This is The World According to Buchs - Keepin’ it moving since 2003!

This past Friday night, I participated in the latest of Craig's Video Game Day tournaments. The game, once again, was Madden 2004. The twist was, the rosters were updated (by hand) to reflect the free-agent signings that have occured since the end of the season. Eariler last week, names were drawn at random to determine the picking order, and I was lucky enough to draw the #1 seed. In addition to picking first, that also meant that I was assured a seat at the Big TV (42" Hi-Def), instead of playing on a 15-incher. After giving it about 45 seconds of thought, I decided to go with the Eagles (Redskins were my next choice). I ...

We finalized our flooring and countertop choices yesterday. I was able to track down sample images from the manufacturer websites, so here's a rundown: Kitchen Countertop Master Bath Counterop Master Bath Tile Floor Bedroom Carpeting 2nd Bathroom Tile Floor 2nd Bathroom Countertop

Here's a little background information before I start my rant. A large number of my clients make use of some sort of one-way e-mail communication with their clients. Some call it an e'zine, some call it a newsletter. These e-mails typically go out to a large number of people - anywhere from 500 up to 2500. Visually, they look like a mini-version of the websites - same color schemes, branding, etc. Pumping out 2500 e-mails isn't something that I care to do on my own. I've tried to build a system in the past, but it's a pain in the ass. Why re-invent the wheel? There are several ASPs (Application Service Providers) out there that offer the functionality I'm looking for: ...

Deja Vu... If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Well, we're getting closer to a home. We had an offer accepted over the weekend, and are dropping off a big fat check tonight. We went back to the condo on Sunday to check things out one more time, and to go over some of the upgrade options. We ended up spending about an hour and a half going over tile, grout, carpet, and countertop options. It was a little more fun than I expected. Luckily, Our Guy didn't mind sitting through it with us - although he did mention that he's never seen people take 30 minutes to pick out a grout color before. Photos of the unfinished interior are in my gallery. So, although I'm operating under the assumption that it's not over until somebody hands me the keys, it's pretty much a done deal. It's a two-bedroom, two-bath condo on Lafayette Street, between Prospect and Farwell - spitting distance of Sol Fire, and walking distance from the lakefront and that new Alterra. There's a small balcony off the living room (big enough for a grill!), and a gas fireplace in the living room. We'll use one of the bedrooms as office space, and the other has a huge walk-in closet. We're also getting two underground parking spots with the unit.

We spent the late afternoon/evening/early morning at Dan & Jen's place on Saturday. Started with a cookout - hanging around, drinking beer, eating brats. After the sun went down, we retired to the living room, and readied ourselves for a Texas Hold'em Tournament. We had a total of 13 people playing, so we initially had two tables. We decided to play the first round for about 2 hours, or until there were 3 people left at each table, whichever came first. I drew the "big" table, and played with Jen, Judy, Amy, Justine, Les, and Kirk. Kirk and Jen took control pretty early. Judy was the first on knocked out, and ...

You may or may not notice that all of the entry titles on the site have been updated. Instead of standard HTML, they're now rendered in Flash. Yep, every time I make a new post, I open up Flash, edit a title object, and save it as a SWF. Oh, and I do it three times - one for each style. No I don't. I stumbled across a technique this afternoon called Inman Flash Replacement. You may have seen it used over at ESPN.com. You'll probably see it at more sites in the future. What it boils down to is an ingenious way to replace text on a page with a stylized version, while leaving the semantic structure of the page ...

MovableType, the software that powers my weblog, announced new licensing terms for the new release (3.0 - I'm running 2.6.5). Bottom line, it's no longer free. Which sucks. I never bothered to upgrade to 2.6.5, so for the time being, I have less than no intention of upgrading to 3.0. I'm not sure why they did that. From the responses I've been reading around the web, they (Six Apart, the developers) instantly went from one of the most popular web log tools to public enemy #1. There's a pretty substantial community of developers who create plugins for MovableType. I'm curious to see how they feel about this - do they bolt for another platform, or stick it out? There's a ...

No, not that horrible movie starring James Spader wanna-be Arye Gross. We took a poke at a few more condos last night. Both were in the same building, a converted warehouse in the Brady Street area. The first was reasonably priced, and it was a loft. Bottom floor had a kitchen, half-bath, and a pretty sizable living area. A pretty steep set of stairs led up to the loft space: 1 bedroom, 1 full bath, and another bedroom that was more realistically an office. Judy was a little freaked out because there were no doors anywhere (except the bathrooms), and the stairs. The deciding blow(s) were that there wasn't an in-unit laundry, and there ...

I'm kicking off a new feature on the site today. I live within a mile of work, but I rarely take advantage of that at lunchtime. It's got more to do with being, well, lazy, than anything else. I tend to eat out a lot. And, I typically end up at Jimmy John's - 3 times a week. The rest of my lunches are split between Einstein Brothers, Panera, Subway, Chipotle, and the occasional trip into Pick & Save. So, for posterity, I'm going to chronicle my lunchtime menus here. For the time being, I'll only show the current luncheon of choice, but ...

Thanks to the nifty little newsfeed script I have running in the sidebar, I saw an article over at Slate about athletes running their own web logs. One of the bits in the article mentions a few sites, one of them being Blog Maverick - the Mark Cuban weblog. I've spent about 45 minutes poking around there, and its very interesting stuff. Say what you will about the guy, but he's pretty sharp. To top it all off, there was a post a few days ago about his hotly anticipated reality/contest show, "The Benefactor" I can't ...

I just took a look at the most recent usage stats, and saw that I got a few hits from search engines: # wifi maps # wi-fi maps # espn toolbar I was a little surprised to see that I'm in the top 3 results for each of those. Cool!

Round One of home-hunting happened over the weekend. Last week, Our Guy gave us a packet of printouts to dig through. We hadn't given him much direction in terms of what we're looking for - because we don't know. The packets were broken down by location, and one by price. We were able to immediately disqualify about 1/3 of what was in there, and after rummaging through the rest, we found about 1/3 that we would have considered. So, given that info, Our Guy lined up showings for us on Saturday afternoon. We never did make it down to Bay View - scheduling conflicts, or something. We did see 6 places in the downtown/eastside and 'Tosa areas; a few single-family houses, ...