Happy Easter

• weekend / easter update
• this past weekend, Em and I traveled back to STL for Easter. Left Friday to snow flurries (not exactly your normal April weather), but the drive was OK.

• Saturday we got up early and spent the majority of the day looking at apartments in the area. Given that nothing about our possible move is still official, we mainly just wanted to start getting a feel for prices in various areas of town and see what kind of place we can get for our money in each area. I foresee it being a bit of a pain trying to figure out what place will be best for us given price, amenities, location (to family, everyday places, and our works which we don't know about yet), etc. But I am up to the task. We actually looked at 11 places on Sunday (talked with people at most, but not all) and got some good ideas. Obviously, certain areas are more expensive than others, and getting a place a bit out of town means a ton more for your money .... still looking
• Saturday night we went to a fun surprise birthday party for my cousin's husband. Good times, food, and drink were had by all.
• Sunday was Easter, and we started the day by going to mass with Em's family. Funnily, Em asked me later in the day if I knew that I didn't have to go with her .... funny ;). Actually I really enjoy it. Granted the formalities and the rituals can get to be a bit much for someone who is a heathen, but I really do enjoy taking part, and listening to the preacher preach. I actually wondered at a particularly loud part (many children crying, etc) how many people there were really listening to the priest and thinking about what he was saying and how it applied to their lives. My guess is less than would be ideal. Oh, one other note about church ... a guy in the row in front of us fainted or had a small seizer during mass. Luckily his family seemed like it wasn't the first time and he seemed to be ok after a few moments, but it was pretty strange to see.
• Later we had brunch (and tons of yummy food) at Em's parent's house and later a great second lunch and family time out at my aunts.
• Monday we made our way back to Cinci (good weather, just cold) and I was greated by Cinci's air when we got here (my allergies are always WAY worse in STL. I am not sure which allergen is more abundant there than here, but man they were bad!)
  
• GAIM name change - http://pidgin.im/
• I saw a link about this today ... I knew they had had issues in the past, but was still surprised to see them change their name to something so different. Great tool.
  
• google reader
• So yeah, I am a RSS convert and totally sucked into the world of the RSS reader. Until now, I was never fully converted. I knew the theoretical benefits and heard the hype, but never really used anything that used them, nor had I seen the benefit. Well, a coworker uses google's reader tool, and upon setting it up with all the sites I try and read reguarally .... I am converted. Yeah there are plenty of other tools that do this (and have for some time), but this is the first I have really given a chance and I like it. Intuitive interface, fast, auto-updating, easy to manage, and easy to make nice taged lists which can be public or private. Everyone who reads a fair number of sites a day should check it out. And those of you who read this and have blogs without a RSS feed should really get one ;) (cough Kooz cough) ;) Also, as you have probably noticed, I have added a list of my shared links to the site, we shall see how that works out.
  
• lots of work, big demo tomorrow
• last week resulted in lots of work, this week should be more of the same. Tomorrow is our big end of sprint demo so thats fun. Spent the last couple weeks getting ready for it. Thursday is almost all day meetings to plan the next one. At least it makes the days go by really fast
• Today I played around with changing the blog's template (I would like to modify a few things, make it liquid, and easier to read ...) but Google doesn't give you many stretch-abled templates and the good looking ones I find online are all designed for 800x600 still for some reason. Bummer, guess its staying the same for now.

Thats about it for now .... I want to throw some info about our apt search onto a google-my-maps-map but haven't yet and am not sure how much info I want to put online ... either way I played around with it a bit today and its pretty cool. Very simple interface.
(The last pic is our "Frank-en-koosh" guy on the dash of my car, watching us drive home)