GoChet.com

Are you on LinkedIn or Facebook?

I finally understand at least part of the usefulness of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites.  The biggest value (for me) in using a service like this is for its usefulness as a self-updating contact manager.

I was looking at my contacts that I’ve made on LinkedIn today, and I noticed that a couple of people that I know have changed jobs.  If I just had a normal address book on my computer or phone, I would have to manually go and change their contact information every time that happened.  But because I use this social networking service as my contact list, my contacts change their own information, taking the responsibility off of me.  LinkedIn is a site built around your work life, and using it as a contact manager is both simple and brilliant.

Facebook not only provides a way to be useful as a contact manager, but provides a single portal to keep up on the lives of your non-work related acquaintances (I think they’re called ‘friends’).  As you and your friends begin to funnel more and more of your activities into Facebook (something that I’ve been using FriendFeed to accomplish, and I’ve been loving the fact that it all happens automatically), you find that you now have a single portal to keep up on the lives of the people you care about.  The more that you and your friends use the service, the more valuable and useful it becomes.

The problem in the past has been that there were so many competing social networks, it was difficult to decide which one(s) to get involved with.  Now that we have pretty clear winners with Facebook (for friends) and LinkedIn (for business), these networks are becoming exponentially more useful and valuable.

So the question now becomes:  Do YOU have a Facebook or LinkedIn account?  If so, please add me as a contact.  If not, how about you take a couple minutes to create a profile, and then let me know about it?! 
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Obama, I’m so pissed off at you.

Not that it’s going to change my vote, but this really pissed me off.  See the full story here.

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Chet’s first garage sale!

All summer long I’ve been telling you about Saints games, street dances, waterslides, drinking and carousing, but sometimes summertime means something different. Sometimes summertime means “get all the crap that you don’t need out of your house and garage and have a damn rummage sale.”

But I’ve never done that before. So being my first time, I enlisted the help of my wonderful and capable girlfriend Sharon to help me with things like pricing. And merchandising. And counting…

I’m actually writing this post in the garage during the sale on Saturday afternoon, and things are going great! We’ve made about $50 so far, and it’s only about noon. The oppressive heat from yesterday has broken, and it’s a pleasant and breezy 80 degrees. And some guy just gave me $5 for a crappy set of golf clubs that I found in the garage when I moved in. Cha-CHING!

I took a couple of photos with my BlackBerry to post here for you, and am delighted to find out how simple it is to do blogging in real time. Have a great day, and when our sale is over later today, we’re gonna go blow all this money at the bar! Bye for now!

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Packing it all into summer…

So, yeah, sorry I didn’t blog about how awesome last weekend was, but honestly, I’ve been tired and busy as all hell.  Summer is my favorite time of year, without question, but it seriously needs about 12 more hours in the days.

Last weekend was everything that I thought it was going to be.  I ended up making Kabobs on the grill on Friday Night, then heading to the ‘Karaoke under the tent’ in North Branch, where I sang karaoke while operating in a blackout.  Saturday brought us to Wild Mountain for the water slides and stuff, where I made a day of pointing out the staff that I worked there before they were even born.  Saturday night, of course, was the street dance in NB, where I got to talk to dozens of people from high school, and reminisce about what a temperamental problem child I used to be.  Ahh….  Good times….

Sunday was a Saints Game day, and I managed to snap a few photos of the Sasquatch that was there (not really sure why), and then we went home and drank some wine.  Whew!  Needless to say, it took me a couple days of early bedtimes to shake all that off…

On top of all that, I’ve been installing and tweaking Ubuntu 8.04 and Opera 9.5 on both my roommates computer and my own, and struggling to get audio and video to work correctly on 2 completely different computers.  I must say, however, that if you’ve got a junk computer lying around, and you want to make it useful, I’ve become quite the Ubuntu Linux guru lately, and I can probably re-purpose it for you (not for free).  I’m becoming more and more enthralled with Ubuntu, and how well it works as an operating system.  I still don’t think it’s for novices to set up, but once up and running, it’s a pretty fool-proof way to set up a little internet/email/word-processing machine.

