From the "too much time" department

Jeff Tweiten is a resident of Seattle. He's camping out for five months outside of the Cinerama theater in Seattle, awaiting the release of Star Wars Episode 3. He has a blog where he's posting updates in this adventure.

"Wait, back up...5 months?!" You bet. And according to local press, this isn't the first time Jeff's done this. And he has all of the logistics worked out, it seems.

The Cinerama is about a 5 minute drive from my place. If anyone wants me to deliver something to Jeff, let me know.

Local color

PBS.com has a nice website around their new program, "Do you speak American?". It has quite a few articles that discuss local dialects from different regions of the U.S. Fun to read about some examples of pronunciation and grammar that people use, and goes to show how many different countries and cultures of origin there are in this country.

Bagpipes v0.1

I've created a page on bagpiping. You can find it here as well as from the top navigation bar on this page. It's just a few links and blurbs right now, but I hope to grow it with some articles on the instrument, the music, and other related info before too long.

More news, less time

A colleague at work suggested I try BlogLines, an online newsfeed/rss/blog reader. I was initially skeptical; what's wrong with visiting a few sites and reading their stories? After using this tool for just a few days, I quickly realized:
- I was spending too much time typing in web addresses and navigating sites and not reading
- I wasn't reading the news I really cared about
- I hadn't discovered web sites with news that I really wanted to read.

BlogLines covers the above quite well. And it's free. And no irritating ads or invasive signup procedures, at least for now.

From the wacky weather department

It's been a month of crazy weather. The northeast and midwest is getting pummeled with snow, while the west is enjoying balmy temperatures. Lack of snow is closing slopes near Seattle, including Snoqualmie and Stevens.

Last year around this time, it was in the 30s-40s in Seattle, colder on the slopes, and there was a great snowpack for most of the season. This is pretty much the complete opposite. The temperatures on the passes are well above freezing, and the rain that has been falling has pretty much wiped out any snow cover that's fallen this season.

I'm not a snow sports fan by any means, so I'm not partial to high or low amounts of snow on the mountains over the winter season. But, I really lament people losing their jobs because of a wacky twist in the weather.

Hello World

Introductions
I suppose all good relationships start with an introduction. Internet users at large, meet me. Me, meet Internet users at large.

What, a blog? How original...
Well, not quite. Sure, it's a web site with postings on a hopefully frequent basis. But I hope this site is (or will be) more than that.

- A place to share ideas on topics that interest me.
- A place to comment on current events.
- A place to review new and upcoming books, music, and movies.
- A place to post links to interesting web sites.

What's coming?
- Dedicated pages for topics (or categories) of interest
- More rollup/aggregation/dynamic information
- An updated template
- Permalinks to friends' blogs

Until then, nice to meet you.