Again, it probably doesn't exactly meet the "things I've created" criteria for this website, but I just couldn't help but post this one. A few months ago Kate Bauer and I put together this ring:

Today when it arrived she agreed to marry me, and I couldn't be happier.

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Hey Ry4an, you may or may not remember me, but my name is Brenden Johnson and was in IT at the U with you. We had Serge Rudaz (and FOSSIL) among other classes together. I happened across your blog a little bit ago on GeoURL.org and had to congratulate you on your engagement.

A few months back Kate Bauer and I hosted a BBQ at her place. I wanted to try putting together a fruit and vodka infusion of the sort I'd previously seen at bars.

Kate bought a bunch of fresh fruit and I picked up the vodka (Svedka, the best vodka for the dollar, and damn near the best at any price). We used the same glass container from Pier One I purchased to house pickled eggs for my Moe the bartender Halloween costume a few years back. The infusion came out great, but we learned a few things along the way:

I really need to sleep in once a week, and I actually get to once a month. When I do sleep in I want the ringers off on all the phones in the house, but that's three phones to go find and then to remember to un-silence in the "morning". This past weekend I figured out that by using the call-forwarding feature on my home phone line to route all calls to my cell phone I can keep all the extensions from ringing. What's more by using the timed profiles feature on my cell phone I can have it muted until a pre-set time (say, 2pm) at which time the ringer re-enables itself. Finally I've got a good way to sleep in uninterrupted without forgetting to turn the ringers back on for the next three days.

On Sunday Kate Bauer and I ran and participated in a double blind random taste test of the various shades of Coca-Cola. Into numbered glasses Kate poured the samples from bottles whose labels I'd replaced with lettered labels. The samples we included were:

• Coke
• Diet Coke
• Diet Coke with Splenda
• Coke C2 (already hard to find!)
• Coke Zero

Kate was 3 for 5 with only Coke and C2 transposed. I got only one of them right (everyone knows the gasoline flavor of Diet Coke). From this we can conclude that either Kate's got a much better palate than I do or that she drinks a lot of Coke when I'm not looking.

I've been hooked on MTN's televised scrabble since Kate Bauer and I stumbled across it a few weeks back. The only on-line mention I can find of it is an old review in a student paper.

I'm thinking of getting a group of folks together to play as a team semi-regularly, but while that's getting setup I decided to start archiving the games, because that's the sort of thing I do, I guess.

I'm a happy Netflix user. Before I used Netflix I used to maintain a list of movies I wanted to see. Now I just use my Netflix queue for the same purpose. The only problem with my new system is by the time a recommended movie goes from the back of the queue to the front, about a year, I've long since forgotten who recommended it.

If Netflix offered a way for me to put a little note next to my own queue entries, I'd better be able to track who recommended movies or just why they made it on to my queue in the first place. Netflix does offer a feature they call their two cents system wherein you can write reviews of movies, which other members on your friends list can view. That's not really what I'm looking for though. I just want some space I can make notes to myself -- not for others.

There's a ton of poker time software out there and even some nifty looking dedicated hardware. At the games I attend we'll usually use a computer for the timing, but often there isn't one in the room and no one wants to bring over a laptop. However, there is almost always a TV with DVD player in whatever room gets temporarily re-purposed as the game room.

That got me thinking that a DVD that could serve as a poker timer would work in all the rooms in which we play poker and would offer these other benefits:

The policy here at the UnBlog is that I only write up things I've created -- not just things I've seen. Last month, however, most all my creative output went into work, with very little time and energy left for side projects. I've got a few nearing completion, but nothing worth writing about yet.

I did manage to get a few small projects done -- some of which involved a little ingenuity:

Last weekend I was camping and the person buying the food bought frozen pizzas. I couldn't think of any good way to cook them until I saw we had some aluminum foil. We defrosted the pizzas and cut them into slices. Slices were places face-to-face, wrapped in two layers of tin foil, and then tossed into the coals of our fire. After ten minutes or so they were fished out, and they'd turned into perfectly palatable pizza-pocket-alikes. It's not good camping food, but its better than raw frozen pizza.

When getting or giving directions I always prefer a map to written directions. Maps are great because they don't become useless if you make a wrong turn. With a good map you can always find where on it you are and can always build a new route to your destination.

Unfortunately, one can't always produce a map on the spot -- especially a good map. In those cases you have to fall back on written directions. I've given and received plenty of directions, some good, but mostly bad. I'm thinking a list of guidelines to use when vetting directions could help.