So, that brings me to this coming week.  I’ve got more computer work planned, a Saints game, a trip to the North Shore, golfing, drinking and Sharon is making her first paella.  Details to come, and thanks for stopping by!

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Epic Fail

Ok everyone, how’s it going?!

I really don’t have that much to post about right now, but I haven’t put anything on here in a while, so I thought I’d at least make an effort.

Part of the delay has been that my computer took a great big dump last week, and my hard drive is officially fried.  This is a little disconcerting on a couple of different levels.  I had most of my important files and photos backed up (because this happened to me a few years ago, and I learned the hard way), but some of my most recent photos, files, and 100GB of music that I had are apparently now gone.  If you don’t have your important files backed up on a separate hard drive, I cannot overstate the importance of doing this.  It is incredibly distressing to lose photos and personal files, and just a big old bummer to lose everything else.

Since I don’t have $300-400 lying around right now for an entry level replacement computer, I decided to just install Ubuntu (which is a free replacement for the Windows operating system which you can learn about here ) onto a cheap, small refurbished hard drive I picked up at a local computer store.  Ubuntu can’t run many of the programs that Windows can run, but for simple office tasks, internet access, and email, it’s a lifesaver. 

The next step, I suppose is to find out if the data on that hard drive is salvageable using a technique that I discovered on the internets one day.  That will probably have to wait a couple weeks, however, until I finally get a commission check.  (Last month I missed my goal, and didn’t get one.  That is unacceptable.)

I also managed to do some nice bike riding this week and some house cleaning, all thanks to the wonderful weather that we’re finally being treated to!  This coming weekend is going to be an awesome good time as well, as my sister is in town from Missouri, there’s the White Bear Lake Manitou days parade and beach dance on Friday night, the North Branch Midsummer carnival and street dance on Saturday night, an afternoon of fun planned for the Wild Mountain waterslides on Saturday, and a Saints game on Sunday!  What a weekend!

I’ll be sure to post an update next week, and tell you how it all went down.  Have a great weekend!
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MS150 2008

How horribly wrong things could have gone. As the ride approached, the weather turned ugly on us, and by the time we arrived in Proctor on Friday evening, my mood was as foul as the sky and the rain and the cold gusting winds. We decided to ‘camp’ in the gymnasium of the Proctor High School for Friday night, along with hundreds of others, and I was sure that I was going to be kept up all night by the sounds of snoring and rudeness. I was also sure that the morning would be much like the evening… Rainy and cold with a fierce headwind that would suck any joy out of this adventure in less time than it takes to say “Taxi, please!”

But that’s not what happened. We had a nice spaghetti dinner at the high school on Friday night, followed by a few drinks at the Powerhouse Bar, then off to bed early, where Sharon and I slept like the dead. And in the morning, we were delighted to awake to 55 degrees and blue skies, with only the lightest of breezes. Our ride began a little chilly, but dry and delightful, and continued that way for most of the morning. Saturday afternoon brought actual sunlight and heat, but the riding was so comfortable that we finished 2 hours earlier than last year, with only a slight sunburn. We made Hinckley at 1:30 (after a 6:30 AM start), and while obviously tired, we didn’t feel horrible or miserable at all.

Team Best Buy raised enough money this year to get us a tent stocked with food and beer for Saturday night, and my Mom was kind enough to help us wrangle our way into a hotel room at the Hinckley Grand Casino, so we were in fantastic shape for the rest of the day. Tons of food, beer, and liqour were available in the tent, and Mom left us a bottle of wine in the room, where we were fortunate enough to enjoy hot showers and a comfortable bed.

You would think our luck would run out…

But it didn’t. After an early bedtime of about 8:30 PM, we were on the road again at 6:30 AM on Sunday, and once again, the weather could not have been better for our ride. Now, if you were planning a day at the beach, it would have probably been a little disappointing, but for us, it was perfect. Overcast and cool, the day was perfect for the second 75 miles of our adventure, and the pace was FAST. Last year, the heat was so oppressive that it took us all day to finish the ride. This year, we rode from Hinckley to Blaine with 5 stops, and we were finished by 1 PM. That’s 3 1/2 hours better than last year, and we felt fantastic!

