Archive for the ‘Friends’ Category
Friend Profile: Hank Vogel
September 8th, 2010 | 
Author: 
pre beard Hank
When I first started blogging, when I was blogging a ridiculous amount about stuff no one in the world cared about, one shining gem was the friend profile thing I did about once a week, detailing odds and ends about some of my friends from Drake and Illinois. Well it’s time to start making fun of my friends while boosting their ego all at the same time again. The first person selected in random lottery style (believe me I had custom made ping pong balls designed), is Hank.
I met Hank through the fraternity and quickly realized how horrible it is to know someone from Illinois that is a Packers fan. Terrible. Besides that Hank and I did share one thing in common: our 1st semester GPA: 2.46. I know this and likely won’t forget it to this day because at the time we were told that to make it into the fraternity we needed a 2.50 or better. So Hank and I were as close as we could come without making it. So I imagine Hank went through the same brief turmoil before we were informed the cutoff was actually 2.40.
Sophomore year Hank was a roommate along with Garrett and Justin. Probably the best room ever. Most stories from that year cannot be posted publicly for fear that my relatives that read this blog will disown me and not allow me to speak to my friends again.
Senior year Hank and I were briefly roommates until he decided I wasn’t cool enough for him and he moved into Drake Park Apartments. I’ve since forgiven him.
Hank is known pretty much as the outdoorsy nature guy of our pledge class. I intend to ride his coat tails once he has his own nature show. In college, Hank discovered a turtle species previously thought to not be naturally located in Iowa. He was in the newspaper and Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelangelo, and Raphael sent him a thank you card.
One time I went with Hank when he was working for the Iowa DNR I believe and we spent what seemed like 12 hours trekking around the prairie of Iowa checking traps for animals and documenting or whatever. It was fun, but one of those “I’m glad I did that once” situations. Hank was doing it every day all summer long. Really cool stuff, simply not for me.
Hank is now in Wyoming, with a beard jesus would be proud of doing all sorts of animal and nature stuff. Besides all the nature stuff we’ve done a pretty darn good job of staying in touch regardless of the distance (even more so now). I will likely call him immediately following the Packer’s loss to the Bears this season.
Posted in 
I’m in Juice Magazine: I’m pretty much famous
I’ve been made Juice’s E-Friend of the week. That means they pick someone who is into social networking and do a little bit on them. I’ve attached the article from the website but the same thing is in the printed version as well. There are a few inaccuracies in the article that I’m just going to let slide. Let me know if you want my autograph. Hell Yes.
P.S. Friends (Matt Morin), keep the comments PG-13 otherwise I’ll delete them. Coworkers and parents all follow my blog.
Shameless Plug: Chris Noel’s Photo at Deck the Walls
My roommate Chris is a togger. A photographer that is, but he’s so hip and with it that we him. He has been doing it for several years and actually takes some of the best pictures I’ve ever seen. He has such a great interest in the subject that he has actually gotten me into it somewhat, though I have no where near the talent or the expensive camera that Chris does.
One pretty popular photo method that is used to make really vibrant shots is an HDR shot. High Definition Resolution? I forget what it stands for but basically it works like this. You have the camera on a tripod and you take a shot of your subject with with the settings done in such a way to highlight and bring out the color of say, the sky. Then you take another picture and change the settings so that another aspect of the picture is focused on and bright. And then one more. Then in photoshop you are able to combine all three shots into one really excellent photo. The results are amazing. Obviously you cannot do HDR shots of moving things because you need to take multiple shots of the exact same picture.
Chris has recently discovered twitter (Chris_Noel), as have I (SPerk15), and Chris was able to connect with some local “toggers” in the area. He met with one that really liked some of his work and they discussed the possibility of having some of Chris’ photos up for sale. Chris now has one picture, the above picture of the Iowa Capitol building, up for sale at Deck the Walls, at the Merle Hay Mall. It’s really cool to have your passion be considered enough of a success where other people would be willing to buy it. That being said, steve-perkins.com is also on sale if Time-Warner or IBM want to buy it. Not to say that this is now Chris’ new business venture, because it is still a hobby and even professionals don’t make a lot of money to start, but it’s still really cool.
