Green Like Gitgan

To avoid drowning in a sea of negative thoughts and pet peeves I thought I’d celebrate my 29th birthday by telling you about 29 things I really like or at least enjoy a little bit – or whatever it takes to get to 29. Last year it was 28 Things on my 28th Birthday. Crazy to think another year has flown by, but here we go:

1. Having a blogging platform that works the way I want it to without having to hack at it. I’m really digging Wordpress. Using the Hemingway theme is great – the perfect union of form and function.
2. Mint – a great stats tracker. I’ve had it installed on the site for a few months now and it’s pretty cool to see where everybody is coming from, and what links you all enjoy. It’s not free but it really is pretty cheap and well worth the license fee to have so much functionality.
3. The InDesigner video podcast – now featured on InDesignSecrets.com. What a great way to learn more of a program that you can never know in its fullness. Wow. That was one nerdy sentence but I can’t deny that I am that big of a geek. Yes, I get excited about open type fonts, good layout and color palettes with high contrast.
4. DJTV – Digital Juice is doing three video programs each week that are a great way to learn some new or not-so-new ideas for video editing and production.
5. My Powerbook – I haven’t mentioned it lately but I really like it a lot. No–I love it. And even more than loving how easy it is to use, how ridiculously free of viruses, spyware, malware and underwear it is, I love that it annoys people that I enjoy my computing experience. Like this guy, he hates macs, but wants one for Christmas. Sounds like he needs some counseling.
6. As long as I’m talking about my mac I thought I’d mention that I got to help the CEO of my company move over to a shiny new 15″ MacBook Pro – that was fun, and let me tell you I felt no pressure as I exported emails from Outlook into Apple Mail. All via a great little program called O2M. (Might want to remember this one Andy if you get your wish.)
7. Reflections! I can’t decide if I really like them or not but I agree – Apple has gone reflection crazy!
8. Swensons. The main reason I will not move out of the Northeast Ohio area. Okay maybe not the main reason but its up there.
9. Fall, or Autumn if you prefer silent n’s. By far my favorite season and it seems to have hit a little early this year. Cool enough to wear wool sweaters without a coat over top is just right for me.
10. Raffi – can you say banana phone? The kids like to dance to it – so do I.
11. Carl Monday got “investigated” by the Daily Show.
12. Concrete – I poured a block of it for the front porch steps to land on last weekend and I really had a lot of fun doing it. I think it looks pretty good. I embeded a penny from each of our birth years in one of the quarters – so someday when we move away it’ll annoy the people who buy our house!
13. The Land’s End store at Sears. Finally a reason to go to Sears – or at least an easy way to return the wrong size.
14. Illustrator Techniques – a new magazine/newsletter from the people who put together Photoshop User Magazine. I’m pretty excited to get my first issue – Illustrator is probably my favorite app – it was the first pro-design app I ever used and is the one that I turn to first. Right now Illustrator Techniques is featuring a tutorial on how to recreate the look from the movie A Scanner Darkly.
    
    I haven’t seen the film but the artwork looks really cool. I’d guess that of all the people I know a certain fan of graphic novels might be able to fill me in on it. If you’ve seen the new Charles Schwab “Talk to Chuck” commercials you’ve seen this kind of animation before but this film takes it to a whole new level.
15. iPod! So I signed up for an account with KeyBank so I could get a free iPod Nano. I should get it soon and I found out that people are getting the new version in silver with 2gb of disk space. Pretty neat.
16. – If you’re on a mac you need Camino – a great browser based on the Gecko rendering engine, brought to you by Mozilla.
17. – Speaking of Mozilla, if you’re not on a mac you should be running Firefox. I’m running the beta version of Firefox 2.0 and it’s great. Works on PC, Mac and Linux so no excuses!
18. Ferguson–my truck. With a short little trip to work and the fact that it can’t (or at least doesn’t) hold two car seats and a booster, it doesn’t get driven as much as it used to now that we’re a minivan family. But fewer miles equals less money spent on gas. Not that filling it up ever really bothered me that much, I was and continue to “contribute” to the economy.
19. The minivan – a Mazda MPV, technically its classified as a wagon. Drives like a car and Kirsten thinks it looks green. It’s costal blue. I like it.
20. Jim Gaffigan, dude is hilarious and worth every cent of the $9.99 download from iTunes. He’s clean enough that I actually played a bit after my sunday school class.
21. Comments, getting them like I did on my last post. How friendly of you – I wonder what I did to not offend you enough to make you not want to comment. If you followed that sentence let me know what I should do to get you to not comment again. I might listen.
22. Kidnapped on NBC, it’s bounced around a bit and landed on Saturday night. In my opinion a great show, lots of drama a little bit of blood. 9:00 pm, kids in bed and our butts on the couch watching Kidnapped. If you’ve got kids or spare time you’re not doing anything on Saturday night you should watch too.
23. I really enjoy when classic music is used to make funny commercials, like when the Johnny Cash song ‘Ring of Fire’ was used for a hemmoroid commercial, or Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ was used in a Memorex commercial where a teen driver is cruising and at the end it reveals that he’s driving a hearse. I love commercials like that. I actually probably pay better attention to the commercials than some shows.
24. Peanut Butter Kisses – It’s a fall tradition in the Smith family to have a glass pumpkin filled with Mary Jane Peanut Butter Kisses in the orange and black wrappers. It used to be a Smith kid tradition to take those wrappers and stuff them into the couch until mom one year told us if she found one wrapper anywhere besides the trash can then the tradition would end. The other day we were over at Ben & Ashley’s place and they too had a glass pumpkin filled with peanut butter kisses – and now, their couch has wrappers stuffed into it too! Don’t you just love traditions.
25. Adium – a great multi-proticol instant messaging client. Lets me use AOL, Yahoo, GoogleTalk and a bunch of others all at the same time – its for mac only but wanting to share the love I recommend Trillian for you Windows junkies. Nice for having once all your eggs in one basket.
26. Speaking of eggs, we’re eating a lot lately and it got me wondering, how many eggs can a chicken lay in a year? 260 – that’s around one every weekday each year. Now, you can’t complain that I never teach you anything.
27. Banned Phrases – I love these kinds of lists. It’s nice to see someone doing something useful with the internet.
28. The internet.  What a great idea this was – thanks Al Gore.  I find a lot of useful stuff out here on the internet – really.  I mean beyond the goofy stuff like #27, there really is some quality floating out and about to be discovered. Things like meetwithapproval.com, a great way to organize group events where people don’t have shared calendars. Or Backpack by 37signals – keep notes, send yourself reminders, store files online, whatever… And fun stuff too like NBC’s Rewind that lets you watch a 2-minute recap of their shows or in some case, watch the whole thing.  You can keep track of all the stuff you find without being tied to one machine using services like  Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia, find cool news with Digg and share it all with your friends. And the neat thing is a lot of this stuff is free.  The internet is a pretty great thing as long as steer clear of all the crud.
29. Yep, 29.  I’ve made it through 29 years of life and I have to say that it’s really just starting to get interesting.  Oh and for all of you that were wondering – yes, I made it through my birthday without having a singing telegram from my mother-in-law.