April 15th – The day I turned 24

Today was the big day, my 24th birthday. I see this as a milestone year because I am now the same age as the title of a popular TV show.

After work today I went over to the Foggy Goggle for the Third Wednesday social media meetup. Since I get off work so late I missed the actual presentation part of it (@bboudreau talking about PR), but I made it for a round of socializing and networking. As always, I saw a lot of familiar faces and met some new people, which is always fun.

Then after 3rd Wednesday I went over to Second Cup to meet up with Sarah to talk website design stuff. I now have a ton of stuff to work on as well as all the little photo projects I have in the works from the trip to the UK.

Speaking of photos from the UK,  you can visit my flickr main page to view the photos. Here’s an example:

I really wanted to post the slideshow of all the photos in this post, but flickr and wordpress don’t play well with each other so I will need more time to figure that out. If you want to see all the photos as a slideshow you can do that here. It looks pretty cool. I am also working on a top secret ultra-cool video/photo project that will be amazing and will be finished sometime soon.

Ok so that was today, this has been very brief because I’m getting tired. My new age resolution (like a new year’s resolution but different) is to actually write in this blog everyday.

Filed under: Everyday, 3rd wednesday, birthday, england, flickr, foggy goggle, photos, travel, uk, vacation

March 26th – Going to England tonight

Today is finally the day; Jess and I are heading off to the UK tonight for a 10 day vacation. Technically, we leave at 12:45 tomorrow morning, but who’s counting.

Funny story about that, we had been thinking that we left Friday night at midnight, not Friday morning at midnight until Monday when we double checked our flight info. It’s a good thing we checked then and not tonight.

In any case, I think I will try to post on here once or twice while I am there, and I will probably still be twittering a little bit when I find wi-fi spots (not turning on 3G roaming). I will also be taking a ton of photos; I am bringing my dSLR, my old school 35mm SLR, and my iPhone to take photos, and I intend to use them all. Look for a huge photo post shortly after I get back.

This will be my first time taking a night flight I think, normally I fly first thing in the morning, so it is kind of throwing me off that I have a full day of doing stuff before catching the shuttle to the airport. I just hope I can sleep when I get on the plane, but I have podcasts to listen to and a book to read if I can’t. This is going to be awesome.

Filed under: Everyday, Everyday

March 15th – Now let me tell a story all about how, my life got twist turned upside down

Let’s just ignore the fact I haven’t posted in two weeks, deal? Deal.

Since you can’t get much more succinct than Twitter, here it is:

Good News

In a surprise turn of events, I had my interview with Capilano on Friday, and I was told right over the phone that I was accepted. I was not supposed to have the interview for another week, but I hadn’t heard back from the woman who was going to schedule it, so I emailed her on Thursday to ask when it was going to be and she asked if I was free the next day. Crazy!

We’re also going to the UK in 2 weeks now. I can’t believe it’s coming up so quickly. You can see the full details of our trip on my Dopplr page. I’m linking that mainly because Dopplr is really cool but not a lot of people use it (or at least not a lot of people I know). We’re flying into Heathrow on the 27th, staying with friends outside of London for a few days, then flying up to Edinborough for a few days, and then coming back to London for the weekend before we return home. We’re also going to go to Glasgow while in Scotland to visit a friend of Jess’s and go to a football match.

It’s funny how stuff always seems to happen all at once…this blog post makes it look like I lead a very exciting life. Which is true, but probably not as exciting as this one post would lead people to believe.

Filed under: Everyday, capilano university, dopplr, Everyday, moving, school, sunday, travel, uk, vancouver

March 2nd – Taboo Apprentice

This weekend, Jess and I finished watching Seinfeld. We’ve seen every single episode, in order, over the past few months. It’s been fun, she had never watched them before and I had never seen them all in order. Now there is a gaping whole in our lives which 90s sitcoms once filled. Hopefully we will find a way to fill it.

Saturday night a couple friends came over and played Taboo, the super awesome board game. I think board games are making a big come-back these days, or at least my friends and I are bringing them back. Either way, there’s something enjoyable about playing games that aren’t digital, every once and awhile.

On Sunday another friend moved into our building, so Jess and I helped her move some stuff in and hauled a couch from storage up to her apartment. It should be good having her nearby, I think she’ll be down in our apartment a lot, if only to mooch our wireless. Also on Sunday we watched the first episode of Celebrity Apprentice. At 2 hours, it was a little long for Apprentice, but it was a good start to the season. My money right now is on Tom Green to win, I want to make sure I write that down so that when he wins I can legitimately claim my genius.

