OK, Go

It's up. Not yet 100% without issue, but it's there. If you use a blog reader of any sort, point it here. If you don't, you should really consider it if you read more than a single web site more often than about once a week. Go to Google Reader and start subscribing to stuff. You can check it like you'd check your email, and it will tell you when there's a new entry from BBC News, or me, or the IRS or Al-Jazeera, or whatever other Very Important Things you like to read.

In Response to Anonymous ()

Yes, I am ever going to update my blog. Promise. I actually have a few entries you haven't seen yet even though they're already written. See, I have my web site all ready to go, designed, looking mezzosnazzy, etc. My cousin is hosting it for me, though, being the nice guy that he is, and it's taken a little bit of work to get it up and running. It involves FTP permissions and some technical goofery. And then there were the issues getting it to look right in Internet Explorer, which I'm still only 93% sure I got through. It's been a slow process. And see, the thing is, I've been holding off on putting new posts here because I wanted to wait until I could be like, "OK, new web site! Go."

And that still hasn't happened.

But it will. In fact, I'm hoping within the next day or two. That means I might as well go ahead and tell you: the blog is moving. Start visiting kentwalter.com on an hourly basis now, and with any luck whatsoever, you'll see the new site within the next 24 hours. Just don't bite me or anything if it's not there right away.

The new site is kind of meant to be:

• A supplement to my resume if that ever becomes beneficial in any way. (Not that it is at the moment, but if there's one thing being in Scouts having Eagle Scout friends taught me, it's to always be prepared),
• A mini-biography/profile, which is sort like the first point,
• A place to put my "creative" writing, separate from my life and events writing, and
• This blog, moved, renamed, upgraded, and injected with a new dose of self-importance because I laid it out myself. Except really just moved. And renamed.

So there you go. Start clicking, and one day, you, like me, will have success seeing my web site on the actual internet. I'm looking forward to it!

Kent

Zooooooooom!!

You know what I just did? I just put an out-of-office notice on Outlook starting today at 5 PM. For the second time in a week! I'm such a grownup, seriously. Last week, my brothers came out and I took two days off, and then tonight, we're flying across just about the whole continent (better than flying across the country) to go hang out in VA for just about two weeks. Of course, we're pretty excited. There's excitement, then contagious excitement, then excitement where it's "Oh, that's cute." And then, "OK, too much." And then this. Sorry.

The initial idea was to go out and catch my friends in My Epic while they're in the studio. I've managed to get in the way at some point nearly every time they've reorded anything, and you have to keep a good thing alive. I haven't told Aaron I'm coming because I think highly enough of myself that I think it should be a surprise (you know, like a gift!). If you talk to him, don't mention it, OK? Then I realized that this little trip could be turned into a real live vacation just by flying back later. So we made plans to go to Lynchburg to see our friends and to Virginia Beach to see my family. We have a list of places to eat, things to see... places to eat... It will be good times. Also, if you're in Lynchburg and you have my number, give me a call! I'm sure I'd love to see you. Additionally, if you're in Lynchburg and I don't see you while I'm there, please please don't be offended! I really do love you. We have a short amount of time and a TON of people and places and things to see/eat.* We'll do our best, I just want to know that no one will take it personally if we don't catch you this time around. Don't worry. We'll be back at some point.

Some things of recent interest:
When Scott and Christopher were here, one of the things we did, in addition to showing them around Seattle, was to go out for some Geocaching. You, tech-savvy reader, may be all over this, but I had never actually done it before. Scott's mentioned it a few times, and I knew the overall concept, but having a chance to go and do it a little was awesome. Basically, the way it works is this: someone hides an object, usually some kind of elements-proof container somewhere on the planet, and uses a GPS unit to get the coordinates. Then they post those coordinates and some clues on a web site. Anyone can register, get the clues and the coordinates, and go hunting. The idea is that even with the coordinates, the treasure object is small enough and hidden well enough to be little puzzle, and that's where the clues come in. Some of them are pretty ingenious. We printed off four caches and set off to conquer. Short story: we were one for four. If you're reading this and have some hints on "Singularity" or "Sixth Sense," those two drove us nuts! The one we did find was in two stages. The first was a tiny magnet on the underside of a bench outside the library. The second was the cache itself, and it was located at the coordinates found on the tiny magnet at part A. The cache was a hide-a-key box magneted to another bench. There was a pencil and log sheet inside, which is how it usually is, so we recorded it and then moved on the get shut out everywhere else we tried to find anything.

So now I want to get a GPS unit. Really bad.

