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.

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.

Finally, I’ve been working on a new project that I wanted to post before I left for this trip.  Kate and I decided to put a website together to post information we have about our wedding and we have the basic site up and running over at www.timandkateanderson.com.  Head on over and check it out.  You may have noticed a small bump in my site here site (that I still haven’t fully recovered from) in that the sidebar here is a little different than normal.  I accidentally used the same SQL database for both sites and thus reset the customization I had here.  It’ll be a little while before I put everything back to how it used to be.  Please give me any input or thoughts on the new site that you have.

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.

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…

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?

Check it out, or try it yourself.

On Google I come up as 3rd, yet still ahead of the website itself.

What’s interesting between MSN and Google, is that MSN is linking to the actual article itself, whereas Google is linking to my front page where the article for Wikimapedia was posted for a long time but has now dropped off (only the most recent 5 articles are shown). Wonder how that’ll effect the google ranking for that search.