With the current redesign, you can scroll with ease. And as of this morning, I finally broke down and added a Link to each post. For the uninitiated, that means that you can now directly link to a post and send it to your friends and family and enemies… my witty repartee will be the hot coals on their heads, baby. (Sorry, that just got creepy, didn’t it?) What it really means, Indy, is that you don’t have to wade through the jungle of archives just to find that one gem you so desperately must find. (Like, for instance, the The Holiday Story of Flight 929.)

Next thing you know, i’ll start having post titles or something. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY SHUA?

I never want to lose the child-like (child-ish?) wonder I had the first time I flew in an airplane. Granted, that wasn’t that long ago… five or six years maybe? But still… at the age of 20 I was amazed. During last week’s trip to Vegas, I was on four different flights and I got the chance to see a variety of the American landscape from 25,000 feet… isn’t that inspiring? Seeing all of Chicago covered in snow, or the Blue Ridge Mountains in all their glory, or a very frozen Lake Michigan from the window of an airplane should make you stop whatever you’re doing (most likely trying, in some unfruitful way, to take your mind off the fact that you are flying) and be in awe that YOU ARE IN THE AIR. I don’t want to lose that.

On a semi-related note, I am ready for something different. I’m ready to be awed by something. A change of scenery… maybe a new realationship to shake me out of my everydayness… even rearranging my office or moving or SOMETHING. Restlessness is part of my DNA. Sometimes it weighs heavier than others.

It’s almost February. In February I will buy a vehicle. While that will be a nice and very welcome change considering how i’ve felt like I was 12 for the past few months, I seriously doubt a vehicle will awe me. Nonetheless, wanna go for a ride?

Hello faithful YourCreativityDollarsAtWork™ readers… everyone wants to charge you for the internet here. Everyone except the airport. Thank God for the airport. I doubt i’ve gone this long without internet access in months. That’s really quite sad. Nonetheless… this time, I had literally forgotten that I had redesigned the site before I left… it was like this pleasant surprise when I looked at my own site. It took me a second to realize I had actually made it.

Vegas: The Abridged Version… six people and a load of video gear stayed at The Aladdin and interviewed lots of people on the strip. I took about 1500 pictures, 900 or so of which were keepers. The customer service here is absolutely AMAZING. The church could take some amazing cues from fabulous Las Vegas. The Bellagio (that’s Terry Benedict’s place) is the classiest hotel i’ve ever been in. So incredibly creative and beautiful… every detail is thought out and borderline perfect. More later, when I have a chance to decompress a bit.

Pictures soon.

YCD@W version 15 is brought to you by Dan Marino, the color teal, and Thin Lizzy. I wonder if i’ll ever get bored of getting bored with this site? Did you follow that? I typed it and i’m not sure I did.

We leave for Las Vegas in about 8 hours. I haven’t packed or done laundry yet. There’s really absolutely nothing shocking about that statement. Nothing at all. However, my laptop and iPod are loaded with goodies. So i’ve got that going for me.

Today I got a 1GB memory card for my Canon. This means I can take something like 3700 pictures at a time. For those of you who are bad at math, that equals fun. I haven’t posted any pics in awhile, eh? We’ll remedy that soon. In the mean time, there’s been some hysterical Chuck Anderson bashing going on over at Newstoday that somehow led to a conversation about Dustin from UPSO and Chuck hooking up in a fictional van. I had a few spare minutes so I made a desktop to tell the tale.

Chuck’s comment was “My crown’s too small.”

On the way into work this morning, Mcd and I had a conversation wondering (in pure guitar fanboy fashion) why Cry of Love was never really popular outside of the greater Virgilina (Virginia, NC, SC) area. A shame really… some of the best guitar work of the 90’s. Too bad the drums sound like they were recorded inside my kidneys.

Tomorrow… we’re off to Vegas. I promise lots of pictures upon my return.

The abridged version of the weekend: sleeping (of course), movie watching (the ok Man on Fire and the classy, beautifully shot and scored Darkness Falls), talking to The Girl, some errant house cleaning and furniture rearranging, reading some Spurgeon sermons (more on that later), hearing some of our staff sum up Rob Bell’s message at C3, coding and more coding, and of course getting ready for Wednesday’s trip to Vegas, baby.