This is such an awesome thing to do! Being outside? Check. Hiking? Yeah, pretty much, check. Like hiking, except with a goal and at least nine more awesome? Check. Feels sort of like being Indiana Jones? Check. I'm going to start stacking my pennies up.

Also, I got a new game. (Speaking of stacking pennies.) It's called Power Grid, and it's A) a ton of fun, and B) much less off-puttingly complicated than the first read through the rules makes it sound. You really should check it out if you're at all board game inclined like me.


One more thing: Internet Explorer is stupid. If it would work like every other browser in the world and stop being so stupid, you'd be ignoring reading this on kentwalter.com like I planned on a while ago. Grrr... In any case, watch out for that, because it's designed and ready to go as soon as I get the IE thing figured out. Keep your eyes peeled.

* EDIT: Thank you, Urn. Yes, we will be eating TONS of people. Wish us luck.

So that's, what... once every geological age?

Today is almost two and a half years since I put the first post up on this blog. Not my very first foray into putting content on the web (holy cow, did you know Xanga is still around?), but definitely my longest-running. So it's been 885 days (I found a web site to calculate this for me, because I am both nerdy and math-disinclined; actually, I can think of a bunch of situations in which this would be useful) since I started, and today makes fifty total entries. That makes an entry every two and a half weeks. I'm going to try to eventually steer that average to something under two weeks.

I guess I mentioned FATTT CAMP, the First Annual Table Tennis Tournament, Celebration, and Meeting Point. In keeping with the tradition of sportspersonship and idiotic naming built to accomodate juvenile acronyms, we started our next undertaking today: SIPPIE CUP. The Second Infrequent Ping Pong Independent Extravaganza and Competition of Unlimited Potential. Three matches in, and it's good times all around. I lost today (in the first round) but played a good match, I thought. It's double elimination, so maybe there's hope. It reminds me of this, which you've probably seen before:


Which, in turn, reminds me of this, which you may also have seen:


I like that stuff.

Alright, no huge things to report, so that's all. Keep an eye on things here, as they're about to get more awesome pretty soon. Thanks for checking in.

Kent

Get a Hobby. Seriously.

I have some hobbies, and that fact is the thing that unifies the rest of these otherwise loosely related news items:

First of all, it turns out that my roommate's spouse's spouse's cousin's brother's roommate's roommate's roommate Adam is a budding sci-fi author, and he's looking for an editor. Or really just kind of a peer review sort of thing at this point, but it was cool to find out that I had something big in common with this guy I'd hung out with a handful of times. He's looking to write novels for a career, and I'd love to look to write novels for a career. I've just started reading, and it's pretty cool so far. I'm not a super-experienced literary editor or anything, but I did get an English degree with pretty high marks, which should have at least distorted my outlook on fiction enough that I can give all kinds of useless academic feedback. This should be fun. Watch for Adam Henderson on the shelves wherever books are sold.

Second thing. And holy cow, have I been waiting to say this for a while: there's a piano at my house now! Awesome! Kirsten's mom and her husband live in a place called Jubilee at Hawks Prairie. The residents are "active adults at play," which means that for the most part, the residents are retired but don't want to just move into a regular neighborhood and be "those old people that live down the street." (You could argue that some of the residents are kinda playing fast and loose with the phrase "at play," but it's a pretty nice place.) Anyway, since a lot of people there are retired, they're not planning on moving any time soon, and they can get all kinds of stuff that would be a big pain to move. Some friends around the corner got a baby grand piano to replace their old console, and they were just going to give the old one to the movers! Kirsten's mom stepped in and told them to stop in the name of love. She knew I'd wanted a piano for, like, longer than I've been alive. So we rented a cargo van from Enterprise and picked it up. The cargo van and the 90-minute drive to Lacey were all it cost. Well, that and a tuning, which we need pretty badly now that we moved it from a 70-degree house to a 30-degree nortwestern afternoon and drive it 90 minutes up I-5 to Redmond. They were happy to send it to a good home, and I was excited to find a place for it in our apartment and release my inner Elton, musically (and only musically) speaking. Everyone was a winner in my book. I don't have any pictures at the moment, unfortunately, but if you do a Google image search for Baldwin Acrosonic, you can find an idea of what it looks like. It's small but cool.

The same part of me that enjoys theme parties and such, and Risk games at work, found another outlet and secured my bid for the position of Official Workplace Hangout Enabler last week by putting together some quick tournament brackets and dragging seven coworkers into a ping pong tournament. It's the First Annual Table Tennis Tournament, Celebration, and Meeting Point. (Acronym FATTT CAMP; which came first, the name or the abbreviation?) It's going swimmingly. We already have a signup sheet outside the office for the next one. We're going to have sixteen people next time, ideally. Then will come the foosball tourney, the 8-ball (or possibly 9-ball; it's cooler) tourney, the floss fest, the toothpick caber toss, etc. Any ideas are welcome. We're gamers here at Xbox, remember. Hardcore, unapologetic analog gamers. We're so hardcore that we've probably already played your suggestion. But give it a shot anyway.

