…about our wedding day. :)

1. I was incredibly hungover when I woke up Saturday morning and was barely alive until we got back from the hair appointment. Then, I think it was the adrenaline or realizing I was getting married that just completely flushed the alcohol from my system.

2. Our wedding was broadcast live over the internet. Our minister was amazing and the chapel was beautiful to the point that I got choked up when I first walked in. Here’s the saved and edited version:

3. The view from top of the Stratosphere is amazing… none of our outdoor wedding shots are in front of a background or photoshopped (it’s really that beautiful of a view).

4. Dinner was absolutely delicious (seriously, we didn’t hear one complaint and I was completely FLOORED by how good the ravioli and steak were), catered at Fellini’s Restaurant:

1st - Antipasti (Cold assortment of yummy salami, prosciutto, mortadella, soppressata, provolone, fontinella, roasted peppers, marinated eggplant, marinated zucchini, marinated artichoke hearts, and olives)

2nd - Ravioli all Vodka (Ravioli pasta filled with a blend of ricotta and Romano cheeses, simmered in a pink sauce made with vodka)

3rd - Choice of Soup or Salad

4th - Entrees (Chicken Marsala, Veal Picatta, Grilled New York Steak, Grilled Salmon Fillet)

5. We had (I believe) 31 people total (including us) at the wedding, all of them had dinner with us, and a good portion of them partied with us at Polly Esther’s nightclub in the hotel. I apparently danced on both the bar and a stripper pole in my wedding dress, and it was by far the most fun I’ve had in my entire life, with all of my favorite people there and everyone happy and dancing and complete strangers congratulating us. The night time celebration will go down as the best partying I’ve ever done in my life.

The only video snapshots are bad ones, which can be found HERE.

These are my two favorite pictures from the evening:

6. All the pictures from the day of our wedding can be found here: wedding, professional wedding pics, and Polly Esther’s.

7. Anything that happened after Polly Esther’s is none of yo’ beeswax. :)

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…about the day before the Vegas wedding. :)

1. My second hairdresser was awesome, which was lucky because the one the day before had been a total bust. I wore my tentative wedding hair to the bachelorette lunch. Lunch was friggin’ awesome (Mexican cuisine of the tastiest variety):

2. Dianah, Susan and I went to an oxygen bar:

3. I bought a Coach wristlet for $50 at Caesar’s Palace, because Kristen gets a 50% discount as a Coach employee (at ANY store), so I had a small bag to carry that evening. I got this, but in black. I also bought a bracelet at the Playboy store. Shopping:

4. Shopping, dinner at Roxy’s Diner, running into clothed male revue boys, all very fun. Then the night officially started at Fremont St:

5. The club we ended up spending most of the night at was supposed to be visited by Adam Sandler that night, but he never showed. Kristen and I crashed his reserved VIP section, were given drinks, and then we were escorted out of the VIP area.

6. I don’t remember this Tweet.

7. We never made it to a strip club (and Dianah never got to join us *sad*). I’m a little sad about that, but we wouldn’t have had time with how much time we spent at The Bank… everyone just got too drunk to keep track of time.

8. Undisclosed debauchery is filtered to the LiveJournal. VIPs can go dig up the big juiciness of the night there.

[You can find all the pictures from the bachelorette extravaganza HERE and that day’s Twitters are HERE.]

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Or rather, as soon as I get my iced tea from Starbucks… ;)

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STeaP is now offering a few different ways for you to support the show financially, for those of you who have been requesting this option. It’s important to us that you know that we certainly don’t require or demand financial support. The show remains completely free to all and we have no plans to ever change that.

That said, if you’d like to support us, you may do so by clicking the “Donate/Subscribe” button in the right hand column of the site, or you can click HERE.

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So, shortly before we went to Vegas and got married and such, I started staying up really late, getting things done, worrying about things, or just staying up late to do something I wanted to do. Then we went to Vegas and the time zone change made that an advantage, because I was already in West Coast mode, and then on top of that, we started staying up way too late out in Vegas (because it’s Vegas and there’s no concept of time), and by the time we arrived back at home, I was used to being up until about 4:00 a.m.

It’s gotten progressively later and later, until last night, when I stayed up until 6:30 a.m., took a shower for Tuesday morning and saw Jim off to WORK before going to bed.

That is totally not acceptable. Totally not a way to operate, and tonight, I am taking the bull by the horns. I have two Advil PM tablets in hand, I’m downing them now and I am GOING to be asleep prior to 1:00 a.m. I am not going to become some weird third shift person who works sometimes at 3:30 a.m. because… well, I’m awake and what the hell else is there to do at ridiculous hours like that?

Plus, I’m WAY sick of that penis enlargement informercial that doubles as a staged sex talk show. Horrifyingly awful and it’s on constantly on more than one channel after 4:00 a.m. NO MORE.