Infomercial Gem: The AeroGarden
I am very fortunate in the fact that apparently all of my roommates have some sort of affinity towards Infomercial products. Currently in our house we have a Magic Bullet, AeroGarden, and Mighty Mendit. Having these products around also reaffirms the fact that I need to one day get a job as the sidekick guy on an infomercial.
The AeroGarden is not a standard infomercial in that it doesn’t really fit under the main categories of Food, Exercise, and Real Estate infomercials. It clearly leans more food because you are growing herbs, but it isn’t traditional. I’d fit this in the types of infomercials like the CriCut before I would the GTXpress 101.
The whole idea of the AeroGarden is a mini garden that lets you grow your own herbs with minimal fuss. It includes a heat lamp and areservoirfor water, as well as some nutrient pills. So far so good, it has been up and active in the house for about 2 weeks and everything is starting to sprout. Ryan is the caretaker, and is currently treating the whole package like his baby, rightfully so. He’ll be so proud when he makes his first meal using his own home grown herbs. Boy that sounds drug related.
On a cooking note, I discovered the benefits of washing ones hands well. I made pasta and crumbled in some of Ryan’s uber hot peppers. I then proceeded to wash my hands, apparently not well, and then pick my nose and scratch myself. No subtle way to put that, sorry. I am an idiot. You can guess how I felt.
The AeroGarden post will be updated once we finally use the herbs for cooking. Great Success!
I Always Feel Like, Somebody’s Watching Me!
I love techno. It’s a weird guilty pleasure I have. I don’t listen to it that often, but working out and the weekends is when it moves to the top of my playlist. I also am a sucker for advertising, and usually quirky ads. Also flashing lights and colorful things, but that’s a given. When you combine these two things, you have an uber commercial, otherwise known as the Geico “Kash” commercials. According to Geico that is the characters name. Sweet.
From Brandweek.com: Two 30-second commercials that introduce the character–literally a bundle of money with eyes–broke nationally yesterday. In one spot, a businessman is distracted during a meeting when a squeaking noise diverts his attention to “Kash,” who appears on a window-washer platform. “That’s the money you could be saving with Geico,” explains a co-worker. In another ad, a woman spends more time flirting with “Kash” than her date. Both commercials end with a remake of the ’80s Rockwell hit “Somebody’s Watching Me.”
The song that plays at the end only plays for about 5 seconds, if that, but I instantly recognized it as the type of song I would sit in my chair in the FIJI house for hours listening to. I had to have the song. I didn’t know the song at all, not listening to music in the 80s, and after some quick googling, I was looking at the itunes search results. There are over 70! hits that come up for this song. Apparently an often remixed song. I was unable to find the exact one from the commercial but I found one close enough.
That’s it. I just wanted to let you all know I love those commercials and the song as well. I’ve included a youtube video similar to the version I downloaded. Apologies to Marc in advance for this song.
Weekly Wrap Up (WRUP): Lost in the Skywalks
This was an extremely busy one, because grades were due today, and I had a bit of catching up to do. I wasn’t too far behind in my classes, I just needed to enter in a lot of make up and late work. I would say one of the least enjoyable parts of teaching is grading and dealing with late work. It can really deter from the actual fun that is being in front of the class and working with the students. A necessary evil however, I can’t just go, “Johnny….um A. Cindy….let’s see, how about a D”. I even had to go into school on Saturday morning to finish things up.
Friday the event I planned for the staff finally came to fruition. I set up a teacher outing to an Iowa Chops minor league hockey game for Friday night. The night did not go without some speedbumps, most of which were entirely Steve related and no one else’s fault. Melissa and others decided we should grab some dinner before the game and a bunch of teachers went to Rolling Wok, an Asian place pretty close to Wells-Fargo Arena. Really good food, but the service took forever! About 90 percent of the people had already paid and picked up their tickets from me during the week, but a few said they would pay me at the event. The service was starting to get really slow and I had to be at the game before it started at 7 to get tickets to the people that were just meeting us there. So I left early, while Melissa offered to pick up my tab, and I’d just get her back this week.
