Blankbaby

So that's where all the Wawas went

I am in VA visiting my mom and we stopped into a brand new Super Wawa. This is the first Wawa I have ever seen in Virginia.

Test post from my iPhone

My first piece for a magazine

Earlier this year I tweeted about one of my goals for the year: writing something for a print publication. Luckily for me, one of my Twitter follower is Jason Snell, who is a big mucky muck over at Macworld. Macworld, if you aren't a Mac geek, is the leading Mac news publication in the world. For some reason Jason thought that some opportunity for me might popup at Macworld.

Months past and I had forgotten about wanting to write for a magazine when I was contacted by one of the senior Review editors to write some reviews of antivirus software for the Mac. I knew AV reviews would be a tough sell, but I didn't think my NAV 11 review would end up being the most loathed article on Macworld.com (and by a long shot!). This doesn't seem to bode well for future Macworld writing assignments.

At least the folks at Macworld seemed to like my writing.

Fork You: Chili today!

I have been slacking off in many areas of my life:

• Being awesome
• Blogging on Blankbaby
• Editing Fork You
• Fighting terrorism

As you can see from the video above, I'm working on the Fork You bit. That's right, Chili Today is up and ready for your viewing pleasure (that leaves only about 5 more Fork You episodes that we have filmed that I need to edit!). Watch as we make that summery treat: chili.

I took the treadmill's fitness test: I'm average!

Happy 4th of July, Muppet style

via SenorDanimal (who has promised to sneak me into Pixar at some point in the future).

This is what happens when 4 geeks vacation together

*sigh* My Friends
Originally uploaded by Contrabass.

Thad snapped this picture of his lovely bride, Marisa, and myself snapping pictures of this sign.

Well done, Thad!

Maura asked for it

I had lunch today with Maura and Jessie and I happened to take my camera with me. Maura told me to take the picture above and blog it. Maura, your wish is my command.

8 years of bloggy goodness

I need to write a bio for a project I'm working on (more on that later) and so I thought it would be fun to mention how long I've been a blogger. Turns out that almost 2 years ago to the day I wrote about how I've been blogging for 6 years. Doing some basic math (hey, I was an English major) that means I've been blogging for 8 motherflippin' years.

That's pretty damned crazy if you ask me.

Ignite Philly

I was on Attack of the Show for some reason

Above is the video from my appearance on last night's Attack of the Show. They had me on the Loop to talk Apple rumors before Apple's WWDC event that starts on Monday.

Luckily for me my segment was only a couple of minutes long since I seemed to have lost the ability to form coherent thoughts. I even called OS X 'the OS X,' like some sort of crazy old man ('Isn't your Apple MAC running the OS X or something? Where's my soup?').

Having seen Attack of the Show before I figured I was going to be one person on a panel during the Loop, which they often do. Imagine my surprise when I was on air, live mind you, and I figured out that it was just little old me and Kevin Pereira chatting about Apple rumors. Kevin did say he was a big fan of TUAW, which is always good to hear.

Thanks to the wonders of technology I didn't have to board a transcontinental jet to appear on AotS, but I did have to walk 5 blocks from my apartment to VideoLink, which has a satellite uplink thingie. I then sat in a green room for a few minutes (there was free candy, but I didn't have any) while I waited for my close up. One of the VideoLink dudes let me know I was ready to go, and I walked into another room with some bright lights, a camera, a table and chair, and a screen on which they would magically show Philadelphia's skyline. I even got to wear one of those in ear mics things, so I that the people on the west coast to talk to me.

A few minutes later and my second television appearance was over. (Note to John Gruber: I was wearing a Daring Fireball T-shirt under my 'ready for TV' shirt.)

When I was all done I walked into the green room to retrieve my umbrella and I was greeted by an older gentleman who was wearing a suit, though his coat was off. He was very busy looking into a mirror and applying makeup to himself. Looking up at me, with a sponge full of makeup in his hand, he said, 'How'd it go? You didn't shoot a booger out your noise or scream fuck, did you?' I acknowledged that I had not, in fact, yelled any profanities and anything that was in my nose at the start of my segment remained solidly in place until the end. He explained that he was a lawyer in Philly and he often appears on CNN to talk about legal stuff. I asked about the makeup and he said, 'I learned long ago if you don't do this you end up looking like a vampire on TV.' Since I hadn't applied any makeup to myself before my appearance I can only imagine I looked like a vampire (though vampires don't have reflections, so they can't be caught on film, right? Take that, Mr. Lawyerman!).

