Sarah and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Niagara Falls, Ontario Canada. It was really cool to see the massive waterfall and it was also Sarah’s first time out of the United States. Check out the pictures.

I made a trip out to California a couple weeks ago to San Diego. I also managed to drive up to LA for the weekend to visit with Kyle and Andrea. Check out the photos.

Sarah and I went to the Blue October & Yellowcard show tonight. They both put on a great show and rocked pretty hard. Both bands have a guy that plays the violin/fiddle in them, and both of those guys rocked harder per capita than any other guy in the band. Sarah thinks its because they have to overcompensate for the “gayness” of their chosen instrument.

Thoughts?

I’m now searching for housing in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area. Rent here is pretty much the same, but you get a much bigger place. I’m going to try and grin and bear it as best I can. Hopefully living in Maryland will be much better than I think it will be.

I’ve put together a group of pictures from my last three years in Hawaii. I didn’t realize how much I had traveled since college until I put this together. Check them out.

Alohas and Mahalos,
Andy

My little brother Adam and his friend David Cahill came out for a week to visit before I move to Washington D.C. They flew out on the 4th of July and spent that night trying to stay awake long enough to enjoy the firework at Ala Moana. Over the next couple days I took them around the island showing them Makapu’u, Spitting Caves, Zippy’s Loco Moco, Giovanni’s Garlic Shrimp, Lani Kai, Maunawili Falls, and Genki. I think the highlight of the trip for them was jumping out of an airplane at 14,000 feet up on the North Shore. As always check out the pictures and the videos.

So, if for some reason you don’t have a Pownce account yet, I’ve got a bunch of invites to get rid of. Pownce is Kevin Rose’s (creator of Digg and host of Diggnation) latest creation.

I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet, but it seems “OK”. You can send messages privately to your friends or broadcast them to a group, schedule events, and even post files. Alex posted a song the other day and it even loads in a little mp3 flash player. Its a nice touch. Note: 10 MB limit per file upload, which rises to 100MB if you shell out $20/year. I’m not sure if the service is really worth paying for just yet.

Anyway, leave me a comment and I’ll send you and invite.

I just got back last week from a trip to Japan. We spent most of our two and a half weeks in Misawa. Its a town in Japan to the far north. I would liken it to Canada. They get a ton of snow in the winter and the sun comes up unnaturally early in the summer. Seriously, the sun came up at 3:30am. All in all it was a solid trip. We saw some sights and even snuck down to Tokyo for some fun in Roppongi. As always check out the pictures and videos from my trip.

Check out this video of Adam, Alex, and I playing a Mario Party mini-game. The object of the game is to scrub the paint off of one of those big black iron bull dogs. We didn’t know we were being filmed.

Sarah and I got a chance to see the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch tonight. The shuttle took off at approximately 7:38 pm EST from the Kennedy Space Center about 60 miles from our hotel. The huge exhaust flame was still visible even from that great distance. Being able to see it even from that large distance makes me want to witness a launch from much much closer. Hopefully I’ll get another chance some day.

I attended my first Microsoft Tech Ed this week. I thoroughly enjoyed enjoyed the sessions given by Marcus Murray and Mark Russionvich. Marcus Murray gave a talk entitled “How I can hack your (Windows) Network in a Day,” which evoked gasps from the crowd. Mark Russinovich went over the changes in the Windows Vista kernel in gory detail.

Overall, I’d say it was a decent conference, but I don’t think I’ll be attending again. Tech Ed is too general. I think I might enjoy a purely developer conference a bit more.