*goes to eat the mushroom and go tumbling down the rabbit hole and such*

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1. Work (this includes several sub-tasks)

2. Slashfood entry (post one for Tuesday and write up one for later this week)

3. Mail packages (tea packages, Viddler tee, Fathers Day/wedding-related gift for Dad, social security name change thingy… USPS=$$$$)

4. Continue work on updating resume (bleh)

5. Call and yell at UA parking office, b/c I paid my tickets and my transcripts need to be released from hold

6. Work on outlining my session for Podcamp Ohio

7. Anxiously await morning visit from UPS man (where are my Moo cards that I ordered for Podcamp???) (My Moo cards didn’t come. :( )

8. Deposit mileage check I found from when I worked at my old job (at least two months old) - I FORGOT THE CHECK AT HOME.

9. Use unexpected mileage check to purchase The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (sequel to the book I stayed up past 5 a.m. to finish yesterday) (I bought the book even though I forgot the check)
___________________________________

EDIT: I haven’t even gotten to most of this due to stuff I forgot I needed to do. TOO BUSY TODAY.

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Dear Apartment,

It’s time we had a talk about the state of things in this living space you provide. I cannot possibly be expected to clean this enormous tornado disaster zone due to the fact that I was not in my right mind when creating said mess.

Due to wedding planning, finishing school, and now being overwhelmed with the disaster-state that is YOU, I will have to decline cleaning duties, and I ask that you clean yourself at once.

I believe I asked you to take care of this last week, and you did not comply. It is clear we are at an impasse, so I will give you a few more days to come to your senses.

Please be reasonable,

Brandice

Ps. Please clean out my car as well. It is atrocious in there.

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…about the Thursday before our Vegas wedding (our second day in Vegas)!

1. Simi and I went to my first hairdresser appointment and discovered that the woman who does the bridal styling COULDN’T BRAID. She looked at me like I had three heads when I described the hair I wanted. Luckily, I made appointments with two salons in Vegas (the Friday appt. went much better), so we just walked out.

2. When Jim and I were at the courthouse getting our marriage license, the following exchange took place between the clerk and the couple that went ahead of us:

CLERK: Congratulations to you both. *hands the man the license and paperwork*
FUTURE GROOM: I guess… *sigh and noncomittal shrug*
FUTURE BRIDE: *silence*
JIM: *barely contained laughter*

Here we are after getting our license:

3. We went to Quark’s Bar, where all the following very exciting things happened:

- We were entertained by a very funny Klingon and an awkward Ferengi

- Dianah introduced me to very tasty Borg drinks:

- My dad arrived and met us, and it was my first time seeing him in person in FIVE YEARS (three times as long since I’d seen my stepmother as well). We had a really great time catching up and I was really excited to see them both.

- I met KAREN!!! Karen and I have had practically twin lives recently (she got married the weekend before we did and was in Vegas on her honeymoon!), and we’d never met in person before. We instantly clicked (my stepmother had no idea we’d never met in person until afterward… thought we were long time friends) and now she has to come see me in Ohio!

4. My dad, Susan (stepmom), Paul (Jim’s cousin), and Jim and I all walked to the Stratosphere from the Star Trek Experience and continued hanging out in the bar there, and I found myself waking up the morning of the bachelorette party with a hangover. D’oh!!

More to come! You can check out the “wedding” tag on the blog to see all the wedding posts. :)

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So, I’m is hitting Podcamp Ohio on June 28th (next weekend), and I’m doing a session entitled “Podcast Visibility & Internetiquette.”

Session description:

This session is a round table discussion about how to properly and appropriately interact with your audience online. It is important to know where the line is between properly promoting your content, and driving away viewers and fans with overly zealous marketing and poor knowledge of netiquette. The discussion will include a brief presentation and then a casual exchange about how to properly use social networking sites, blogging, email and microblogging services like Twitter and Pownce to keep fans updated without turning into a spambot.

What I want to know from all of you is this:

How much self promotion is TOO MUCH self promotion?

Sure, I have my own opinions about where the line is, but I want to get an idea of what the rest of you think. Where do you draw line when it comes to someone on Twitter, or Facebook, or (shudder) MySpace plugging their work and giving you links to their projects? What types of self promotion really turn you off of a project or even a person altogether? Who do you think does self promotion well, and who have you seen cross the line too many times?

I want to start off my session with some things that are commonly understood to be faux pas in online marketing and some advice on basic ways to do it right on a few of the commonly used sites, so help me to understand where YOU, as an online content consumer, draw the line.

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Firefox 3 is officially out, so go and get it.  Wondering why you should be excited about a new web browser?  Here’s three quick reasons why you should got get Firefox 3 now:

1.  It is much, much faster when it comes to complicated javascript, AJAX, and multiple iframes.  I don’t have any benchmarks on me, but I do some pretty intense stuff with Firefox and the improvement is immediately apparent.  This is very important because even normal web browsing is becoming pretty intensive, from Google Maps to Gmail to normal blogs with 100 widgets plastered on their sidebars.

2.  It’s even easier to manage add-ons and downloads.  The real power of Firefox is the ease of creating and installing extensions, and the interface has been improved making it easier to find new add-ons.  The download manager has been polished as well, which should help end the old “where did that file go” blues.

