As I said in my last post, my family and I took an amazing trip down to the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador. It was an awesome time and a once in a lifetime trip. The wildlife and scenery was amazing. Between 5 digital camera, we took over 2500+ pictures, and I have slowly been working on getting them organized, edited and posted online. You can check out our first few days by clicking on the links below.

Galapagos – Day 1&2

Galapagos – Day 3

During my trip, Kate moved down to Nashville to start her 2 year Masters program at Vanderbilt.  It was an event we had not been looking forward to, but now 2 months after the move, it has worked out alright.  We are getting to see each other once ever 2 or 3 weeks and with communication and technology the way it is today, we can talk online and on the phone all day.  The drive to Nashville isn’t half bad (only 6 hours) and we’re looking forward to being a mid-way point for future traveling friends who head south for vacations and whatnot.

I also moved to a new residence once I returned from the trip.  Now I am renting a large house in suburbia with Matt, Newbs and Nick.  So far the setup has worked out really well.  We have tons of room, including a backyard and a basement where we have setup some weight lifting equipment and stuck to a weekly workout program.  It has been a small challenge to get the 4 of us on a chore schedule to keep this huge place in some sort of order, but I think we everything has been going pretty well so far.  I think I mentioned in a previous post that I really wanted to get a dog once I moved to a place with a yard.  Well, after a week or so of debating and discussing the idea with Kate and my parents, I have decided to wait yet another year (until the move to TN) and not get a dog quite yet.  It was a tough choice, but I think I have plenty of other things to keep me occupied and this way Kate and I will raise the dog together.

Even though the combination of work and life has kept me fairly busy, I still have found plenty of time to keep up my video game recreation.  2 weeks back Halo 3 hit stores, and I have been playing it nearly every night.  The game is a ton of fun, and has a lot of different parts to keep you entertained and coming back for more.  I also have been playing the sequal to an old classic – Team Fortress 2.  This is an online PC game that is only multiplayer, but the balance, variety and presentation is top notch and I find myself constantly debating between starting up a match of Halo 3 or TF2.

Finally, wedding planning has not really been taking up much of my time, but I like to thing with everything that Kate has accomplished, I was very much occupied participating in the “yes dear” aspect of our decision making.  I won’t go into great detail, but you can find all our updates and information over at our website that I linked to before.  http://www.timandkateanderson.com.  Moving forward I’m not sure how I plan on splitting time and content between this site and that.  I know I’m going to keep posting my general life updates here, but eventually, once we’re married, we plan on turning T&KA.com over to a combined blog for the two of us.  I’ll probably end up moving all my general posts to that site, but still use this site for my personal interests like gaming, technology etc…

That’s all for now.  I know I promise this almost every post, but I’m sure I’ll write more frequently than once every two months.

About 2 weeks ago, I went with my brother and parents to pick up a new puppy for them. They drove down all the way to Washington Courthouse to get a 1 month old Golden Retriever pup. You can find some pictures of him by clicking on the picture below.

We debated for a while on what his name should be and decided on Cody. My parents wanted something that reminded them of the West (Cody, Wyoming) and also might be related to a soda beverage (our dog before Zac was Fresca – like the drink). So Cody can also be considered Code Red (Mt. Dew). All very vaugue and weakly linked in my opinion, but Cody works. We thought of one name that all of us except my Mom loved. Bauer (or Bower in dog language). I’m considering getting my own dog this fall (if our housing arrangement allows it) and am pretty sure that I will name him Bauer. I’d really like to have my own dog, the only problem being if I got a puppy then I’d have to train him, and that could be difficult since I work all day. If I didn’t get a puppy, I’d be somewhat limited on his/her name. But we’ll see. My Mom is currently remembering how much work raising a puppy (do you raise a puppy?) is, especially when you’re home by yourself all day.