Anyone that knows me knows that I get lost easily. Like can’t find my way out of a paper bag easily. I drove to the Wells-Fargo Arena but obviously the streets and nearby lots were all full because it was about 6:50. I pulled into a garage a little farther away. It was cold out, and I remembered that Des Moines has a vast amount of skywalks, which I use maybe once every two years. But it was cold so I figured I’d give it a try. Upon entering the elevator, I remembered I had no idea what floor the skywalks were on. The nice sign said, push S for skywalk. There was no S to be found. So I went to the top floor, which in retrospect is pretty idiotic because I know these skywalks aren’t just floating at the tops of buildings, but bear with me.
At the top floor a nice old man in a rascal scooter gets on and offers to help me out a bit. We go to the third floor, at which point I notice the remnants of a sticker that probably said S that had been torn off. He gave me some psuedo directions because he wasn’t going the same way, but they seemed simple enough. I got totally lost. First of all, nothing on any of the skywalk maps said Wells-Fargo Arena, which seemed really odd to me. Secondly, I got bamboozled. After walking for a bit I thought I finally found the right way as a bunch of people were flocking in a certain direction all holding tickets. Turns out I followed these people to the Civic Center, where the production, “Legally Blonde” was playing. Now I’m way lost.
At that point I said to hell with the skywalk that I though would be a nice warm…quick… walk to the Arena. I walked outside and got my bearings down and found the hockey game. Turns out that on the skywalk directories, the Wells-Fargo Arena is labeled as the Iowa Center. No one told me that tasty fact. I arrived at the game after the group that I left early, so that I could get tickets to people.
After the game, I had no idea where my car was. I knew it wasn’t anywhere close to the Arena, so I started walking pretty far. Des Moines has a big city feel to it, but there really aren’t that many people, so pretty quickly I was by myself. That is until Dre walked up to me. A man walked up to me and starting shouting for me to wait a second. I knew right away what the deal was but I was isolated enough that this dude could have stabbed me and no one would have noticed for a good 10 minutes so I had to play along. He was from Calumet, and was new in town, or so the story goes. He said he was going to help me find my car. I told him I was from Chicago land, and became a Sox fan for the night. Once I knew where my car was, I didn’t make it immediately obvious, because I didn’t want Dre following me all the way to my car. He then decided his car finding services required payment, and again, no one being around, and not wanting to be stabbed, I gave him a couple bucks that I had in my front pocket. There was no way I was opening my wallet in front of this dude.
Came home, watched Green Street Hooligans and went to bed. Any normal person would not have the problems I had this weekend. Oh well. This week is shaping up to be much more fun! Going to get some cooking done, and won’t have to grade nearly as furiously.
Friend Profile: Chris Noel
Name:Chris Noel
Nicknames:Dexter Morgan, Chrias
Interests:Togging (photography), running, Umphrey’s McGee, Social Networking, Doing 8 Minute Abs
When Chris lived in the FIJI house his Junior year, my Senior year, I didn’t know much about him at all. In fact I think our first interaction was me saying, “Hey man, can I borrow your DVDs of Curb Your Enthusiasm?”. That’s about all we said to each other until this year. Roommates now, we actually have more in common than I thought, though I’m still a little cooler.
Chris studies at Caribou all the time, which happens to be one of my favorite place to go on the rare occasions that I decide to go somewhere to get work done. Though Chris has a very demanding classload, he manages to crush with the best of them.
Chris is also very into ethnic food, and has a large variety of Indian food in the house. While I’ve yet to truly dive headfirst into Indian food. Chris and I have sampled many Thai places together. Often the other roommates don’t have the money, so we go on bromosexual dates a lot. It’s not too awkward. I swear.