And now I am hanging out at work, after I’ve finished working. I’m weird like that. I have some stuff I want to do and I know I won’t do it if I go home, so I’m staying at the coffee shop.

Filed under: Everyday, board games, Celebrity Apprentice, Everyday, monday, Seinfeld, taboo

February 28th – The end of an era. If you consider each month an era.

I just realized today is the last day of February. This month has just soared by.

I mentioned in my last post that I had received a photo in the mail and was going to get it framed, here’s a pic of it all framed, mounted and on my wall:

I’m really happy to get that done, that empty frame has just been staring at me for months.

Thursday night was Twushi, a tweetup up with sushi. It was a lot of fun, there was about 13 of us, all crammed into a tiny alcove in Minato (they don’t seem to have a website, so there is a Yelp link). We even managed to get my friend @ErinMD out for her first tweetup. I bet it won’t be her last…

Here is a pic from Twushi:

The best pic of the night though comes from @DarrinSearacke with his count the iPhone contest photo:

For those who haven’t been to a tweetup, this is considered appropriate. We didn’t spend the whole night looking at our phones, but (almost) everyone pulled it out at some point.

After Twushi, Erin came over to our place to watch High School Musical 3 with Jess. Yes, we are in our early/mid 20s and they watched High School Musical. I played WoW and pseudo watched it.

Last night we didn’t do too much, watched a couple episodes of Seinfeld: we are now 2 episodes away from the Series Finale. I wish I had been keeping this blog when we started watching it, or had marked down the date, I don’t know how long it has taken us to get through all 9 seasons. Oh well, it’s been a few months.

I think we are going out to the market today, if Jess wakes up in time. Other than that, not too sure what the weekend has in store.

Filed under: Everyday

February 21st – A weeks worth of blog posts all rolled into one

For a week where I haven’t posted at all, a whole lot has been happening, which I will very quickly run throw now.

Wednesday was the Halifax social media meetup Third Wednesday, which is an excuse for social media geeks to get together and have a few (too many) beers and chat in real life. This was my first time going to one of these in Halifax, because I work until 6:30ish on Wednesdays, so I always figured I would miss it since it starts at 5. But I decided to go anyways and sure enough everyone was still hanging out and drinking when I got there. So I chatted with a couple people I knew, met a few new people, and had a good time.

Then Thursday was my 4 year anniversary with my girlfriend, Jess. Awwwwwwww. We didn’t do anything extravagant, just made a nice dinner together (which is similar to what we do every night, but whatever). It was nice. To commemorate this occasion electronically, I will run down the super short version of how we got together, which is a fascinating, multinational story full of intrigue and romance.

So, we met in first year of university and were good friends, but were never “together” that year. Then instead of returning to school in my second year, I shipped out and went to China to teach English (you can read the journal I kept while I was there here). Oh to be young again. While I was there, Jess and I talked a lot over msn, and came to the conclusion that we should be going out. Of course, we were in different countries so this was not the smartest idea. So she came to visit me in China over Reading Week, and we’ve been together ever since. I may have exaggerated the intrigue, but all the rest was there. I just went back to check my old livejournal and this is what I said on Feb 18th, 2005, the night before I went to meet her in Hong Kong:

Tonight was super cool. First some of the Chinese teachers asked me to go with them to a Roller Disco!! well, they didnt say “roller disco” they did the action of rollerskating, and i picked up the jist. It was crazy. I’ve never worn actual rollerskates, as opposed to rollerblades, before. they are super hard to use. but i got balanced, and was able to go pretty fast/turn ok even if I did have Chinese girls always grabbing onto me. The place was incredibly poorly lit, with disco balls and lights flashin all over the place. It looked like a really bad house of horrors type deal. Anyways, then I had told Vigorous I would go for a foot massage with him, so went there. I heart those. Me and Jess are gonna get one when she’s here, so relaxing. He taught me how to say foot massage in chinese, but i forget already, so i’ll jsut have to hope they can figure it out when we show up. And then came back and packed up some stuff for goin to HK TOMOROW TO PICK UP JESS!!!! SWEEEEETTTT! So the next three days I’m gonna be in HK, soakin in the sights with Jess. then we will be back in china for the less exciting sights for a week. Best week ever comin right up 🙂

I remember that roller disco like it was yesterday! I can’t believe how much stuff I did in one day that day, this is why I love writing this kind of stuff down, it’s funny in the past. Also, in case you’re interested, here is a picture of us in Hong Kong, 4 years ago:

Jess and I in Hong Kong, 2005

Yeah I had long hair back then, I don’t know what I was thinking either.

