Vegas is Big. I made it through alive. Too tired to write more: it’s 2:30 here, 4:30 on my body’s Central Time. G’nite.

An update from Utah- There’s not much here except for barren landscapes and I-70. Quite beautiful though, in an exotic other-worldly sort of way. Just a little unnerving to see a road sign: “No services on I-70 next 100 miles”… Anyway, Utah is pretty cool to drive through, AND to make it even better yet, I finished my LiveTrip program last night, so you can follow our progress live by clicking on the link at the top of this page! Try it out, and let me know what you think. The only problem I didnt anticipate was: there are no fricking cities in Utah to ask Google to put on the map! So I guess hang on a bit until we reach mappable civilization. 🙂 Until then! (Or actually until we reach cellphone coverage again… 😉 )

Road Trip to CA: Day 3
After a marathon 12ish hour drive across all of Nebraska and Colorado yesterday, we stayed the night about 20 miles from Utah in Grand Junction, CO. Along the way, we passed through Denver and the Rocky Mountains, which were pretty awesome! The only snag was some road construction on the west side of the mountains, which cost us like 40 minutes of stop-and-go traffic that also made my left leg tired from clutching 🙂 After that we had quite the adventure finding food in Rifle, CO. We ended up at a crazy local Mexican restaurant that actually had pretty good food. This picture is the beautiful canyon we were stuck in during the road construction. See all the stopped cars ahead?

End of Day 1: Jeni and I made it to Lincoln, Nebraska around 7:30 pm. Had supper at Culvers and then checked out the Capitol in downtown Lincoln. It was really interesting architecturally, it felt kindof like a temple or something. Then at night I started working on a new WordPress gadget that I’ve called LiveTrip. You can see an early prototype at the link at the top of this page. The goal is to extend the Postie plugin that I use to send blog posts, like this one, from my phone. I want to add geotagging abilities to it, so that when I post a blog entry, if I include the name of the city in the post, a pushpin will be automatically added to the Google map. The second idea is to also allow me to send just a pushpin, so that I can build a “live” map of our progress during this roadtrip. Should be cool when it works. As of today, all you get is a pushpin of my house, but now that I got the map showing a GeoRSS feed, I should be able to make it dynamic soon.
Stay tuned!

Crossing the Mighty Mississippi, and I’m gone for the summer! I suppose it’s somehow fitting that we leave in a rainstorm, a nice last impression of home before heading to the great (hopefully) sunny state of California.

The best friends are those you can be away from for 2 years, and pick right back up with where you left off. I got to see several of those tonight, attending the Bay Port Summer Theater production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I stayed after with Emily, Ashley, Irene and Mike to help strike the set. I miss those guys and crew in general so much!
Afterward we alumni and Chris went to Perkins, where our extremely stressed waitress gave us all free desert to go after the kitchen delayed our order. Sweet. And now I must sleep shnce I need to be up in 3.5 hrs…

Well, I’ve nearly finished packing up to move home again after another year of school.
It’s so strange to see life reduced to such small packaging. Makes me stop and think a minute about what it really takes to “live” somewhere, when about two days worth of work can completely remove your existence.
That or I’m up too late not studying for yet another semester of finals 🙂

Well, with the conclusion of the ECE 453 open house a little bit ago, my classwork for the semester is officially over! Everything ended up on a really great note, culminating in the above mug, our award for the “best in class” design project. More later, when I get ahold of Ben’s video of our project in action 🙂 Now to enjoy some iced coffee…