You may have noticed if you clicked on the picture, that it didn’t go to the normal spot. In fact it went to a entirely new area and layout. You may have also noticed, if you’d looked in the past 24 hours, that all my pictures in the photo section are someone limited. This is because my “pro” Flickr account has expired after 1 year and I’m debating still if I want to renew it. The puppy gallery is currently being hosted by google’s picture service. Its a great service especially since it integrates well with Picasa, my windows picture organizer of choice. The only hold back is integration with my site ( I really liked hosting a plugin on my site that connected with Flickr) and the amount of storage. With Flickr, I paid $25 for a years worth of infinite storage and bandwidth. So I’ll be debating over the next few days/week if I want to move or just renew with Flickr. I’ll be sure to post, once I’ve made a decision.

Going to see Spiderman 3 tonight at midnight. I think I’m going more just to keep the inner geek inside me fed more than I am excited for it. Its not that I don’t expect to enjoy it. Thats not it at all. How can I not enjoy the most expensive movie ever made that’s based on comics and guaranteed to feature some badass fight scenes. I just feel like I know what to expect. Plus I hear there is a lot of Peter crying and Kirstin Dunst singing. Not sure what to think about that. It should still be good, but I’m not nearly as excited for this as I am say The Dark Knight (Batman Begins 2).

And while we’re on a superhero kick, Heroes is by far the best show on TV right now. Yes, better than Lost, 24, and Entourage. Every episode for this opening season has been amazing, and there are only 3 left! Even though I’ve been dealing with Heroes and 24 being on at the same time (watching 24 live and DVRing Heroes to watch immediately after), both shows have their season finale on the same day at the same time. UGGG!

The reason I mention this is because I’ve embarked on tagging all my Flickr photos with appropriate tags. Mainly, the people who appear in the pictures. This will allow you to search for pictures with a specific person or persons in them. For example, if you wanted to find pics of Newbs, you can click or search on the tag for “Newbs”. If you wanted to find pics of Mike & Julie you could search for “Mike&Julie“. The whole project is in progress, and I’d estimate I’m about 60% through tagging all my pictures. Often times I come up with new tags to specify what’s going on in the picture or where it was taken, but sometimes tags are limited to 1 or 2 items. I’m not sure which you’ll find easier, tag browsing via flickr or via my photo section, but take your pick. If you have any tag suggestions that’d make browsing or finding photos easier, by all means let me know.

The Dark gray color is perfect to match for a Scarlet and Grey Ohio State driving machine. I’ve debated picking up a buckeye leaf magnet or two to put towards the rear. Kind of give it a Buckeye helmet look. I’m not sure if that’d look too tacky or not. For now I just have my Ohio State Lifetime Alumni sticker in the rear window.

Finally, I’m debating getting a personalized license plate. I’m kind of up in the air on this. On the one hand, I think it’s kind of neat and a good way to make a statement for what you care about. On the other hand, it can be kind of arrogant and nerdy. Plus if you don’t choose something you absolutely love, there is the chance a year or two from now you’ll regret what you chose. Obviously the first choice would be something Ohio State related. If I do end up getting a personalized plate, it’ll probably be an OSU plate. The hard part is in Ohio almost anything you can think of that remotely resembles OSU is already taken. That’s when I was surprised to find one that kind of works that hasn’t been taken yet. What do you think of :

I think it could work. Especially for a license plate, it’s right on the border of being or purpose or not. (by the way if comes 2 weeks from now I try to go register that plate and it’s taken so help me, I will track down every IP that has hit this site and find you!)

Other plates that I saw but are way to geeky to actually have are OMGWTF, YA RLY, AFK BRB, or ALTF4.

We need to reserve NEWBS for when he gets his hot 1984 professor driving Mercedes.

Finally got around to snapping some shots of the new car for you to see. I’m trying something new by embedding a slide show into the post. We’ll see how it works.

I talked a while back about how I was totally into aggregate news feeds and the websites that have taken off due to the use of RSS. Ever since that post I’ve continued to use bloglines as my main choice of RSS reader. That all changed about a week ago when Google updated their reader. Now google.com/reader/ is my prefered method of viewing headlines and news content. Some of the highlights that won me over are the ability for GR to realize a post as read or unread on a post-by-post basis instead of by feed. Also I like Google’s “Staring” and “Sharing” system much better than Bloglines. Now I’ll have an updated list of the 5 most recent stories I thought were interesting enough to include on my site (though I still need to work with the css to make it blend more with the scheme of my site). For a compelte list you can get see the full page here or use my rss feed here. I’m going to try and see if I can somehow work the full page version as an aditional page into my site.

