One of my good friends, Jacob, is getting married this weekend and I felt I was in need of a new suit.

Robin Sparkles – Let’s Go To The Mall!

I really love Banana Republic so that was the first, and only, stop on this trip for me. Heather and I quickly found the perfect suit and after a few shirt/tie combos found the right fit for the weekend. I’m going to look awesome (but not as awesome as Heather). I’m not 100% sure this is the exact suit I bought, but if not it’s close:

Modern chalk-stripe two-button suit blazer

That’s also the exact tie I bought in the picture on the left, however I’ll probably be wearing it with a white shirt. Heather says I look like someone from Mad Men in the suit. Not Don Draper tho, she made sure to point out. I’ll take what I can get.

This is also going to look awesome on International Suit Up Day.

…where I make excuses for why I seem to never post anything for months at a time.

Excuses:

1. I’m just not a very compelling writer
   • I always have these great ideas (or so I think) for posts, but can never properly put them into words and feel good about putting up on the internet for people to actually read
2. I’m usually at work when I think of something to write about.
   • Case in point: I’m at work right now! I don’t generally spend a lot of time on the internet at home, and unless I get a new phone (I’m looking at you Nexus One) writing out posts while mobile just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Reason why Excuse #1 is L-A-M-E:

• It’s the old age adage (or is that age-old adage, I can never remember), but you’ll only get better at something by doing it more often. I blame my feeble self-esteem, and my lack of internet-cred.

I’ve got a few things on the go, and although I’m not going to call it a “resolution” I hope to post with a bit more frequency in 2010.

How many friends do you know who have started a blog? Of those friends how many of them actively update them? Chances are those blogs are a lot like this one, with sporadic monthly updates, most of them saying “I PROMISE TO UPDATE MORE FROM NOW ON”, but that post is from 3 months ago and now you’re left to ponder if it’s even worth checking that blog anymore.

I’m not going to pretend like this post is any different. I do have at least one cool thing to talk about in the near future, like the awesome home network/media center I just picked up and put together this past weekend which I promise will constitute a real blog post within the next few weeks. Let’s face it, I’m blogging this really quick post from work, but work is not where I should be blogging from, in fact I feel guilty blogging this right now (my excuse is that I’m waiting for a test model to alarm so I can capture a few data points), and when I’m home I usually don’t spend much time on the computer, so realistically, no, don’t expect much more in the way of frequency of updates, except when I have something to cool to blog about or I feel like talking about the Oilers.

Here’s the scoop peeps. I originally thought that by adding a post that posted my twitter updates from the day before would give any potential readers the ability to see what I’m up to in a micro-blogging type of way. I rarely have the time to sit down and write a meaningful entry in here, which saddens me, but the format of simply posting little tidbits of info, up to 140 characters in length, makes those brief moments during the day where I’m not doing anything into an actual posting opportunity, just not anything of depth or substance.

But it has now simply become depressing for me to look at my own website and see an entire front page of just Twitter updates. I can imagine that coming to my site and only seeing my tweets from the previous day a little bit underwhelming for a new visitor. Besides, if you navigate to the sidebar or to My Lifestream you can see everything that I’m up to in almost real-time, including my Twitter updates, Last.FM latest plays, Delicious bookmarks, Google Reader shared items, YouTube favourites and videos, flickr photos, Picasa web albums, TwitPic photos, Facebook status updates, and Xbox Live achievements (although I don’t think that one’s working at the moment).

If you’re wondering how to get to my lifestream, simply click the tab where it says “brendan” near the top of this page, or below the 10 latest updates in my sidebar. Easy peasy right?

So I won’t make any promises other than the one I’ve made to myself: to post 3 meaningful updates per week. That’s all I feel I can ask of myself right now, and if I have to do so, perhaps I’ll make it a belated New Year’s Resolution (of which I’ve made none in the past 5 or 6 years out of spite).

