Gambling Today

My wife and kids are out of town this weekend and so a friend from work invited me to go to Borders to listen to a UNLV student play some acoustic guitar. The guy had some pretty amazing stuff. You could tell it came pretty natural to him. I guess he’s the president of the Guitar Society of Las Vegas. Looks like a pretty cool group to be apart of. So, if any of my readers play guitar in Las Vegas, get in touch with them.

I must admit that I think the best part of the night was hearing Katrina Leshan play a bunch of songs that she wrote herself. My friend from work and I guessed how old she was and just couldn’t believe it when we found out she was 17. She’d written something like 3 songs just this week. One of which she just wrote today and played for us. Talk about some amazing talent. You can check her and her music out on Katrina Leshan’s myspace page. One day when she’s a famous singer you can say you heard about her first here.

My favorite song she sang was the first one she sang that I think she called “Chances.” Once she puts it on YouTube I’ll post it on my blog. I wish that I could have heard it again. I think one of the future Guitar Society of Las Vegas gigs I’ll have to get a babysitter and take my wife to enjoy some nice guitar.

Katrina Leshan also sang a modified version of a song she calls “…you and we should totally go bowling and eat some suuuuuuuper cheesy nachos (AKA See You) (AKA The Song I Wrote For Brandon Walsvick)” Here’s a rather poorly recorded video of the song on YouTube. Much better in person, but still amazing to watch this video and think that she’s only 17.

All in all, a nice way to spend a Saturday evening with good company and good music.

About 5 years ago I was having a discussion with my brother who told me that he wanted a service that would just send him a short part of a book to his email. He always read his email and by having it in his email he’d be compelled to take the time to read it. More specifically he wanted to have a short part of The Book of Mormon sent to his email so that he could follow the prophet’s counsel to read The Book of Mormon daily.

Well, my brother doesn’t need to look any farther. Turns out there is a service that will do this for you. I also love that it has an RSS feed of it too. Might as well get my scripture reading done with my other feed reading. The only challenge there is that I’ve been letting my feed reading go by the way side lately. So, maybe I should stick to email.

I’ve just found my new favorite real estate site. I’ve always loved Zillow, but the last time I used it I had problems scrolling the page properly and the load times were too poor. I still like some of the data that Zillow has, but I think I’ll use it once I’ve found a place that I’m interested in analyzing its value.

Today I started playing with HotPads and I’m really impressed with their interface. Maybe I’m just more interested because I’ve started the job search and associated housing search that goes along with a new job in a new city. Regardless, I found HotPads really nice to use. I can still see a few parts of it that could be improved, but I love how quickly I can go through the map and see how much house I’ll be able to get for the price. I also really love the deep integration with what that size of mortgage will really cost me. There are so many variables involved and I think HotPads does a great job allowing you to change all of the various mortgage costs associated with purchasing a home.

A relatively new part of the site is a Rent vs. Buy heat map. I’m pretty sure this is just a really nice marketing item to get people to use the other parts of their site. Well, it worked for me. However, you can tell that the principle of rent vs. buy is more than just a marketing ploy for the company. This type of analysis is shown throughout the site to allow people to make more informed decisions.

I think that I especially love this part of the site, because when I moved to Las Vegas 3 years ago my in-laws nearly ridiculed my wife and I because we chose to rent and not buy. They said we were just throwing money away. Well, 3 years later that same in-law ended up selling their house at loss after paying much larger mortgage payments than our rent payments. Plus, if we had bought a house in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t be able to switch jobs, because I’d never be able to sell my house.

At the time I had no way of explaining these rather complicated rent vs. buy economic models to my in-laws. Now, I could just show them the nifty chart on HotPads. Sure, it’s based on certain assumptions about the market and inflation, but at least you can navigate best and worst case scenarios and make an informed decision.

I’ll let you know how it all goes once I finally land a new job (yes, I’m searching so if you know of any let me know) and try to find a house on HotPads. Right now it’s great visually. It will be fun to see how accurate and updated it is.

I’ve always been interested in the collaboration tools available on the internet. I’ve also always felt that there had to be something better out there. In fact, it’s been a topic of many discussions on Cambrian House. You see, Cambrian House is a website where people are trying to collaborate with a large crowd of people in order to build an idea. The question is how do you easily organize a group of people who are from all over the world?

Today I found something I want to try called Vyew. It’s an ad supported site with a premium service for those that don’t want the ads. I haven’t tried it yet, but soon I want to give it a whirl. I think that I might do it with the great group of people that have been working on my Spoil On website. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you know of any other sites that are similar or better, then let me know.

Today at work I went to a farewell event for the VP of my area. She had worked for a lot of years at our University and had a number of very close friends. A few of them in their remarks were brought to tears. Someone next to me, asked why they were crying.

While I don’t usually admit this type of thing in public, I’m definitely a crier. My mom’s side of the family is happy to take the blame, but I’ll be completely honest that I’m not afraid to cry when something touches me. No, I wasn’t crying today for this departed VP. I didn’t know her that well, but I did appreciate the great food they had at the party. However, I did cry today reading this incredible sports story.

I just saw a preview for a Las Vegas news report that is going to talk about gas prices and people who have chosen an alternative (see bus) to avoid paying for gas. They put this rather homely unkempt man on the screen and he proceeded to say “I can go 20 miles on 1 bus pass. Two fity.” Let’s say your car gets about 30 miles per gallon. At around $3.50 for gas that’s about $2.33 for a 20 mile trip. Yep, I think we should all take the bus. I love what the news decides to air. News 3, watching out for you!!

I wrote about what I did for my Last Minute Valentine’s Gift for my wife over on Spoil On. I thought it was pretty creative and I’m pretty sure when she sees it tomorrow she’s going to be very happy. Hopefully it will help her relax and have a great Valentine’s Day. We decided to not do much else, but on Friday we’re going to the temple and we’re going to get tickets to go to Phantom of the Opera also. So, it should be a nice little Valentine’s day.

Now that my gift is done I’m going to go eat something for dinner.

There are a jillion little programs online that show you long lists of baby names. Mostly it is mind numbing to go through the long lists. I’ve never once found one of my children’s name in a list. Someone described it to me as looking at an alphabetical list that makes them start to appear all the same. Oh well, I’m done giving names to children (I think). However, I did come across this really cool baby name application. It took me a minute to see how it worked, but it has a really neat way of presenting the popularity of names over time. Pretty neat all around I’d say.

It also shows that the name John has been in a sharp decline. Sounds good to me. There can only be so many quality John’s in the world.

Everyone that knows me knows that I’m a complete ultimate frisbee addict. It’s snowing here in Utah on my vacation and I’m still planning on finding a game and going out to play.

This also makes sense why I got so excited when I saw that someone had created an ultimate frisbee computer game. I’ll download it now and if you don’t see a post for a while, then you’ll know why.

I use remote desktop all the time and I often find it hard to know which keyboard shortcuts I should use and which ones will work through remote desktop. Ctl alt del is the most common one I need. Luckily windows has created some remote desktop keyboard alternatives. Very useful for those who use remote desktop as much as I do.