I’ve finally gotten around to posting pictures of both my TV and PC setup on Flickr.  Check out the link below for more shots.

Yes I do realize that 3 screens is a little excessive and uncessary, but from the first time I saw it I knew I had to make my own. Plus the two 17″ screens are used from Ebay so the whole setup really wasn’t that expensive.

I feel as though there were quite a few things that I wanted to post about, but now I forget them. More later I suppose…

We have an insanely powered and deep offense, that, as far as I can see, can only be stopped by injury, and even then to only one or two key players *knock on wood*. Our defense is talented, built, and gaining marked experience each week. I’m still waiting for Laurinaitis jerseys to go on sale. The thing I love best about our team is the attitude. Troy is practically Tressel Jr. in how he handles himself during interviews, and our whole team is calm, cool and focused on the team during every second of play. Each game we recognize where we can get better and never talk about how good we were. The players and coaches leave that to the fans and press. BE HUMBLE!! And it’s working!

I was all set on Sunday morning to write a post about how this is an amazing time to be a Buckeye/Bengal fan, but unfortunately the Bengals had to go and play like crap against the Patriots to produce an L. Oh well, you can’t have it all. I was also set to talk about my first complete season of fantasy baseball, and how I won the league after leading after the entire post all-star break. But another player squeaked by me on the last day to claim First place. So…. needless to say, I’m not in the mood to talk about that.

Bree’s in town this week and my Brother is coming up for the Bowling Green/OSU game this weekend. Here’s the link to pics from tOSU/Penn State game. Our seats are actually pretty decent for being in the South Stands. Hopefully I’ll catch some good touchdown shots as the season continues.

I also love Kate

As all fan’s know by now, OSU’s start was a little lacking, but I was glad that we came out with a 37-7 victory and still plenty to work on for this week. During the first half I knew we would end up with a W, but I really didn’t want the ESPN bottom line to peak anyone’s interest at how we played poorly; which in the end, we didn’t. After some very successful panoramic shots from the Texas game, I decided to try it at The Shoe. I must, there are quite a few sexy ones in there. Click on the sample below for the full gallery (panoramics are at the end).

Also in case it gets missed. I snapped a great shot of Pittman’s touchdown run just as it was developing. Check that one out here:

For those of you that don’t realize, on all of my pictures you can get various sizes, including the original rez, by clicking on the “available sizes” buttons at the bottom of the picture page. Just as an FYI.

Anyway, the rest of the day was spent watching football and every single game gave me great satisfaction. The games I cared about (OhioState, USC and Notre Dame) all turned out the way I wanted. OSU and USC walked away with a dominant win, and Notre Dame got smacked back to suckland where they came from. The rest of the games I really didn’t care who won or lost, and almost all of them came down to the last play to determine the winner. Overall an A+ day of college football. And to top it all off, Sunday the Bengals handled the Browns 34-17.

I’ve made a few small changes to the site that you may or not notice. For one, I’ve upped the security for posting comments. I’d love it if more people posted comments on this site, but so far for every one comment posted there are at least 3 spam comments that I have to manually delete. So now you’ll have to provide a name and email address in order to post. I’ll probably also be installing a plugin that has one of those random word generators for verification. Hopefully this will cut down on the amount of crap that gets posted.

Secondly, I’ve changed the way permalinks are handled. Now instead of every page and article being assigned a number, they’ll be associated with the title of the page. I should have done this a long time ago, but just now have gotten around to realizing my mistake. Shouldn’t really effect much but it’s just a nice esthetic change. All the old links will still work FYI.

Oh, and if you were knew about the new photos section but were still going to the old link, please do tell why? Are there Flickr haters amongst us?

