My brother's girlfriend bought me a cupcake tree this week. I think she saw me ogling one at Macy's awhile back. I've always wanted one seeing how it's a great way to present cupcakes.
It was a great gift and it gave me a great excuse to make cupcakes. These are yellow cake with vanilla frosting. The next batch I plan on making are going to be red velvet with a butter cream frosting.
I'm a big fan of sprinkles as you can see. They make every cupcake look about 110x better. I wish I knew more people around me who liked cupcakes because I'd make a ton more if I knew it wasn't just going to be me eating them. :D
For the record, I am guilty of eating about 3 in one sitting at minimum hence I refrain from baking them too often!
Cupcake Tree
Same Temperature as Jeppy
I normally keep a weather widget on my desktop for both Austin and London so I can keep tabs on the time it is for my friend Jeppy. He lives on some island south of London. You never realize how much time sucks until you have international friends..then time is never on your side.
Anyhow, today I was particularly cold this morning. Normally I'm scorching hot in my office because of the heat but I found myself shivering like crazy. I looked at my temperature widgets and noticed it was 64 degrees Fahrenheit (17.8 Celsius) and it's almost mid day! Normally it's breeching 99 degrees by midday.
I just found it interesting that it's the exact temperature in London right now as well. We're synced! How cool is that? But as much as I like sharing things with my friends, I might have to pass on the cold weather. :) It's not supposed to get this cold until January! hehehe.
Fully Wired
So I know being able to say you’re house is fully wire for gigabit network transfers and high speed internet would be “eh cool I guess” to some people, for me it’s like WOAH Hella cool shit!!
I’m so used to having to make 50ft ethernet cables and stringing them along walls and under doors etc. In my old house, I even had one going out of the house through the back porch to my office. It looks messy and can be inconvenient.
This new house came wired with cat5e telephone jacks everywhere in the house. (who the hell still uses telephone jacks!?) The problem was somehow using those wires for networking instead. I had my brother come over and take a look at the networking hub. After a bunch of research and some trial and error, it was determined that we couldn’t just use the existing wiring in the hub. We thought maybe if we just switched the plates in each room, it’d work. Eh! wrong.
So we went to best buy and bought a gigabit Netgear 16 port switch that would support the 13 wires coming into the hub. The tedious part was taking apart all the existing wiring and hooking them into the ethernet switches. And in case anyone was wondering, you can use cat 6 connections with cat5e wiring.
I got really fast at them by the time I was on the 9th one. lol. Brown, brown white, orange, orange white, green white, blue white, green, blue! That’s the order I assembled it in. We had a good system going. Taint would strip the existing plates, I’d rewire for the new plates, Taint would check the signal with his laptop and Sahd would trim the wires and put the new plates back into the wall.
It is totally exciting having a house that is fully wired in each room. Wireless is great, don’t get me wrong but having the option to jack in anywhere is just pure awesomeness. ALL houses should be built pre-wired. I don’t know why it’s not a standard yet.
PS. I learned a lot today. It was fun. I love networking that doesn't involve fake socializing. LAWL.
Heartless
I thought this was a fitting post given the events that happened at the VMAs with Kanye. That’s the problem with following the personal lives of artist, it can really effect how you view the music. And artists tend to be even more flawed than most.. I think it’s part of having 90% creativity flowing through your veins. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for rationalizing or being self-aware. In fact, to be a bold artist you sort of have to forsake those values to produce what they do.
For example, I had to stop following John Mayer on twitter because his tweets were getting beyond self-absorbed and less of it was him as it was about the “idea he thought of himself”… often tweeting as if everything he did was part of some greater vision. It was exhausting to read and at the same time made me start to appreciate his music less and everyone who knows me knows I love me some Mayer like nothing else. So I always say now that their personal lives are their own but their music is what belongs to me.
In any case, I thought this cover of Kanye’s song Heartless was appropriate and beautiful. The Fray did a great cover and the art concept of the video is just awesome. I love doodle art.
The FRAY - Heartless from IE HAGY on Vimeo.
Burning Man
I had no idea this even existed until tonight when @Azyxa linked me some incredible photos of the event. I couldn't use them in the mosaic because they are copy righted but here's a link: http://flickr.com/gp/loupiote/29YW8C
It's this crazy festival of community, art, and self-expression called Burning Man that happens every year out in the dessert. Over 40k+ people attend and participate in it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Man). It just seems absolutely amazing. I absolutely love the idea of art merging with humanity and vise versa.
Art and Community are becoming extinct in most of the US. You see the evidence of this in our architecture and how we spend most of our daily lives. We've fallen in love with predictabilty, tradition, and independence. It must be amazing to throw yourself into an event like this and perhaps discover parts of your nature you never thought existed. I am totally amazed. They even have a Thunderdome! lol.
Read to Go
Everything was set for the move on Monday. Movers scheduled for Tuesday, Uhaul pick up at noon, installers coming on Wednesday.
There is one problem! Monday morning, I get a call saying that the lenders are still tied up with the paper work. Apparently when the house was surveyed, the guy named the property as 123 Generic North Rd instead of 123 N. Generic Rd.
This was enough to stop the entire lending process and once they halt one aspect of the process they stop everything entirely. Every day has been waiting and calling and stressing out. I only took this week off for the move and have a business trip next week so this really has to get done ASAP.
What pisses me off is our Mortgage broker who signed with the lenders. I'm thinking to myself, "WTF is supposed to be flexible about a closing date?!" This is not a date you f*ck with damnit. It's not something you can just say "yeah, we'll see how it goes.. maybe in a few days." These people act like they've never loaned money before. It's totally ridiculous. Don't ever pick up a loan from Provident. They have awesome interest rates and are solid lenders but their paper work process has a reputation of royally f*cking people.
I just have to hope the seller stays calm and doesn't decide to break the contract which he'd be well in his right to do... but then the house would go back on the market and he'd have to hope another buyer comes a long. I'm a pretty patient person but this is really wearing on my nerves. At the earliest, the closing date will be Thursday now. :(
Wicked Musical A+
I went to go see the Broadway Musical Tour of Wicked last night at the Bass Concert Hall (Austin). I was definitely not disappointed at all. I had no idea really what to expect and I honestly thought I might not like it as much because I had heard nothing but good things. (you know the old saying about hype)
However, it definitely lived up to the hype. Sometimes with musical productions either the music carries the show or the story does. In this case, it was both. I was very impressed with most of the musical numbers. It helped though that they had Marcie Dodd playing Ephalba (one of the lead characters).
This woman's voice was just incredibly amazing. When she did her first semi-solo musical number "The Wizard and I" you could tell the whole audience wanted to give a standing ovation if it weren't for the fact that the musical was still going.
While the rest of the cast was also very good, they were definitely overshadowed by Marcie's talent. I'm not sure if that's the way it's supposed to be with musicals but I didn't mind it.
The only two comments about the show was that I longed for a just a little bit more eye-candy with the stage set design and production. Often times, there would be numbers that involved a color drop curtain and spotlights. The other thing would be that Colin Donnell who played Fiyero was completely understaged by Marcie. I would have liked to have heard a stronger voice paired with her. He was still a great actor though and had amazing stage presence.
Other than that, I totally loved it. The story line, the singing, the whole atmosphere of the production was perfecto. After curtain close and a standing ovation everyone left the theater saying nothing but wonderful things. Everyone wanted to get their hands on the soundtrack. If they were selling CDs outside, I'm sure there would have been a line as long as the yellow brick road goes!
A+