For those of you who supported us, and/or donated to the MS society, I cannot thank you enough. Being a part of this has brought many people out of the woodwork who have family members stricken with MS, and the kind words they have for those of us who ride are priceless. We have met SO MANY cool people and new friends on these rides, that it feels like the MS society is doing more for us than we are doing for them.

3200 riders participated this year, raising about 2.7 million dollars. Again, thank you to those who helped out, and as always, I have a bunch of pictures for you! Click here to check them out. Bye for now!!!

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See you after the ride!!

Ok, everyone! This is my last post until after the MS150, and I’m asking one last time for you to donate to my cause! If you can just pledge $5 to the MS150 foundation, it will be greatly appreciated by many, and you’ll have that warm, fuzzy feeling inside for the rest of the week, because you did something worthwhile today.

Days like Sunday are not normal…

I wish that I had better words to describe what I was feeling and thinking while riding the State bike trail near Lanesboro, MN this weekend, but here are some that came to mind during the afternoon while pedaling. 

The air was about 85 degrees and slightly humid, just enough to bring out the scents of the path and the countryside, the wildflowers, the vegetation, the river, farmland, fertilizer, fish, and all the interesting scents of being in the woods with spice and floral, woodsy and warm, rich and fragrant, abundantly green and impossibly oxygenated, each scent and breath as complex and invigorating as fine wine.

The day itself was perfect, slightly cool in the shade, slightly warm in the sun, but just enough of both, so that moving from one to the other made for a refreshing break from the one before.

The ride from Lanesboro to Fountain on the State trail is beautiful beyond compare, with interesting rock formations, land formations, golf courses, pastures, farmland, and animals grazing, so you barely notice that you’re going slightly uphill for pretty much 11 miles continuously.  This is slightly tiring, but makes for a positively joyous return ride, allowing you to essentially coast all the way back to Lanesboro unencumbered.

I had no idea that Lanesboro was a central mecca for all the kayaking, canoeing, cycling, tubing, and fishing for the south-eastern part of the state, using the Root River and State Bike Trail as a basis for an outstanding economy of bike, kayak, and tube rentals, awesome little shops, and an amazing array of bars and restaurants.  The town is so charming and inviting on its own that you’d be hard pressed to not instantly start making plans for a return trip, but this is only capped off by the fact that everyone in the community is smiling, all the time, even while waiting in line at the gas station.

We ended up doing just about 35 miles on the bikes on Sunday, and we didn’t even break the surface of everything that the area had to offer.  Such perfect days are utterly rare and wonderful, and it will be a long, long time before I forget just how much I enjoyed the afternoon that Sharon and I shared on the Root River. 

Thank you, Lanesboro, and for the rest of you, I managed to snap some photos with my BlackBerry that I’m certain could never convey even a small portion of the beauty of this area.

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It turns out you have to pay for this.

Yeah, my blog was down for a couple days, there.  It turns out that if you don’t pay GoDaddy.com for your web hosting, they just stop doing it.

Well, now I know.

What an awesome weekend…

Hi. How ya doin’?

It’s Sunday at about 4 o’clock, and I am in the best of moods. The weather was FINALLY beautiful this weekend, and I’ve sorely needed it. I tend to forget how crabby and unpleasant that I can become when there’s no sun, until the sun comes back. I really have to get out of Minnesota. But that’s a conversation for a different day….

Today’s conversation is about biking! ‘Cause Sharon and I did a lot of it this weekend, and it was awesome! On Saturday, we took the bikes to Uptown and rode to Fort Snelling, saw the Minnehaha Falls, took the lightrail to downtown, checked out the Mill City Farmer’s Market, looked at the 35W bridge project (which is positively awe-inspiring), went down the Midtown Corridor bike trail, around Lake of the Isles, and back to Uptown… (35 miles!)

Then, this morning, we participated in a training ride with some of the Best Buy MS150 team, and did 24 miles around lakes and local roads in a strong headwind and uphill. Which seemed to last the whole way, even though that’s not really possible, since we went in a circle. But either way, I’m tired. And slightly drunk. Since we went out for drinks afterwords, and I’ve been sipping wine at home for the last few hours.

Like I said… This has been a nice weekend. Here’s a few photos from Saturday, and have a nice day…