Taking Sides

I'm with Coco

I just want to be clear on where I stand regarding this very important issue.

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My Soundtrack for 2009

I really enjoy creating my annual soundtrack. It’s fun to consider the music I’ve been listening to over the course of an entire year and decide what songs best express the seasons I’ve been through. This marks the third such soundtrack I’ve made. (Have a look at the ones from 2007 and 2008.)

I have a few rules when picking the songs for my soundtrack. First, I limit myself to twelve songs, which is somewhat of an arbitrary number. Second, I limit myself to one song per artist. Third, I use both quantitative and qualitative data to make my decision. The quantitative data is how many times I played the song (I use my Last.fm account to keep these stats). The qualitative data is how the song impacted me personally. Finally, I can’t repeat a song from a previous soundtrack. Something else to keep in mind is that these songs weren’t necessarily released in 2009; they are songs that impacted me in 2009.

Now it is my pleasure to unveil this year’s soundtrack.

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How to Remove Facebook’s "Reconnect" Box

Facebook ReconnectDoes anyone else dislike Facebook’s “Reconnect” feature? It’s on the home page, under the box that suggests people or pages you might want to connect with. Suggesting a first-time connection with someone is actually somewhat helpful. But suggesting I contact a friend I’ve been out of contact with for a while because some Facebook algorithm thought it’d be nice? That’s nearly useless. And because I can never leave well enough alone I found a way to block the bothersome nag.

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name… Because It’s On the Menu

This past Saturday my roommates and I hosted an event at our home known as Big Breakfast. It was a throwback to an event held when I was a college student, but we wanted to put our own stamp on it. So we added something that had never been done before. We created the very first Big Breakfast menu.

To tell you the truth, the menu was initially a big part of why Big Breakfast was resurrected. One Sunday evening my roommate Joe and I were casually tossing around the idea of hosting a Big Breakfast when one of us suggested the idea of creating a menu, complete with items named in honor of our friends. For the next hour or so we sat in our kitchen devising some of the worst puns you’ve ever heard, occasionally inventing something we wouldn’t be ashamed to admit we’d created. My roommate Aaron came home that evening and, upon finding Joe and I in stitches, added in a couple winners of his own. Later on I included my friend Zack in the madness. For a couple days I received these odd text messages from him while I was at work, each with one or two new suggestions.

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The Coalition for a Bigger Breakfast

One of the top memories I have of my first two years in college is of Saturdays spent at Camp Special as its residents Brent, Joel, Rob, and JD hosted Big Breakfast. No, it’s not much more complicated than the event’s name makes it sound. About once a month on a Saturday morning at around 10am — okay, maybe closer to 11am or noon — I’d crawl out of bed and make my way off campus where a veritable feast was waiting for me and scores more. Eventually the Big Breakfast tradition migrated from Camp Special to a number of different dorms on campus, including Salley Hall and Kellum Hall the years I lived in them. And I’m sure it also inspired the Saturday Morning Breakfast with Disney Movie crew who met frequently for two years or so in the apartments behind Camp Special. But for whatever reason, with the exception of one final hurrah before Brent moved to Austin two years ago, Big Breakfast has not returned to its point of origin.

Tomorrow it will.

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