost, but also with the ease of customizing/expanding the system and the simple look of the system. The setup couldn’t have been easier with the great setup guide on the computer and the wonderfully wireless components already equipped with sticky tape. And any time I’ve run into a question or issue, their customer service has been top notch responding almost immediately and doing everything possible to please. I am highly impressed with everything so far and I would definitely recommend this system.

Another day with some downtime for the website. My apologies for this one, as I cannot blame it on Comcast or any outside source. My hard drive filled up completely on my server. I had absolutely no space remaining. I’ve been looking into buying some more drives or possibly getting a NAS setup. I’m still reading up on this though, so feel free to add suggestions. For now, I need to remember to move some files that don’t need to be on the server off of it and onto my other PC. I hope I can get to that tomorrow.

Earlier this week was my official five year anniversary for my current job. The time has flown by! I was able to select a gift for my years of service from a website catalog and chose a globe. I figured I would use it more than some fancy pen. Now I just need to find a good spot for it in the home office. As far as work goes, things are continuing to improve after a recent shift of our organizational groupings. At first I was not very excited to be back to quality assurance testing full time, but I am slowly taking on more advanced testing tasks. Hopefully things continue to improve.

So I bit the bullet and joined the DU rec center that Kim joined over a month ago. We’ve really been getting into racquetball and are playing two or three times a week. We have definitely improved since the first few times, and can now play a regular match (best of three) in under an hour. We got some rackets, goggles, balls, and gloves as a Christmas gift that have been seeing a lot of use already. I’m still the overall leader, but Kim has been known to win a match or two from time to time.

I have my first hockey game in quite some time tonight. I’m hoping that I remember how to skate.

Saturday was mostly dedicated to my most recent hobby, homebrewing. My parents sent a starting homebrew equipment kit from Midwest Supplies to me as a Christmas gift. In addition to everything I needed to start brewing, it also included the needed ingredients for my very first batch of beer, an amber ale. So I successfully (at least so far) steeped some grains in the large pot, added some malt extract, brought the mix to a boil, added hops to the boil, cooled down the wort, transferred to a fermenting bucket, and added the yeast. I think those were the basic steps I took so far. Oh yeah, lots of sanitizing various equipment as well. I checked on it this morning to find some bubbling in the airlock that sits on top of the fermenter, which is a great sign. Now I must wait for the fermenting to finish, at which time I will attempt bottling.

Happy New Year! Last night we headed downtown to Jackson’s to watch the Cincinnati Bearcats take on Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. For the few UC fans in the house, things started off great with a quick touchdown less than two minutes into the game. Unfortunately it was nothing but Hokie scores after that. Though the final score was 20-7, it was actually much closer than that. The end result boiled down to missed opportunities, including one missed field goal, VT stopping the rush on a fourth and goal, and four interceptions, one of which was in the offensive end zone. Had that one catch gone the other way, it could have been a completely different game. No reason to make excuses though, making their first ever BCS bowl appearance was quite an accomplishment for Cincinnati, and I look forward to the coming years.