Since leaving Texas, the one thing that I’ve longed for the most was to have a grill again. Perhaps it’s the primal instinct in me, but I truly enjoy cooking on an open flame. I found a pretty decent deal ($200) on a heavy-duty, 4-burner, gas grill, and here it is in all its glory. I also got the obligatory accessories: cover, spatula, tongs, brush, skewers, cedar planks, and a veggie tray (I’ve upgraded from tin foil). This marks the beginning of the unofficial Summer season… and the end of a cold, white Winter.
This is the CCFC house church crew donning their standard issued hairnets
Last Tuesday I organized a volunteering event for my CCFC house church at Community Servings in Jamaica Plain, MA. The organization cooks, packages, and delivers food for families where the primary caregiver is afflicted with HIV or other terminal diseases in the Boston area. They need a certain number of volunteer hours each week to keep their costs low, and the volunteers typically prepare raw foods to be cooked later. On this night we were chopping parsley, and on a previous night I peeled and chopped sweet potatoes. On Saturdays they have a larger event for those who have volunteered there before, from 10am-2pm, with breakfast provided at 9:30 and lunch provided at noon. This place has been one of my favorite places to volunteer in Boston. If you’re interested in volunteering in the Boston area, check out YAVA or Boston Cares. Here’s a quick video of our crew at work:
In an effort to keep my personal posts and my academic posts separate, I’ve created this separate blog for personal posts. Its purpose is to keep friends and family informed about my personal activities, so feel free to check back often for updates.
Today is Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, so many people, myself included, are off work and enjoying the nice weather. This is a new holiday for me, being from Texas, so I wasn’t sure what it was all about, although a day off is always welcome. As far as I gather, there are two main events on Patriots’ Day: The Boston Marathon, and The re-enactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord (the two battles that started the American Revolution). In any case, to the point of this story… I was driving around Lexington, unaware of all these events, and saw three older modeled armored vehicles driving down Massachusetts Avenue. I’m glad they were older, and there was only one large one, otherwise I’d have been a bit nervous. In any case, they came to a stop and I got to snap a few pictures of them before they moved on. Here they are, enjoy!
Those of you who know me well, know that I’m rarely in the same place/city/state/country for very long, so I’ve cooked up a way to track my location. While I was out last night in a neighborhood I’ve never been to, I found some really cool restaurants, bars, theaters, architecture, etc. I thought it would be cool if I could blog my location at that point, and add a note so I could find my way back some day. After many hours of searching and modifying some great plugins, I’ve added a new feature to this website called “Stalk Me!“. I know what you’re thinking, a security enthusiast giving out his location on his website… but don’t forget, we should never rely on security through obscurity (those who want to find me bad enough, can easily succeed without this feature). Besides, the solution that I came up with only updates the location when I tell it to, and sets it to where I say to set it to with variable accuracy. So enough with the lead in, what did you do?
Step 1: Sign up for Brightkite.com
Brightkite is Twitter meets GEOlocater meets Yelp. You can update your location, find people near you, see what other people have visited your location and what they had to say. You can also upload photos, see posts on a google map, and tons of other cool features.
Step 2: Install Brightkite iPhone app
Brightkite has apps for the iPhone as well as other smart phones. This allows me to take a picture, write a comment, and plot my location, and upload it all to my Brightkite account.
Step 3: Add Brightkite feed and map to WordPress homepage
I used LifeStream and XML Google Maps plugins for WordPress to make this happen. Some modifications were necessary for precise functionality, but they mostly worked out of the box. I still need to add a feature to the map to get a chrono listing of all the posts.
That’s about it, some work still needs to be done, so feel free to Stalk Me!
After my graduation from The University of Texas in 2006, I decided to take a few trips overseas. The first trip was to Belize with 5 other friends and one of their sisters. We did a little island hopping, scuba diving, cave exploring, temple climbing, all without a pre-planned agenda. This worked out so well that one of my best friends Evan and I decided to plan another trip to Europe. Countries on the agenda were England, Italy, Germany, and Norway, with no plans until we got there. Due to the liquid bombing plot in England the day before our trip to Italy, our flight was canceled leaving us stranded at Stansted Airport. We made the best of it and found a cheap flight to Germany the next day, giving us more time there and allowing us to go visit our good friend Kevin at Spangdahlem. Evan left for home from Germany, and I continued on solo to explore Norway and then back to London to head home. I may edit this to talk more about each country, but for now I’ll leave it at this and show you some pictures from each country. Enjoy!
This was my undergraduate graduation present to myself. I went with 5 other friends to go scuba diving and exploring. We had no plans at all, in fact we read the guide book on the flight there and when we landed, voted on an island to head to. It turned out to be a great trip, we went snorkeling with rays and sharks, scuba diving with dolphins, took a sunrise tour to the top of a Mayan temple, and explored some caves and rivers in the jungle.
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After narrowly escaping London, we headed to Germany and immediately fell in love (see the picture of me and a roasted pig leg with a glass of local beer). Here we visited a friend in Spandahlem, and another local friend in Cologne. It was great to have a native tour guide, and an excellent host mother to cook us the best local meals. We went to about 4 cities in western Germany, but it would be nice to go back to visit Berlin and the eastern side.
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