Moving right along.

Last night we went to see Gran Torino with a couple friends. It was pretty good, I don’t think I loved it, but it was well done and Clint played a cranky old rascist man effortlessly.

Then this morning I went over to Second Cup to meetup with my friend Steph who was in town for just a day before going back to Wolfville. It was fun, I hadn’t seen her in a long time. It was quite random actually how we ended up meeting, she joined twitter last night and added me, and then we arranged it over twitter at midnight. Once again, twitter saves the day.

In other news, Jess is out of town this weekend so I have the place to myself. Wild crazy parties are going on all over the place. Closet, Kitchen, you name it, there’s a party there.

Filed under: Everyday, anniversary, Everyday, gran torino, hong kong, saturday, third wednesday, twitter

February 15th – Valentine’s Day

While we were at dinner yesterday, Jess and I were trying to remember what we did last Valentine’s Day, and we couldn’t for the life of us remember. I see that as a good reason to keep up writing this blog, next year, we’ll be able to figure it out by looking back here.

So, what did we do?

We slept in until about noon. This was pretty exciting because normally these days I am waking up around 9 on weekends just because I am always up early during the week. Then we got up and headed for the gym. We were given a 5 day trial pass to Nubody’s by a friend who just got a membership so we hopped in the car to head over there.

But the car wouldn’t start.

It turns out then when I drove this same friend home the night before, I had neglected to turn the lights off in the car, and they had sat on overnight and drained the battery. What can I say, I only got my driver’s license in December. This meant we needed to call up a cab company to come boost our car (no one in our building had jumper cables) before we could be on our way. It didn’t take too long and then we were back on our way to the gym, stopping to pick up Jess’s sister who came with us.

The gym was pretty nice, I think we will probably end up getting a membership for a few months and see how it goes. Also, I watched a bit of Tomb Raider while I was there and discovered Daniel Craig was in it. Weird.

Ok so then we just hung out at home for awhile before going out to dinner at Baan Thai, which is a great local thai restaurant. We had a nice long dinner, and enjoyed listening in on the couple behind us talking about marriage (don’t say you don’t do that sort of thing too).

After dinner we met up with another couple and headed to the movie theatre, where me and the other guy went to Friday the 13th, and Jess and the other girl went to Confessions of a Shopaholic. They refused to go to the scary movie and we didn’t really want to go to the shopping movie. It all works out. Friday the 13th was good, not “haunt me for the rest of my life” scary, but definately, “I don’t want to go camping for awhile” scary. I need to see the original now…

And that was my Valentine’s Day, 2009. Of the V-days I can specifically remember, it was #1.

Filed under: Everyday, baan thai, car, dinner, Everyday, friday the 13th, gym, movie, sunday, valentine's day, workout

February 9th – Podcastin’ and Twitterbrunchin’

Another weekend come and gone. These weeks are just flying by these days, it’s hard to keep up.

On Friday we went out for drinks with some friends at Maxwell’s Plum. Twas a good time. Didn’t drink too much, just a couple beers. Maxwell’s is cool because they have a huge list of beer to choose from, including not-so-common ones from all over the world. I had a Sapporo and a Bass, nothing too bizarre, but I hadn’t tried either before.

Then on Saturday Jess and I went for a walk over to Long & McQuade to pick me up a microphone for my computer so I could record my new podcast (more on that in a bit). I got a Snowflake mic from Blue Microphones, which looks really cool and so far the audio quality has been really impressive.

We also went to He’s Just Not That Into You, which was alright, but it was kind of a let down how the ended some of the storylines. Without giving spoilers (can romantic comedies have spoilers?), let’s just say I didn’t like how the Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck story ended. If you’ve seen it, let me know if you agree/disagree. Oh and I think there was a subliminal Mac vs. PC theme included in the movie as an homage to Justin Long (the Mac from the Mac vs. PC commercials), but I might just be crazy.

On Sunday we went out for brunch at Trinity with a bunch of local Halifax Twitterers (Twitterati, Tweeps, Tweeple, whatever you want to call them). It was just a small, fun event organized by @myogis to get people off their computers and meeting up in real life. Always a good thing. I met some new people, and got to see a few people I had met at Podcamp again. Good times, hopefully we’ll do more stuff like this in the future.

