I started CodeAcademy a little while back. I started on the Programming track and made some progress, but kind of got bored and wasn’t exactly picking it up. However, they recently added an HTML and CSS track, and I jumped all over that. I’d already had some pretty decent HTML+CSS experience, but never quite fully understood what all was going on. Anyways, I blasted through all the courses they have, and I’m probably not ready to start building my own sites from scratch, but I’m feeling a lot better about my skills. Plus, look at all these neat badges I picked up.

My Code Academy badges

My fiance’s family dog, Howie, was put to sleep late last night. Though I knew him for roughly six years, I never got to see him during his prime as a champion agility dog. He was the classic yellow lab family dog that was full of love, great with kids and anyone else that was visiting. His age and health limited his interactions with our dog Jack, which was really too bad. Jack sure could have learned some lessons from Howie, and I can only hope that Jack will become the kind of dog that Howie was.

Update: I saw this post from Beth’s sister Abby, and although it’s a Harry Potter quote, it is quite fitting for Howie:

“To call him a dog hardly seems to do him justice; though inasmuch he had four legs, a tail, and barked, I admit he was, to all outward appearances. But to those who knew him well, he was a perfect gentleman.” –Hermoine Gingold

Great smile. Great dog.

Update 2: Thanks to commenter Nate, who pointed out that I had mistaken the quote as being from a Harry Potter character, which is not the case. I’ll just slink away now… Oh, I also found a few more photos of Howie.

Yep. Took me almost six and a half years to finally make it happen, though I knew from the first time I saw her this would happen. Just like the proposal, I won’t ruin this with a bunch of talk. Here’s a few photos from our special weekend. The rest are on Facebook.

I’m an avid participant in FWD:, a gathering of Chicago-based guys that believe men are more than what the media portrays them as (that’s a very loose and completely incomplete description of what the group is all about, but it’s one aspect). I firmly believe that most men aren’t the completely moronic, insensitive and close minded group that the media-and others- would have you believe we are.

That said, sometimes it’s nice to engage in some traditional ‘man activities’. A couple of weekends ago, I went on a long weekend trip to Traverse City, Michigan with my future father-in-law, and my girlfriend’s sister’s husbands. So what does a group of men do in a cabin in the woods, away from home, away from women? We lived, of course. We ate extremely well (or poorly, if you’re into health foods and such), we drank, we played poker and spades, went to the casino twice, smoked stogies at a cigar bar, went 70mph on snowmobiles, and we even found time to go skiing. Aside from illegal drugs, women, and perhaps hunting, we let our man flag fly pretty high that weekend. And now, a few of my favorite photos from this manly trip below.

It’s January 12th and it finally snowed here in Chicago! Technically, it’s snowed a few times before, but it barely stuck, so I don’t count it. But today, we got real snow. 4-6 inches! I wouldn’t normally welcome snowfall, but I’ve got a snowmobile trip next weekend and we really needed some snow in the Midwest.

Anyways, here’s a few pics I snapped of the first Chicago snowfall of 2012.

A handful of photos from my birthday today.

Even Google knew it was my birthday.

Templeton Rye Old Fashioned

Bacon-wrapped meatloaf from Uncommon Ground

Beth got me some Molly's Cupcakes

Beth also got me some new watch straps

I’m planning on taking Beth to Doughnut Vault on our way out of town tomorrow morning. To celebrate a new year, DV is making special birthday cake doughnuts. YUM. It will be her first visit to the shop, but not first time having the baked gems. Can’t wait!

Not familiar with Doughnut Vault? This is a fantastic video made during the Chicago Food Film Festival.

See you in 2012!

The Doughnut Vault from Mode Project on Vimeo.

This is just great. It’s exactly what you’d expect from pro atheletes, but there’s some pretty clever song titles going on here. Kudos to the team that put this together. I’d buy their album, but I’d have to find the place where professional hockey team Holiday singing albums are sold.

If you can’t see the video above, click here to watch it on YouTube.

I saw a comment on Facebook that this guy was using Google + to get pages indexed “in four minutes”. So, I want to test this. As soon as this post goes live, I’ll be sharing it via my Google + page. At that point, I’ll be checking Google for the post URL once a minute until I see it’s indexed. I’ll report back with the result!

UPDATE: Sure enough, right around four minutes later the post got indexed.