The game itself was amazing. This was my second regular season away game, and it’s always a completely different experience when you’re cheering for the team that is outnumbered 10:1 in fan attendance (even though OSU did an amazing job showing up in numbers). It’s funny; whenever I try to get into an OSU game that I’m not 100% legitimately supposed to be allowed into, I feel like a complete nervous wreck. I’m normally not one to get worked up or overly anxious in situations, but there is something with the amount of desire I have to be in the game combined with the risk of cheating working the student ticket system that just about drives me insane. But once I have the ticket in hand, there is no great feeling (except for a Buckeye victory of course). In case you haven’t noticed, I uploaded my pictures from the game to Flickr. Check them out below.

You may notice in some of the pictures Texas’ monster scoreboard that I mentioned in a previous post. After viewing it in person, I can attest to it’s monstrosity, but they rarely use it fully. Most of the game a large portion of the screen is filled with Ads around the border which make it look about as big as the average video scoreboard (average for a school of Ohio State’s or Texas’ size). But when one image fills the whole thing… Holy Crap!

A final note on the game, something I didn’t see beforehand but wish I did was the never failing douche Matthew McConaughey’s “speech” to the Texas players prior to gameday:

A very good team is coming to our house and wants to steal something that we own . . . a national championship . . . when the University of Texas Longhorns play for the love of his brother lining up next to him, for the pride of giving his personal best every down, for the honor of every grandparent that could AND could not be at the game, the final whistle will blow and we will be victorious . . . the wannabe thieves will be sent home hurting, humbled, and with a respect for our character.

Nice St. Crispen’s Day speech Matt, but I think we went down to your house, took what was ours and left you hurting, humbled and with respect for our character.

This weekend should be a cake game against Cincinnati. I’m anticipating that we’ll keep the score somewhat reasonable (against former Defensive Coordinator Mark Dantonio) and in doing so we’ll probably see a lot of Zwick, Boeckman and C. Wells. But part of me is liking the new offensive aggression that Tressel has found within and wouldn’t doubt it if he tries to make as much of a statement for Smith’s Heisman candidacy as possible. My prediction? 41:10 Hopefully we’ll see a large amount of rushing to speed up the game. There are 4 other HUGE games going on that I’ll rush over to Nick and Newbs right after our Victory Carmen Ohio celebration. Michigan/Notre Dame and LSU/Auburn play right after us and then Tennessee/Florida and USC/Nebraska play at 8:00. It’s going a long full day of glorious HD college football.

• Trailer for The Prestige – the movie I talked about last time. I’m still just as hyped.

• From the Broken Lizzard Guys (Supertroopers) their new movie – Beerfest – looks pretty funny. And it has to be better than Club Dread. Anything is better than that.

• Could be just a rumor, but I hear it was announced at Comic-Con International (San Diego) that Heath Ledger has been cast as The Joker for the next Batman movie. Not sure what to think of it. I guess we’ll see when the movie comes out. I think there are some better choices out their like the link states. Hugo Weaving would have been awesome, or maybe Jude Law or Paul Bettany.

• Borat – I know most of you probably don’t watch the Ali G show, but the little bit I’ve seen gets me laughing. I’ll probably check out the rest of the seasons before this comes out.

• Plays II (The Reverse) and III (The Play Action) have been posted over at The Blue-Gray Sky blog. Damn we rocked. I cannot wait for football season to get here. NCAA Football 2007 came out on Tuesday and I’ve been playing it every night. Hopefully it’ll hold me over for the next month or so.

• Here comes even more awesome 80’s childhood movie goodness.  TMNT – Animated Movie.

I spent some time pasting together a few shots that I took at the Reds Indians game as well as at the F1 Race. Click on the pics below to see some sweet panoramic shots. I’m going to have to do more of these in the future. (For Flickr noobs, click on “All Sizes” above the picture to get a bigger version)

Also I updated the Breeapaloza set with group pictures that were taken on Julie’s camera. They turned out pretty nice.

That’s it. This post brought to you by a series of tubes.