Ok so then in the afternoon my friend Tim came over and we recorded our first episode of the new World of Warcraft podcast we are doing, The WoWdown. Essentially, The WoWdown will be a weekly news show about WoW, in which we talk very briefly about a number of stories from the week. Our goal is to be short and concise. We didn’t really succeed in that with our first episode; it ended up around the 30 minute mark, we are aiming for about 15 mins. For that, and a bunch of other reasons (we don’t have intro music, background music, hosting, etc. yet), we aren’t going to release this episode and instead do it for real next week once we’ve sorted all the logistics out. Also then we will be more comfortable in front of the mic and familiar with the format we are working on, so it will be a bit smoother. If you want to listen to the unreleased first episode, send me a DM on twitter (@davemmett) with your email and I’ll send you a link to the file.

I’m really looking forward to doing this podcast thing, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, but haven’t found the right idea or the right person to do it with, but now we have a solid concept and both of us are into it. It will be interesting to see where it goes…

Filed under: Everyday, beer, blue microphone, Everyday, He's Just Not That Into You, maxwell's plum, microphone, monday, movie, podcast, snowflake, twitter, twitterbrunch, world of warcraft, wow, wowdown

February 5th – Birthday podcasts

Yesterday was Jess’s birthday.

I woke up early to make her breakfast (pancakes) before she had to go to work. I was originally planning on doing it as like a surprise breakfast in bed thing, but that fell apart on logistics; a) I need an alarm to wake up, and b) we have nothing to allow for breakfast in bed. So we just had regular breakfast, but it was quite good. A nice different way to start the day.

After work Jess and I went to the gym for a little workout. I’m starting to enjoy working out a bit more, I’ve been ending up going once a week, which compared with once a year for the past few years is a considerable improvement.

Then we went home, made dinner, and then headed out to Luxx for martini’s. We’ve been going there a lot lately, the fact that there are $5 martini’s every night certainly helps.

Also last night, in talking with my friend Tim, we have decided to start a podcast. I’ve been wanting to start something up for awhile but didn’t have a solid idea of what I wanted to do, but then yesterday while I was at the gym I miraculously came up with a great idea and he agreed to work on it with me. I won’t go into too much detail yet, because we don’t know too many details yet (or have a name…), but it will be World of Warcraft related (because we are both big geeks like that). Hopefully we are going to record this weekend if we can pull everything together in time. Should be awesome, I will be shamelessly self-promoting it once we actually launch it so look for that soon 🙂

Filed under: Everyday, birthday, breakfast, Everyday, luxx, martini, podcast, thursday, world of warcraft, wow

February 2nd – Groundhog’s Day

I’ve never really gotten the deal with groundhog’s day. Anyone that trusts the meterological accuracy of a rodent has some serious problems if you ask me. I don’t even listen to the weatherman (or weatherlady).

Anyways, Jess’s parents were here this weekend so we spent some time with them. On Friday night we went out for dinner at Fiasco, which was a great restaurant that I had never been to before. As with most places I bother even mentioning on here, if you haven’t been there before (and you live in Halifax), I’d suggest giving it a shot.

Then Saturday we spent some time hanging out at Second Cup while I worked on finishing up the questionnaire I had to send in to Capilano University. It’s all finished and sent off, hopefully I’ll hear back from them at some point this week to arrange an interview (finger crossed).

On Sunday I spent a lot of time playing WoW, working on the achievements for Lunar Festival, which is the in game version of the Chinese New Year festival. I’ve said before that I am a big loser and I won’t try to pretend I’m anything else. We also went to see “The Reader” which was a pretty good movie, I don’t know if it was absoultely amazing, but I enjoyed it. If you want to see Kate Winslet naked, I’d highly recommend it. Or just re-watch Titanic.

This morning I had to wake up at 5:30am to make it to work for 6:30. Woot. I actually don’t mind these early morning shifts that much, it’s nice to have some time in the afternoons to hang out. Tonight I’m going to one of my co-workers gallery opening, which will be really cool. She does ceramic sculptures. So if you’re in the market for ceramic sculptures…well I don’t know if she has a website but let me know and I’ll hook you up.

Filed under: Everyday, capilano university, dinner, Everyday, fiasco, monday, parents, second cup, The Reader, wow