Jan 31, 2009
Over on the side collumn I’ve always kept a list of blogs that some of my friends keep up (or don’t keep up) and there are a few new additions I wanted to bring up.
First is a blog of my friend Mike who has recently graduated from law school and is preparing to take the bar late in February. To prepare he has taken a month of off work and is going to track his study and daily progress/thoughts while preping in his blog. As an added bonus he has decided not to shave for the entire time. Check it out at Bearded for the Bar
Lastly I have finally finished designing our “family” website and transitioning it from our wedding blog. You can track and follow Kate and I over at TimandKateAnderson.com. Like I said in the past, I’m not exactly sure how this will impact my posting here. Most likely not at all as I have two separate goals and aspirations for both sites.
That is all.
Jan 26, 2009
I’m currently in the process of making a 1:1 trade with a person on the other side of the country. We connected for our trade via craigslist and therefore have no idea who the other person truly is other than the email they use. Like nearly all trades I do on craigslist I google searched the name of the guy who responded. Since his name was a very uncommon one, I was instantly provided with his public facebook page, his Bebo profile and some high school information. I was able to see his music and movie preferences, what he looked like, who he was dating, when and where he went to High School, how he conversed with his friends and even some information about a relative possibly his older brother.
This got me thinking about how having a common name, actually provides some amount of anonymity and with that a little bit of added security. If someone google searches for my name, there are 100s of Tim Andersons out there on the internets. Now granted, my presence on social sites probably makes me pop up a little more often, and if you search out the name I use as this website’s domain and on other sites you are provided instantly with a lot of information about me. But in general, if you have a more common name, it is less likely that someone can simpley google just your name and find out information about you. Alternatively, if you have a very uncommon name, you are probably easily searchable. Either way, it was an interesting reminder that you should be sure to protect your public identity on the internet.
Sep 3, 2008
For those of you who don’t know me well enough in my personal life, I have recently married and with that temporarily moved to Nashville, TN while Kate (my wife) finishes up Grad school. We plan to switch over our wedding site, www.timandkateanderson.com from what it is now, to more of a life site where we can keep family and friends who don’t see us reguarly up to date. I’m not sure what that will mean for my site here. I’ll probably just end up writing more geeky and techy posts when I find the time. I’ve found that most of what I tend to want to relay, in general can be expressed in 140 characters or less.
Jun 16, 2008
–This deal only applies if you shop at Kroger, have Kroger Fueling stations and have the right cards for the scenario about to be described–
I’m a deal junkie and love finding the very best value. Some of you may have heard that Kroger is offering a bonus if you buy their store gift cards. For every $300 in gift cards that you buy, you get an extra $30 loaded onto them. Basically an instant 10% savings. If you have a rewards credit card that gives you money back for groceries you can save even more. One card I have, that I use for gas and groceries is the Chase Freedom Rewards Visa. It will give me 3% back on the top 3 categories of spending I use per month. So if I use it to purchase these gift cards, I get to save an additional 3%, totaling the 13% I can save on groceries per month.
I just discovered this past weekend, that I can use the gift cards I purchase, at Kroger Fuel Stations to fill up my car. In addition, if you’ve bought $100 worth of groceries in the past period (I’m not sure how often this gets reset) with your Kroger plus card you save 10¢ per gallon. With the price of gas at $4 per gallon, this is an added 2.5% savings. If you haven’t spent $100 in groceries you still get 3¢ off and I think there is a scalling effect to where the more groceries you buy the more you save per gallon. But in the end it is equivalant to about 15% off when you combine all these which is pretty nice. Giant Eagle seems to have a better Fuel Perks program, because I think it’s for ever $50 you spend you get 10¢ off, and the discount lasts for 3 months…. but it is also only for 1 fill up (up to 30 gallons) so there are trade-offs.
The next thing to figure out is if I can use the Kroger gift card to purchase other store gift cards, and get double fuel points (a limited time promotion currently running). I was originally not going to buy the limit of 4 $300 Kroger gift cards, but since discovering that I can use them for gas, I very well may buy all 4 that I’m entitled too before this promotion is over at the end of July.
Apr 20, 2008
On Friday night we had a party to celebrate Nick’s 23rd birthday. We invited a couple people over and ended up having a great time with our first party of the spring weather. Anyone who knows me knows I like to take pictures and document big events. I like to be able to look back and reflect on the fun times in my life and keep those memories fresh. I recently read at Lifehacker something to try to better document some of our parties. Basically the idea consists of setting up a webcam that captures an image every few seconds. Then the next day, you paste them all together in a movie and you can watch the previous night in a short time span. It gives it a very cool stop motion look to the evening. I decided Nick’s birthday party was a good trial celebration and set my webcam and laptop up in the corner of the room to record. After messing around with the video today and setting it to music, I must say I am VERY pleased with the end result.
High Quality WMV download link
First a quick note on the song. As soon as I saw the “look” of the video during a test run the night before I knew what song I would use if this was successful. One of my favorite songs from last year is “All Your Friends” by LCD Soundsystem. The rhythm is perfect for the type of video that was produced, and the theme of the song hits home. If you listen to or read the lyrics they might be a little confusing, but what I get from it is that later in life, looking back you’ll mostly remember the good times with your friends and not much else, even if some of the stuff you did with your friends was pretty stupid. It’s a theme that really struck a cord with me.
I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision
For another five years of lies
You drop the first ten years just as fast as you can
And the next ten people who are trying to be polite
When you’re blowing eighty-five days in the middle of France
Yeah, I know it gets tired only where are your friends tonight?
Sorry to get sidetracked on the song. Anyway, I can watch the video a few times and still notice something new that makes me smile since there is so much going on. One thing that might change if I keep doing this, is this no one knew that the camera was recording, so everything goes on unrelated to the camera. We might be able to perform some pretty cool captures if people know its recording every 4 seconds. Also we’ve talked about setting up a second one somewhere else to capture even more, but I think the placement of this one got a much as possibly ( you can even see corn hole action outside at one point). Let me know what you think in the comments.
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