3.  The smart address bar is very cool.  I almost never have to finish typing urls anymore…  and it gives me immediate feedback on typos as well.  Hopefully this will put a damper on lame business models like typosquatting.

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• An interesting use of Greasemonkey - Troubleshooting other people’s sites
• The Ethics of Web Apps, or, Ever try to get a list of your contacts from Facebook?
• Announcing Localographer: find an apartment or house with Google Maps
• Setting up a Firefox extension development environment
• Fixing a ‘This site may harm your computer’ warning, part 2: Hidden iFrames
• Tricky little issue in Gmail - how do you find the original sender of a forward?

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Wikipedia is great.  Even now, it’s still kind of amazing that such a huge body of knowledge has been organized ad-hoc by volunteers, most of whom have never met in person. Most social software systems would die for this level of collaboration.

That said, has anyone else gone to a random Wikipedia article from, say, search results and ended up a little depressed?  It seems like every other article I find lately has a big warning label at the top - this article contains too much trivia, this article has too many fictional references for an encyclopedic and academic approach of this topic, and worst one of all: this article has been marked for deletion.

I understand that it must be very difficult to wrangle all the millions of contributions into a consistently high-quality encyclopedia.  Just dealing with all the spam and abuse must be an enormous undertaking, even when distributed among thousands of good samaritans.  But one of the things that was great about Wikipedia was the breadth of coverage and the depth on some particulars, even if it was excessive to the point of comedy.

But a brief look at the list of articles marked for deletion the last few days illustrates my point.

1. Horse Ranch Mountain. You know there’s something wrong when a mountain doesn’t meet the notability requirement.   Here’s the comment opening the deletion on the talk page:

In what way is Horse Ranch Mountain notable? I am quite familiar with the area, and I cannot think of any way in which it is notable. Please convince me otherwise.

I would think it’s notable because it is a mass of millions of tons of rock and earth sticking out of the ground.  One a less sarcastic note, I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s looked at a map, spotted a feature I’ve never heard of, then looked it up online.  Even if it’s not accessible it’s probably helpful to have a reference noting that it’s the highest point in Zion, measured at X meters tall, etc.

2.  List of redundant expressions. I understand the argument that an encyclopedia is not a trivia game or a book of lists, but these sorts of pages used to be one of my favorite features of Wikipedia.  Exhaustive lists of palindromes, English words of Polish origin, etc., give examples, context, and can help connect concepts in language.  Also, the use or omission of redundancy is an important stylistic consideration when writing - it can be used for everything from emphasis to characterization.

3.  Hindu literature. Delete the article on Hindu literature?  Granted, the article needs work.  But isn’t it worrying how the marked for deletion pages are filled with subject matter from outside the U.S. and maybe Europe?

I know the standard answer to complaints like these is that if you feel so strongly, you should participate in the debates and push for things not to be deleted.  Judging by the talk pages I wonder if I would be drowned out by all the “I’m a history major and this is a programming term, never heard of it, not notable” comments.  I’ll admit my contribution to Wikipedia is limited to random spelling and grammar corrections that were obvious enough that even I noticed them, so I could be wrong.  I just feel like some of what made Wikipedia so addictive is slowly being drained away.

Agree?  Think I’m wrong?  Leave me a comment below.  See, it’s kind of like a talk page, but even with consensus you can’t edit my article.   Until the next Wordpress exploit comes out.

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• Why have a website, why create a blog, why Twitter?
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• What I did when my site showed up as a bad link
• Social software and the problem of trust
• The iPhone, Google Maps for Mobile, and e911 - where is the disconnect?

Click on the photo below for the set of our professional wedding photos. :)

We’re really happy with how they turned out!

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They’re up and ready for browsing. :)

Click on the picture below to see the entire “Getting Married” photo collection on Flickr.com:

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No. It’s not a good thing. Not even remotely.

See, the “developers” removed all the windows from the Historic Stambaugh Building in downtown Youngstown. Why? Who Knows. The stated reasons: The windows were dangerous and leaky, so OPEN Spaces on all four sides of the building are better.

Now, As someone who tries to promote the region, I find myself scratching my head. Less than a month after the Taft Tech Center opens, sparking conversation about an imminent revitalization downtown, just a couple weeks after a $17 Million dollar housing project is given the go ahead, we are back to square one, about to lose another historic landmark. To add insult to injury, We are not losing this to neglect or time, but the owners are actively encouraging blight.

People read this from all around the Country: Whether you’re ex-Youngstowners or just interested in the outdoors, I don’t know. I’m willing to bet a lot of you are the former.

Here’s a good article on Shout Youngstown, showing the Historical and Archetectural importance of the building, followed by Tyler Clark’s excellent list of action items for all concerned.

Show your support.

See Also:

• Weekend Events
• “The Map” : Youngstown Things to Do
• First Pics from the Incubator Expansion
• Graffiti At Bear’s Den
• Eco-Industrial Green Belt Creation in NE Ohio