This morning started out like any other morning. I was working on my paper at the bar of Eastham’s chocolate sparrow. I had gmail open and noticed a new feature being offered.

Group chat.

I decided to try it out with Ben and Shamus. As expected, it worked. But… was there a limit to its capabilities?

We immediately set out on a goal to try and pull in 100 people into a single chat. We soon determined that this was HUGE overkill and I dropped our goal down to 50. 50… seemed possible. After about 30 or 40 minutes of telling people to invite more people and seeing our numbers raise and drop over and over again we hovered at 47. There was suddenly a huge drive and our numbers jumped to 51. FIFTY ONE. (fifty two if you include me). There was a choir of congratulations and then suddenly everyone left.

Unfortunately, my screenshot showing the number 51 failed. But the image above gives a quick visual display of how many 50 really is.

Was there a limit? well… not directly. But firefox wasn’t very happy with us. The lag time jumped considerably and people were having trouble joining.

Thanks to everybody who participated!! I hope you had fun.

Check it out.

The Bible’s most INTENSE verses.

My spam filter cleans out HUNDREDS of spam related comments a day. And even with the technologies JonAbad installed on the site, a few still get through now and again and need to be manually deleted.

What I find interesting is the progression of spam from pure advertisement to complimentary. We used to get spam that just threw the product in your face. Then spammers got a little more creative (not intelligent) and started complimenting my guest book. This is particularly humorous since I don’t have a guest book. The latest craze seems to be ping-backs (references to your blog that in-turn throws a comment onto your blog). they use the link as “vote” on search engines to get higher in the list.

Sometimes the ping backs are just ping backs. nothing special.

othertimes though it’s a link to your blog with more compliments thrown in. Things like, “Read this great article on mikedidonato.com”

Oh Spam. I don’t find your antics cute anymore. Seriously. cut it out.

As I step over the doorway into a two weeks of pure mayhem, I anticipate with clammy excitement the completion of a monster paper and a trip to Texas. I start to complain and dread… and then I realize, well, Sander’s got to go to Korea.

And at least Texas has delicious Barbecue.

If you have a trampoline make sure to check your model to be certain you’re not going to fall victim to this major product defect that’s been in the news. I’m not sure which exact brands have the problem. Just check to make sure that your trampoline is not like the one shown HERE.

If it is, you’ll probably want to return it immediately as it can be extremely dangerous. DO NOT JUMP on your trampoline before checking to see if it suffers from this defect. We don’t want anyone getting hurt.

On Friday I played some guitar hero and was captivated yet again by Muse’s Knights of Cydonia. It turns out you can listen to all of Muse’s music online. Go here go to ‘media’ and then select an album. I haven’t explored their new stuff yet, but the Absolution disc is fantastic.

Interesting fact: Muse is considered ‘New Progressive’ rock.

This weekend was decidedly mixed.

Thanksgiving was, of course, splendid. Any holiday that pulls family together and offers two days off from work gets a recommendation from me. Friday after an exciting breakfast with Abby and Ted, I got a haircut and then tried to zip back to CT in time for Kung Fu. I didn’t make it in time, so instead I went to Tony and Paulette’s place for some pizza and some Guitar Hero III.

Most of Saturday was spent researching my paper.

Let’s talk paper for a second.

The class is international business. What I need to do is write a 10 page single spaced paper that talks about something relating to international business. I want to write about intellectual property. My original thesis was an attempt to try and show that the sharing of intellectual property with developing countries is better for mankind. But right now, after a few weeks of research I want to say that really… we need something totally different. Capitalism based intellectual property hoarding seems to work, but it’s not very efficient. Peer Production seems genius and super efficient, but there are some fundamental difficulties that relate to what sorts of markets can benefit from creative donated collaboration.

If we look through the Kaleidoscope of Geekery, we’ll notice that Star Trek operated off of a Peer Production basis where the characters were not rewarded with monetary funds but instead with notoriety. Of course they had replicators for food. Star Wars was a capitalistic society. Perhaps my thesis should talk about what changes would be necessary from our current international business system if we were to start engaging in intergalactic business.

Anyway, my changing my thesis to “we need something new” is weak. It’s not quite specific enough - nor does it have as much to do with international business. So with a monster paper due in four days… I don’t know what to do.

Continuing with the weekend, Saturday night I watched the new Die Hard movie with the Scott family. It was hilariously fun. Sunday was spent working on the paper, doing chores, and playing about two hours of Rockband.

Now, it’s totally cool if you want to criticize me for playing Rockband when I have a huge paper due because Rockband… is probably the most amazing game ever. With Shaun on the guitar and me on the drums… well… it was two hours of intensity like none other.

I’m an occasional reader of dooce.com. Dooce is an amazing writer and usually the website consists of exciting well written stories detailing her daily life of raising her daughter and her dog.

Outgoing links are rare, so when she posts a link to a video or another website it usually means it’s going to be awesome.

And such was the case with the Battle at Kruger.

Follow Dooce’s advice to resist the urge to skip to the end. Watch the whole thing. It’s marvelous.

Outside of my lingering sickness which continues to linger today, Thanksgiving was pretty sweet. The food was unstoppable and it was super wild to see the whole family.