And then the other night I got this terrible itch to build something. So I made this awesome rocket, which was so obscenely manly that it actually started growing its own chest hair. True story.
I love building things. Sigh. I especially like building things out of paper. I remember going to some kind of week-long nerd day camp thing when I was a kid, and we talked about buoyancy and displacement and load bearing objects and all of this stuff, and we got two pieces of printer paper to build a boat that would A) float and B) hold the most pennies and then something about a tower that would withstand a siege of some sort. The details are fuzzy now because I'm old and have a receding hairline. Anyway, some time ago, I spent an excessive number of hours building this:and it was one of the coolest things I (or you!) have ever done. I just wish the picture would do that beauty justice. It's at my parents' house now, the product of the better part of a semester at college, several hours a week. I did a Roman Villa one way back in the day, and made a short attempt at some kind of colonial village before I remembered that Colonial America was the most boring place ever - more boring, in fact, than the surface of the moon, lifeless, even, as that place is - and stopped. Well, I used some of the fundage left on my Barnes and Noble gift card from Christmas to order this one the other day:

I can't wait to get started. These pictures make it look like these things could be built in a couple of hours, but they're so, so detailed, it takes forever, and when I finish one of these, I feel sort of like Hannibal must have when the first elephants made it over the pass. They're awesome, and I don't care what you say, even if it wasn't for the x-acto blades involved, these things are manly, and I am more awesome when I build something. Even something made out of paper.

So there's a slice of what is cool these days. Also, check out boardgamegeek.com. That's also what's happening in the streets, in the clubs, in the hot spots that you love. Get into it.

Alright, take care of yourselves. Have a great Valentine's Day. And like I tell somebody at some point every year, there's always someone to do something nice for, regardless of your situation. Have fun.

Kent

An Accomplishment in Cheese

If you were really paying close attention a little while ago, you might remember me mentioning that we started a record of various cheeses. See, a lot of people go on and on about various social causes and things that are worth spending their time on. Building hospitals, tutoring struggling ninth graders. At my house, we eat cheese and keep fastidious notes. It's true. As it turns out, the number of weeks we have lived in Redmond and the number of cheeses we have sampled from the Whole Foods Petites Fromages program are the same. (That's why I haven't posted in a while; I got carried away on the culinary adventures and had to get the balance right.) We're at 15 of each now, which I feel is a pretty respectable number. The Official Great Cheese Caper Descriptions, Ratings, and Comments Chart (Sheet #1) is now full. And my life is such that this is news.

Highest overall rating from me:

Jacquin Crottin de Champcol

The funny thing is, "crottin" is a slang term for a horse/mule dropping. In this case, though, it's a reference to the shape of the cheese. It's a hard, crumbly goat cheese that's the best characteristically "goat-y" cheese I've ever had. A couple of inches across, white, and moldy on the outside if handled and made correctly. Looks like this:

Highest overall rating from Kirsten:

Roomkaas Double Cream Gouda

Ridiculously creamy, almost buttery, and 146% fat or something. It tastes every bit as good as something so unhealthy should taste.

The Acerbic Wit Award:
This goes to Kirsten for her description of a sample of Le Fournal Chaumes. To wit: "If 'earthy' means manure, then yes."

Creepiest Looking Cheese:
This'll have to go to Cahill Porter, which is made by mixing a dark beer into the vat when the cheese still liquid. Looks like this:

I could go on handing out awards for every little thing, but I remember being offered the role of a tree in a play when I was seven or eight... Some things you gotta learn from.*

I might just have actual news or something at some point. Until then, take care of yourselves. And start your own food list so you can send me notes.

Kent

* - Even at my young age, I knew to hold out for better parts. This tree fiasco was before my breakout role as the drowning kid in a Red Cross safety video. True story.

It Looks Like This

When you try to make your face look as small as possible, you look awesome. Exhibits (A) and (B):

Theme Night!