For the past year or so I’ve been hounding Heather to give up her “room” so I can move my computer, etc into her room and convert it into an office/spare bedroom. I also wanted to get our bed off the wall and out of the corner so one of us wouldn’t have to crawl over the other to get in and out. She finally agreed to it after we got engaged gave me a deadline to have it done by the time she returned from her practicum, which happened to be this past Saturday. Being an expert in time management I left it until Friday to get started. I took the day off work to work on it but it ended up taking until Saturday evening to finish. Continue Reading…

If you’ve visited the site recently you’ll have noticed that every day my blog publishes my Twitter updates for that day. It’s completely automatic, the program even posts a tweet whenever I publish a new post… perfect! The problem is that it’s made me lazy. My blog isn’t even a month old and already I can barely find anything worthwhile to talk about on a daily basis. I even told myself when I started this blog that I would refrain from writing any posts about how I have nothing to talk about.

Well, let’s put it this way. I have things to talk about. I really do. I just don’t generally have the words to make any of it sound worthwhile to read about. But let’s face facts, I’m not a professional writer, I coasted through English in high school and university; we even get a class in University that’s basically a dumbed-down version of English 101 for engineers. I’ve never even really looked into any type of formal writing course. But that’s exactly what I can pretend to be on my own blog, someone with something important to say.

And pretend I shall, on perhaps a less frequent basis to start. I had hoped to keep this blog updated every weekday, however I’m thinking three posts per week is far more manageable. So that is my hope, and I hope to stick to it, with this counting as one of the three for this week of course, and hopefully at least one of those each week about gaming which I can use as a column towards The Social Gamer.

Sincerely,
Brendan

My older sister, Kristin, is in Buenos Aires, Argentina right now. She “moved” there in December, right before Christmas. I’m not entirely sure about her reasons for going there, but it had a lot to do with her ongoing divorce, wanting to get away, and tango dancing. She’s also doing her Masters in Communications by correspondence through Royal Roads in Victoria, BC. She’s in her last semester and only has her thesis left to write. She figured where better to write it than in Argentina?!

So about 3 weeks ago I got an email from Skype telling me that my credits were about to expire. I’d used all of 0.02 euros of the 10 euros I put in about 6 months ago when I was working in camp, but the internet was just so terrible in camp I couldn’t even use Skype for voice calls. Since I’m back at home and I can only assume calling Argentina from my home phone wouldn’t be nearly as cheap as calling from Skype. I didn’t really look into that but I figured it was a great excuse to actually talk to my sister, so I got her number and called her up on Skype. I don’t think we’ve ever talked that long. It was great to hear everything she’s up to now. Sounds like she’s having an amazing time learning Spanish, learning to Tango, wandering the street side markets, and soaking up the Buenos Aires lifestyle. It truly sounds like she’s happy, and as her brother I can’t help but be happy for her, even if it is a little scary having her alone and so far away.

She finishes her Masters program around the beginning of June, and since I told her my wedding is at the beginning of September she now plans to come back in August. She had been waffling on whether or not to come back in August, to be back in Edmonton for her favourite festivals, or stay in Argentina until December so she could say she’d been there for an entire year. I’m glad she’ll be coming back in time for the wedding. It wouldn’t be the same if she weren’t there.

Since I rarely use Skype, actually never, I’ll be giving my login info to Kristin so she can use up my credits.

I also convinced my parents to come home a few days early from their snowbird vacation in Arizona. They have a trailer down there and during the winters they escape to Yuma for 5-6 months before coming back in March or April. I need to be frugal with my vacation this year and save it up for the wedding and honeymoon so I plan to use a long weekend in conjunction with my SDO and the floater day to only use up 2-3 vacation days to get an entire week. Heather and I need to go back to BC (where the wedding will be) and sort some things out and just generally get away for a bit. My next available time to do this is the week leading up to Easter. Unfortunately my parents wanted to stay in Arizona until the middle of the month. I was literally able to guilt them into coming home about 10 days early, using phrases like “Oh, I guess I’m just not a good enough reason to come home early..” and “I’m trying to guilt you into coming home early.” I’m awesome.