All in all, I had fun and I don't think I came off too badly. Here's to being on TV more often!

Higher Education Web Symposium

It is one of the worst kept secrets on this blog that I work at the University of Pennsylvania. It is a great place to work, which might explain why I have been here for over five years, and they seem to like me around here so that's good (and they are ok with me blogging like a mad man, and doing Fork You, and running TUAW, and doing other freelance things which is nice). Anyway, I was at work the other day and one of my co-workers told me that my name came up during a planning meeting for the Higher Education Web Symposium which Penn Medicine is hosting (being driven, one assumes, by the SOMIS Web Team).

I thought it odd that my name would come up during the meeting, since I have nothing to do with Web Design in general nor do I have anything to do with this Symposium. It would seem it was requested that I blog about the Symposium, so blog it I am. Now, I don't know if this was an actual request or just a joke (I mean, who really wants a mention on Blankbaby? Not too many people I would wager) but I figured why not post about it?

If you're in Philly on July 15/16 and are interested in Webby stuff, you should check out the agenda. Looks pretty good to me, though there isn't a session on blogging. What's up with that?

I love my iPhone, though I never call anyone

I have lots to blog about (including some cool pictures I took over my brief vacation this Memorial Day weekend), but I thought I would share this little nugget of info.

I finally got around to filling out the paperwork for reimbursement of my cell phone charges. To do this I had to log into my AT&T account. While there I figured I would check out my usage numbers, as seen to the right.

Yep, I have used a total of 7 minutes of talk time out of an available 5,450 this month. I'm thinking I don't talk on the phone much.

I learned this by watching Dan

Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper

Sweet, sweet Pepsi is my first carbonated love (the Mexican type especially, since they still use pure cane sugar), but a little over 3 years ago I decided that I should really cut back on my Pepsi consumption. They only problem was that I hated diet soda.

I then found Diet Dr. Pepper, which tastes more like Dr. Pepper than you would think, and all was well in soda land. I wasn't in love with Diet Dr. Pepper, but it filled my caffeine needs adequately.

Then the wonderful folks at Dr. Pepper introduced the best diet soda known to man: Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (unlike the atrocity that is Diet Chocolate Cherry Dr. Pepper). There was a time when the Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (henceforth to be called 'DCVDP') flowed like water. You could walk into any store in Philly and get yourself a little can of wonderful. Then, out of no where, the DCVDP river dried up. Sure, once in a cherry moon (see what I did there?) I would discover a cache of the stuff, but it looked like my love affair with the good Doctor was coming to a close.

That is, until I went to Lancaster County. I was there for a certain wedding but whilst there Marisa wanted to do some antiquing (which is lady talk for "let's look at old crap we don't need being sold by people who are at least as old as the dusty artifacts they are hawking"). I was parched, so we stopped at a Turkey Hill Convenience store and there was great rejoicing.

The picture above shows me in my moment of triumph: the store had some DCVDP and so I did what anyone in my position would do: immediately grabbed every bottle they had. Then I thought about it a second, and put most of them back leaving me with 3 bottles of ambrosia.

Luckily for me, it would seem that DCVDP is making a comeback in the Philly area. My local CVS had some in stock last night (and I bought another 3 bottles), so I am hoping that means the DCVDP flows again.

Quick Fork: Scone on the range

The latest episode of Fork You is up for your pleasure. This time around we make scones (in exactly 2 minutes!).

Good burger

Wedding in a barn?

Marisa and I headed to Lancaster County in the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside to celebrate the marriage of our two friends Becky and Eric (they met via a combination of a blog post and a Google search. Blogging makes things better!).

The wedding itself was lots of fun, as one might expect from a wedding in a barn. I was worried about what the appropriate attire is for a barn wedding, so I just wore my fancy dress shirt and some nice khakis. It seemed to work.

The highlight of the evening, since the happy couple had actually married themselves with a self uniting marriage license earlier in the day, was the pig race. Seeing 4 cute little pigs run around a track is lots of fun, and I recommend it to everyone.

Check out all my pictures from the happy event here. You might notice that Becky and Eric are in very few of the photos. My only explanation is that whenever I hang out with Becky she tells me not to take her picture, so she has conditioned me not to snap her pic (though this one of Marisa and Becky is very nice indeed. Becky looked great in her blue dress, and Marisa is always pretty).

Look at me, with my new haircut!

Course 8: green mango ice cream