Not because it needed to happen, certainly, and not because either of us are really obsessed with Colin Firth (though we both agree he is pretty cool), but just because the name -The name! This one was too good to toss back into the water!- demanded it, we hosted the Colin Firthquake this weekend. The way it happened was this:

1. Read a list of natural disasters unlikely to occur
2. Got so cracked up over this idea that we decided it must occur
3. Assembled an event around the name

It came together well. Meghan has an Anatomy and Physiology final coming up for which she must know the ins and outs of the human brain. So she made a diagram of Colin Firth's brain and did a short presentation on his life and film career. Then I MC'ed a game of Colin Firth charades with movie titles and bits of information from the Wikipedia Colin Firth page. And then the main event of the night: a mash-up of the Victorian manners of The Importance of Being Earnest, the rough-and-tumble hijinks of a game of spoons, and the pace-tracking literacy of Horse. Thrills! Each time the name Ernest was spoken in the movie (and you know it's quite a few if you've seen it), everyone had to take a spoon from the table, and the last one to get a spoon got a letter. E-R-N-E-S-T. I spelled Ernest first, and I was out. We continued the elimination, removing one spoon from the game each round, until Kirsten and Meg duked it out and Kirsten won.

Also, compliments of the house artist, we each had little badges to wear.

For the girls:
And for the guys, even higher aspirations:The question you're probably asking at this point is, "Hey, can I steal your idea and have my own Colin Firthquake?" And the answer is ABSOLUTELY! The concept of staking a unique claim on any sort of idea is so nine years ago (except in Eastern Texas), and we sort of appropriated it from another source to begin with anyway. This is the age of open exchange. Go for it. While you're at it, The Fresca Fiesta and the Emilio Festevez are both begging to be hosted. Let me know how those go.
Adios,

Kent

Ultimate Truth

Thanks to Urn for calling my attention to this.

O Weihnachtsbaum, O Weihnachtsbaum...

Last year, we had just gotten married when Christmas came around, and we were over in Prague, enjoying the goofy language and the lights and the old city. It was amazing, and I wouldn't trade it away for anything, but it sort of feels like it's been two years since we've had a legitimate Christmas with family and a christmas tree and presents and maybe a candlelight service. All of those things. We're doing our best to make up for it this year, though. We have a steady stream of Christmas songs going and several Christmas movies lined in the Netflix queue (Next up is the Grinch. We've watched White Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas so far.) We have cookie plans and wish lists and shopping goals, and we even have a paper chain that we've been tending to each day. But up until yesterday, we still didn't have a tree!

Last night was the night for it, though. Kirsten got a tip about trees at Rite Aid (seriously), so we went to look, but they weren't selling them. They did have good deals on lights, though, so we picked those up there, and then the next place we thought to check was Home Depot. They had several kinds of trees and good prices (Noble Fir: $40. Douglas Fir: $20. Knowing what the heck the difference is between the two: Priceless.), and we had an awesome tree within about ten minutes. The guy doing the wrapping and the cutting off of the bottom inch of trunk was the nicest guy ever, too. He seemed like he's a retired guy with a few young grandchildren that are his favorite part of his life, and he volunteers a month of his time each year to come and wish everyone the most gently warm "Merry Christmas" they'll hear all winter as they buy their trees. I wanted to hug him.

We didn't have anything to tie the tree to the top of the car, so we put it in the trunk instead. Surprisingly, it fit pretty well. And we only live a half mile away, so we weren't afraid of anything crazy happening.
I screwed it into the tree stand Kirsten had gotten earlier in the day, and she said it looked like I got smashed by the tree. I agree. Smashed and eaten.

A few ornaments later...

...and we were ready for the topper, which we went and picked out at Target.

Even though this could easily be a music blog, it isn't. But I do have to make one suggestion: use Pandora. For those of you unfamiliar, it's pretty simple. You put in one song you like, and the folks who run Pandora serve up a bunch of music you'll probably enjoy as much. They use a huge database of hundreds of musical characteristics of each song to make it work. If you like a song, you can hit the thumbs-up button, and if you don't, you hit the thumbs-down, and it'll skip to a new song. You don't have to hit either button -you can just let it play- but if you do, it'll get more and more zeroed in on what you're likely to enjoy. It's pretty cool. Anyway, the reason I suggest it is that the creators were small enough to make "Christmas songs" one of the categories in their database, so you can enter "Jingle Bells" as your starting track, and *boom!* instant Christmas radio station with better variety than the mall. Try it out.

Whatever you do to get your Christmas on, make sure to really embrace it. Turn the music up! Decorate a stocking! Enjoy yourself, eat some unhealthy holiday things, smile at people... If it snows where you are, invite a stranger to take a few minutes to have a snowball fight (this happened to us recently at a bus stop and totally made our day) or build a snowman. Watch Charlie Brown (and then aspire to name your firstborn Linus). And slow down. Look around you, and enjoy it all. Get into it.

I'll be back later with more Christmasy things and leave you now with the illumination of our very first tree.

Kent