Alicia gets married in a week, so much of the conversation was centered around final wedding plans. I got to show off my new guitar and did some fun piano/guitar rock songs with my sisters.

I hope yours was as wonderful as mine. Happy Thanksgiving!

Have any of you guys seriously thought about the spelling of the weekday “Wednesday”?

Maybe I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for the past 26 years, but I’ve always said it like: Whensday. And I don’t think I’m alone. Who the heck put that ‘d’ before the ‘n’

A Dad makes his kids dreams come true.

from Jill.

My mom made me a quilt.

She’s not entirely proud of it as she claims that the quilting itself is not as majestic as she’d like it to be. But I helped her a bit with the design and I think it turned out awesome.

The quilt is made up of 100 small squares. Each side is 10 squares long and there is a thing black border that ostracizes the outer row of squares. A royal pink and white pattern divides up the background and then 8 black squares are placed in a seemingly random patter across the quilt.

However, there is nothing random about the placement of these black squares. In fact, the placements are quite specific.

Can you figure it out? And can you guess the name of the quilt?

(if I’ve already told you… please refrain from this mini fun contest)

And I’m still sick.

I guess it was bound to happen really. I had recently decided that I should train myself to sleep less. How exciting could life become if I could snag an extra hour a day… or two hours? man. A free 700 hours a year seems too awesome to not try it. Especially 700 hours of guitar practice. I bet with 700 hours of guitar a year I could be Jimmy Page.

Then I look around and see those that dominate sleep like it was a pile of stationary star bits in Super Mario Galaxy waiting to be owned by an experienced player two. Tim Baird survives healthfully off of about 5 hours. Irene can seemingly live off 4. JonAbad? well heck. Some say Jon hasn’t slept since the renaissance.

So I tried it. I started going to bed later and later and getting up at the same time.

And, as every rational mikedidonato.com reader would have predicted, I pretty much failed miserably. And this morning, as I woke up fully refreshed but totally sick after 11 hours of deep sleep I decided to do some quick web research about this idea. That’s right. I decided to research AFTER trying it instead of before. Anyway, in general people say that you can’t do it. But there are some good points of ‘if you improve the quality’ perhaps you can then sleep less. Paulette suggested that perhaps some yoga or relaxation techniques before bed would help. Tony said I should buy an expensive comfy bed. My mom told me I was an idiot and that I should go to bed.

Oh well.

From a eating standpoint, last week was rather intense. There was the huge Brazilian barbecue, the Chinese food with Jocelyn, the little irish pub with Cindy and the gang, and the horribly overpriced 14 dollar veggie wraps at the McCormick center.

With all this great eating out, it’s no surprise that upon getting back to CT one of the things I wanted to do most was have some good home cookin’.

On Saturday, Shaun L. and I attacked some Asian cuisine.

While Shaun fired through a Thai Chicken Vegetable Salad shown above, I worked on a Vietnamese Fried Rice (shown below)

General Rock Climbing Food Rating?
Salad = 5.9+ toprope
Refreshing and fulfilling… but it took awhile to set up.

Rice: = 5.6- toprope
Not only did this take awhile to setup… the end result was extremely salty. Tony, Paulette, and Michael didn’t have too hard of a time eating it… but both Shaun and I were overwhelmed with sodium chloride.

THEN, as if that wasn’t enough. Sunday evening Pete came over to do a little work on a Mechanical Engineering project and I decided to throw together a spicy chicken soup with dumplings and bake a quick bread.

I’m particularly pleased with the bread. I am notoriously bad at making bread, so I followed this recipe EXACT. Even to the point where the instructions said “spoon the mixture into the pan” and, instead of pouring directly, we used a spoon.

And actually, it came out great. It’s a honey bread and required 20 minutes of thorough beating in the Kitchen Aid… which we feared didn’t have any beaters… but they were found in time for bread making.

The chicken soup was just a quick “throw whatever we had” into a pot with some jalapeño seeds and some tobasco… and BANG. Spicy chicken soup.

Soup Rock climbing food rating: 5.8
I had a bit too much broth. But the dumplings were A+

(fanny farmer’s) Honey Bread: 5.10c
Awesome! Easy! Fast! The whole thing took about an hour and 20 minutes, which, in the world of breads is Super!

So! After a week of glorious food on the road, I get a weekend of glorious food at the house. Follow that with Thanksgiving? well… I think that’s as close to bliss as one can get.

Airports have a lonliness about them from mikedidonato on Vimeo.

It snowed in Ohio last night.
This, following the beautifully strange 60 degree Chicago weather. Odd.

Things are going pretty darn good. It’s 4:45am in Ohio and I woke up with particularly unkemp hair. I finished 95% of my paperlast night so my plane ride today can mostly be spend in relaxation.

Mostly, I just can’t wait to get back and play guitar. This Thanksgiving is going to be very rocking.

Anyone want to read “SLASH” with me?