Cue the King… Viva Las Vegas…

I’ve spent the better part of a week trying figure out how to do a particular photo technique in Photoshop. And last night I finally got it. What does this have to do with you? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. But, my office walls do not seem impressed with me, so I have to tell someone. FEEL SPECIAL, DANGIT.

I’ve been having nerd-ish fun the past few nights, getting www.hrtwrk.com set-up, coding pages, getting used to being on a new server, trying to make my stupid contact form work, taking inordinate amounts of photos of the piles of print work in my flat files. In short, having the opposite of a social life. But this too shall pass.

Not for three more weeks, but still, it will pass.

Or: A Few Things That Absolutely, Positively ROCK About Living in the South…

1. Eye contact. On the street. In the mall. Everywhere. It’s almost disconcertingly hospitable.

2. Chick-Fil-A. Take your big cities and high fashion and “things to do” because I have the amazing Chick-Fil-A which, on a scale of 1 to 10, has more zeros than Wal-Mart has unused checkout lines.

3. Everyone freaks out when it snows, buys all the bread and milk in the grocery store, and is suddenly incapable of finding the faculties that previously allowed them to drive their motor vehicles like a sane adult.

4. Seeing stars at night. No, YOU get out. Real stars. Uh huh.

5. The concept of “cold weather” involves little more than wearing a fleece. This is opposed to a typical phone conversation with northern friends who say things like “There’s frost on my windows… ON THE INSIDE OF MY WINDOWS.” and “It was -50° today.” Shiver.

6. Sweet tea and meat-and-three restaurants. Granted, I don’t actually like sweet tea or (most) vegetables… but I somehow still manage to feel pride that we have these things and hold them in high esteem. Quizzical, yet mildly logical.

7. Camouflage is always in fashion. Grandma in camo. Baby in camo. Camo, camo, camo. It is the great unifier of our fine land. Bringing generations together so that they can be invisible while shooting Bambi… together.

8. Fried EVERYTHING. If it at one time moved or had a face, we can fry it and YOU WILL LIKE IT, BOY.

9. Any and all fashion/pop culture trends arrive here in full force approximately 361.5 days after they have utterly and completely ceased to be fashionable in the majority of the known world. It’s amazing, really, how out of touch an entire geographic area can be. It’s not as bad as say, the midwest, but dang… still humorously late to the fashion buffet. Most mountain people in Bolivia probably have better fashion sense than my neighbors. (I don’t have any paper work to back up the Bolivian mountain people crack… I don’t even know if there are Bolivian mountain people… but I felt the need to finish strong with a broad-sweeping generalization that burned the mental image into your head forever.)

10. One word: mullets.

The fine folks at 37signals have recently released Ta-da Lists, a free, web-based, sharable to-do list manager. (Ta-da is a simplified version of the to-do list manager in Basecamp, a project mangement app that i’m trying out right now on the recommendation of Ryan and Neubix Studios.)

It’s super simple and quite handy. I’ve become a to-list fanatic over the past year and have tried Outlook/Entourage and stretched Apple’s Stickies program to it’s limits trying to manage 6 or 7 different lists of tasks. Ta-da has made it much easier, and the fact that I can access it anywhere makes me happy. Viva la organization!

Lanna and I kept up the long-running tradition last night and went to a play at Anderson College. We’ve seen everything they’ve done since she graduated from there (and stopped actually being in the plays.) Last night was Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Somehow I managed to go through high school and college and never read it. Nonetheless… typical Tennessee Williams… almost painfully real, and full of great dialogue. Our friends Brandy and Cliff continue to make the AC drama department worth attending.

All my friends will be famous.

That’s a spud station. Darth Tater. Awesome.

Ever wonder “what if?” I’m not a big fan of what if… but I am a big fan of the thought and wit that went into Craig Robinson’s What If Chart. Pretty dang amazing. (More pixelated goodness can be found at his site Flip Flop Flyin’)