I thought this was a clever use of the RSS feed available from the XBOX developer's network. My 360's Blog. Basically a self-publishing blog from my Xbox 360's perspective.

We were able to go out to dinner with Scott and Jamie last night. We hit up Macoroni Grill and then came back to our place for dessert over "American Idol." We had a great time!

Jantina ordered a new dual-tuner Series 2 Tivo yesterday. If anyone is looking for a 40-hour single tuner Series 2 Tivo let me know.

Here are the recipes for the Burgers and Black Bean Smash that I mentioned in a previous post. I highly recommend them!

Feelin' pretty sore today, after two days packed with Ultimate. We won all but the championship game against Meddling Kids, so we took second place in the tourney. Mom and dad came up Saturday and watched one of our games. Here are a few pictures [link] but I was busy playing so much of the time that I didn't get to take many.

Friday, Jantina and I drove over to Tampa to pick up my dad. He was wrapping up a business meeting there this week. Being in Tampa, I had to run by Xtreme Juice to grab a smoothie for the trip home. We spent time visiting and ran by the mall at Festival Bay once we got back to Orlando.

Saturday morning we drove to Dundee, Fla., to take a tour of Davidson candy factory. We bought some pecan brittle, pecan rolls, and a couple types of marmalade. We heard about them on Food Network's "Food Finds" and they are only an hour away, so we checked them out.

That evening, we ate dinner at Artist's Point, I was excited to share that place with dad since Jantina and I enjoyed it so much on our anniversary. I tried buffalo this time, and it was really tasty.

After dinner, we drove downtown to Duel of Fools at SAK comedy club. It was a fun time; they always do a great job with improv there.

This morning we went to church and now I'm waiting for Jantina to finish whipping up southwestern burgers for a late lunch (yum).

The neighbors replaced all their windows this week. They had all their old storm windows sitting next to the house. I was wanting to ask them if I could they might fit my storm window tracks and if I could have a few if they did. I have a few messed up storm windows and I don't know what to do about it. But I didn't get around to it. Now the storm windows are all gone. Boo-hoo.

I had several people, including Matt, join my Frappr map (frappr.com/strobot) over the last couple days. Did I send out an invitation that I didn't know about?

I have an Ultimate tournament this weekend at ISU. My team, Torque (Spfld/Jax), is combining with the Peoria team, so we should have quite a big team.

Added a bunch of movies to the list that we were able to watch recently ... mostly because of vacation, I guess.

Julie called Turin Brakes "my emo-y music" last night and I'm aghast. Help me out here ... Turin Brakes is SO not emo. Do I like ANY emo? Maybe ... though I think that's beside the point here.

Going back to work today, after a nice week of vacation. I'll try to put some pics on Flickr sometime, but I've only had time to upload one so far.

Some of the stuff we did:
Saw Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin (from a distance ... not yet open for the season),
toured House on the Rock,
tried baked potato pizza (turned out to be pretty good),
toured a winery,
found a couple nice little shops and resturants (like Cafe Fiesta Fe),
wandered around Madison near the UW campus,
bought a new car (Toyota Matrix),
went to see Eisley in St. Louis,
went to the Venus Envy art show.

A friend of mine is getting rid of his old computer. Just to make sure the next owner doesn't have access to sensitive files, I ran a Department of Defense directive 5220-22.M compliant hard drive wipe on his system.

It didn't take long to find a utility, but in case anyone else ever needs to wipe their data completely from a system before donating, selling, or trashing... check out Darik's Boot and Nuke. It is open source, free, and I can verify that it works well.

Check out the updated icons — now in official Fuzzycouch colors. We should make one for Brett, even though he has only posted once or twice. Troy was able to make one for Brett from a wedding photo.

Guido



Troy



Matt



Brett



Ryan



Found out we couldn't pick up the new car today, because the one the dealer had got in for us didn't turn out to be the right one somehow. We were probably going to take it on vacation, but now we're taking the Civic. And we'll mess with the new car stuff next week or the week after.

Looks like we bought a car last night ... or perhaps I should say we started the official process. But I think we'll be getting it this week. More details later...


I picked up my new mobile phone this weekend.

Went to Mom's concert Sunday afternoon, then tried Rudy's, a new resturant in Lincoln.

Last night to further celebrate April Fool's Day we went with our friends Jamie and Scott to "A Fool's Night Out" in downtown Orlando. I was pulled onto the stage for the Banana song skit, which was really funny. If you click "videos" on Kirk Marsh's site, you can see the bit done by someone else and imagine MY participation! It was a great time, we would highly recommend checking it out next time its scheduled.



Also, thank you everyone for sharing in our spontaneous trip excitement. It really made our day :)

Guido and I were chatting on IM this morning after he saw my last post, and happened to mention I had just checked my frequent flyer miles and there were a bunch about to expire. I'm normally traveling Monday-Thursday for work, and free for fun on Friday, so we joked about going on a spontaneous trip.

Guido told his boss, who thought it was funny, and said, "You should do it." So Guido called me at home and we talked about it for real for a few minutes. Guido IM'd Julie at work and she could not go, and I discovered that Jantina could not go, because she was throwing a baby shower. Guido was able to officially get half of Friday off so he was a "GO" for the spontaneous trip!

We wanted to go somewhere we could do stuff all night and actually have things to do and places to go, so we decided on the spectacle that is VEGAS! Hahaha. Guido had been before briefly and I had only been to the airport. I was able to secure a get-a-way weekend at our condo, the Marriott Grande Chateau, a plane ticket for me from Orlando, and one for Guido from Springfield all with the points.

We met up at LAS, our flights arriving only a couple hours apart, so it worked out great. We grabbed a cab and went to the Hilton first because I've always wanted to see the Star Trek "Experience" there and visit "Quarks." It was really cool, I especially enjoyed the Dabo tables! Then Guido took us to the older Vegas strip for a little bit then back to the far end of the main strip.

We went to the MGM Grand, and this was classic ... So neither of us especially like gambling and neither had really played craps before, but we decided to try our hand at it just to say we'd played. Once we elbowed our ways to a spot at the table, we realized the minimum bet was higher than we thought, and rather than play 4 or 5 times, we decided to pool the cash we were willing to lose together for one big play. That way, we'd be able to just go enjoy the other sites and attractions with our gambling budget spent.

Well, it didn't work out that way! We started winning, letting it ride, and winning again! It was so freaky. We ended up with $52,255.25 total! And this is only Friday night ... er, very early Saturday morning! We have all weekend left, but we are NOT gambling the winnings away.


Right now, we're writing this down from the condo lobby on my MacBook Pro on the free wi-fi but we're about go hit this all-night arcade we saw earlier. Saturday night, we'll probably soak in a few shows like Blue Man Group and Cirque Du Soleil.

Leave us some messages, hopefully we'll be able to check in later today. We'll let you know if we've had to take a nap yet.

UPDATE: Added photo.

UPDATE: It's about 5:45 a.m. Saturday, and we're going to get some sleep for a few hours. We'll try to check in later.

UPDATE: It's about 11 p.m. Saturday, and we're be running around all day with little sleep. That's what planes are for. Sorry we didn't get to check it much today. We got some of your e-mails and comments (and phone calls, of course). We'll have to clear out pretty soon. And don't worry, we haven't blown all the money ... yet.

UPDATE: Happy April Fool's Day! This whole post was a joke but thank you for all the calls, comments, and e-mails!