Some Interesting BBall

Tonight, as I have done regularly for about the past 23 years, I attended a Hawkeye basketball game. It happened to be the Iowa State game which always adds a bit of excitement, the crowd was the best I have seen in a few years, and Iowa happened to play a great game and pretty much had their way with the 'clones. Follow that up with the traditional playing of "In Heaven There is No Beer" and all in all - a most excellent experience.

It turns out I also got a nice little celebrity sighting out of the deal. Ashton Kutcher, being an Iowa native and former U of I attendee (I actually had 2 Engineering classes with him the sole year he was there as an engineering student), came back to the state to do some benefit work to provide money for flood recovery. Both he and Shawn Johnson (Olympic gold and silver medalist from Des Moines for those not paying attention) had events throughout the week to help raise money, which I think is very cool of both of them.

Ashton and his wife, Demi Moore, both sat at the scorers table about 10 rows in front of our seats along with Shawn Johnson. I was impressed that along with the good they were doing this week, they did not simply show up for the game, make their appearance, and then duck out. They all stayed well past the final buzzer, and generally seemed to be into the game and all of the events. My craptastic cell phone pictures aren't worth posting, or I would add them here.

There was a screening for Ashton's new movie, Personal Effects, at the Englert theatre in Iowa City tonight as well. I'm not so sure about the movie - it may have had a bit too much pandering to the Iowa fans for even me to stomach, but I'll probably check it out as a rental at some point.

Pump It

Although this blog largely ends up discussing technology-related topics (such is the nature of being immersed in a technical field), I enjoy nothing more than doing non-technical things at home.

This weekend, Sunday in particular, pumpkins were the name of the game. I decided to go for 4 carved pumpkins this year, and I must be improving my efficiency because I finished them all on Sunday night after we got back from some kids activities.

Here are some shots of the happy pumpkin family before and after. I need to get a tripod to make the night shots turn out better, but this will do for now.

Blowing it off

Sometimes there is nothing more soothing or relaxing than working on something completely pointless and fun. I'm trying to do more of this, as silly as that may sound.

You might notice my (hopefully) growing list of links on the side of this blog to my other various sites and projects. One of those has actually been around for a while, but I just added to it again tonight.

Here is my latest t-shirt design: http://www.cafepress.com/floydpink.105916729. In this particular case, I resurrected an old web classic, and brought it to textile form. Why? Because I can.

Good things are worth the wait...

Xbox media center rocks hard, I'll have more to say on that in an upcoming post. For now though, enjoy the madness:



Click on the image itself to see more details, or to see the original video that inspired all of this.

Light 'Em Up

This was a picture taken this past weekend while we were playing with sparklers, before our town's yearly fireworks show started. Shannon thought it looked pretty cool, and I tend to agree.

I thought it was a good way to introduce a new photo gallery that I recently created. I am going to post some of the pictures I have taken that I think work well as interesting computer backgrounds. You can find the gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/floydpink/Backgrounds.

Weekend Tidbits

Some interesting sites I stumbled upon today, to occupy (I.E. waste) your time.

The first is an interesting concept albeit a bit too focused on the MySpace generation. Share2me is a site that lets you add your contacts from email, IM, and other places. Then, if you have something interesting to share with people, you can automatically add them from a list of contacts and send it to all at once. Regardless of whether that means it sends by IM, email, or posts to a MySpace page. I dig the concept of send once, regardless of mechanism. Go check out the demo on their page.

Second, is something even more tailored to me. A site that exists simply to allow for debating various topics. There are 3 different methods for presenting and arguing a topic. You choose one, make your case, and then attempt to with the debate. I know at least one person who reads this blog fairly regularly should be as interested in this as I am. I smell a new time waster...

Fun Task for the Day

Music by color.

Go into your iTunes collection, type a color into the search box, and hit play.

Tonight's playlist for me: Green.