At lunch this week Jocelyn and I were talking about text fonts and cities. The question is: If you had to choose a font to describe a city in its entirety, what font would you choose? Let’s take a look at Hartford, first we’ll start simply by describing the city, then we’ll try to find a font that screams ‘Hartford’

Hartford has a lot of insurance companies. Not many people live in the city and it’s about as far as you can get from ‘college town.’ It’s reasonably clean and seems to be a growing city. It has a good museum scene. It’s somewhat modern but it’s kind of tough to drive around. The public transportation is poor at best, but there’s a decent amount of parking.

Now for fonts… start by checking out this monster image of fonts:

now… think Hartford.

Hartford is too modern for a Times New Roman and too formal to be anywhere near Wingdings. Courier New isn’t a bad choice, but I think Hartford has enough complexity to it to escape the burdensome scenario where each letter takes up the exact same number of longitudinal pixels.* And obviously, Hartford is not a script font.

Then there’s Ariel. Not a bad choice really, it doesn’t have any serifs (I don’t think Hartford is quite worthy of serifs). It might be just a tad bit too boring for Hartford. It shouldn’t be a bold or italicized font. Century is too classy. Helvetica… Helvetica could work. So could Raavi.

I think I prefer Raavi.

What font do you think best describes your city?

*there’s a word for this type of font. Anyone know it?

Tonight after work I met up with Jocelyn. We had a hilarious eating extravaganza in Chicago’s China town. The food was really really amazing and the laughter was awesome. I haven’t hung out with Jocelyn much before so it was extra fun. After stuffing ourselves with various chinese dishes and a really amazing soup, we strolled through China town expanding our cultural vim and vigor.

After eating, Cindy picked me up for a night of Gymnastics.

What?

Yes. Gymnastics. And it was really sweet. Cindy goes to a Gymnastic Academy that has adult beginner classes every Tuesday and Thursday. We started with some basic warm ups which entailed jumping over various obstacles and doing cartwheels and tumbling passes.

Tumbling passes.

There were three types of people there. The first type were the cute chicks who were able to jump and spin in various directions. (on purpose). They were, by default, extremely attractive. Then there were the dudes who did Parkour. There were probably a good dozen of them. They were really amazing at running and jumping in a manner that looked insanely awesome. At one point they were running and flipping off walls. Why? because it’s awesome. and that’s what parkour people do.

The third type of people were the people like me. The people who really couldn’t do anything awesome but tried really hard.

And I tried everything they threw at me. Some great tips got me to a point where I could land a front handspring in a crouch (not pretty, nor functional, but it felt awesome) and land a front flip on the TRAMPOLINE TRACK. A trampoline track? YES.

The trampoline track was a big long stretch of trampoline that you could run down and then do wild tricks and land on a super cushiony pad. Amazing!

And strangely enough the Chinese food didn’t give me any major problems while I was doing forward rolls and various spinning moves.

I had tons of fun. Special thanks to Jocelyn and Cindy for sharing Chicago with me. Rock!!

I’m in Chicago! I’m here on a sales trip and it’s pretty relaxing. It’s mostly been a mix of sales, homework, and adventure. The flight out on Saturday was fantastic. It just so happened that I shared a flight with Andreas the German Climber. We chatted and shared stories during the trip and the time flew (ba dum dum ching) by. That night I watched a great fireworks show from my hotel room.

Sunday night things were decidedly more lame as I stayed in to work on my paper.

Things picked up again last night when I threw academic responsibility to the wind and went out with the guys to Fogo de Chao, a well known Chicago Brazilian steakhouse. They give you a small token, one side of which is green, the other red.

When you want food, you switch it to green. And the food comes. Fast. An onslaught of meat like none I have ever seen. The first time I turned my token green and had to switch it back to red within 45 seconds for fear that my plate would be overrun by various cuts of tender salty meats.

It was a fun time.

Tonight will be another whole adventure. I’ll take pictures.

So this halloween I through up an MSPaint template to be filled in by MSPaint enthusiasts. The goal was to put me into a sweet costume of your choosing.

The results were massive. Check it out!!!

You’ll notice those last two are bonus images (i didn’t get the pictures up by halloween)

Feel free to praise your top 5 favorites in the comment section. The Artists will be revealed in the next features post.

In the next month I will only be in the office for 7 days.

Next week I’m off to Chicago, which will immediately be followed by a trip to Ohio. Then we have Thanksgiving weekend followed by my sister’s wedding. The next Monday I head out to Texas to return on Thursday December 6th at which point I think the marathon of work will cease.

There might be an extra day slipped in here or there depending on if I can cut the business trips short. We shall see.

The next week is going to be the hardest. I am purposefully not going to bring my travel guitar. I have a ton of work that I need to get done for school and I don’t want any major distractions from my goal. Hopefully a week off will not destroy the sweet advances I have made in sweep picking and finger dexterity.

Last night Jesse stopped by and we had a quick fun jam session. At one point i let Jesse try the new guitar and I picked up my old guitar… oh man. How I ever played that thing… I have no idea.

Are any of you planning any fun trips?

Akshay: Hey Mike D. Do you want a burger?
Mike D: Burgers? is it free?
Akshay: yeah.
Mike D: Sweet! totally.
Akshay: How many do you want?
Mike D: Whoa! how many?
Akshay: yeah
Mike D: can I get two?
Akshay: sure.