Chris’s biggest passion has to be photography. He has a camera that is about 14 pounds, and if I’m really strapped, that is the first thing in the house I am taking to the pawn shop. He is an avid Flickr user, and his photo gallery can be found here. He has gotten some notoriety in the area as he has been in contact with Juice magazine to possibly do some work for them. He has also had some photos discovered through Twitter, and is having one of his photos sold at a studio in Merle Hay Mall. Sweet Stuff.
Dream Job Application Videos
This weekends biggest project was putting together my application video for the Dream Job. For those that don’t know, the dream job is a position made available by Queensland’s Department of Tourism in Australia. The “Job” is a position called caretaker. This person has to snorkel, feed fish, and blog about the experience. They will reside on a tropical island on the Great Barrier Reef for 6 months. AND, get paid 100,000 dollars. Insane. Clearly a lot of people are going to be gunning for this job.
I spent a good part of the weekend with Tim putting the video together. I filmed most of the footage last week during school, but we had to do some “reshoots” this weekend to get all the material we needed. Once the video was completely finished, all that was left to do was upload it to islandreefjob.com. This proved more difficult than I thought. The video was due Sunday, and all day the site was down…clearly to the mass amounts of people that were uploading at the last minute. After lunch, the site had finally popped up with the disclaimer: ”sorry about the site, please keep trying and be patient” I literally pushed the refresh button and attempted to resubmit the video for four straight hours.
NO LUCK. Obviously it’s my own fault for waiting to the last minute, but I was hoping that four hours of trying would result in some success. I don’t know how the internet works. Do people geographically closer have a better chance than me in America? Ugh. But the video is still cool so I figured I’d upload the two versions. The video had to be less than a minute which ended up being really tough. At first the plan was to have half of the video be a snapshot of my day, and the other half me talking to the camera. This didn’t work out so we went with the cool collage and me just doing a voice over of why I deserved the job. The end is my favorite.
Chris also wanted to upload the video to flickr, but one without a voiceover and more of an artistic rendering. I love it with just the music. So here is this version as well.
It was really disheartening when the deadline hit and my video still hadn’t uploaded. I spent all this time, and so did Tim, and I didn’t even get a chance. Granted 34,000 people applied, but a 1 in 34,000 chance is way better than a zero percent chance. It was still a really cool experience to make the video, and it does make me realize I’ve still got big dreams.
Weekend WRUP: Productive/Eventful
This weekend was just what I needed, no real responsibilities to worry about before noon, so I didn’t have to stress out about anything. My biggest project this weekend was finishing my dream job video, which I’ll get into shortly. I decided that I wanted to not lie around and do nothing the whole weekend, but that I would get stuff done. Friday after school I worked out, then cleaned my room a little bit. Then at night I went and saw Slumdog Millionare, which…was…AMAZING. See it. Now. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Really makes me never want to visit India, sorry Bhatt family. After the movie we mustered through an episode of Man vs. Wild and then went to bed. Bear Grylls decided he’d survive by eating bear poop in that episode.
Saturday I woke up bright and early because of my dumb internal clock, and went to North High with Tim to work out. We were able to get into the pool room and run stairs and do some other working out. We were going to swim, but there was one of those pool robots working and we didn’t want to make a janitor mad. I went looking for one to ask if we could swim, but we didn’t find anyone. Then Tim and I hit the video hard. After the video was 85 percent done, Hank had just arrived in town from Missoura, and Hank, Ross and myself went to Macaroni grill. Long night out and then Pizza at home.
Today ended up being super frustrating because of the video problems. I’ll upload the videos shortly with a description of the issues and why I was uploading a video in the first place. I’m off to watch the Oscars and to lesson plan for the week afterwards.
Plans For The Week
Today I began filming video to put into my application video for the dream job. I’ll film today and tomorrow and Tim and I will begin editing the video this week. It is due Monday I believe. I can safely write that I would quit my job here in a second if I got this job because I would make more in 6 months in Australia than I would in 3 years working in Des Moines.
I’m also going to probably pursue the SCUBA lessons shortly. Tim would like to recertify and Josh would like to do it, but neither of them have the funds at the time. To be honest, it would really strap me too, but I’d like to do it sooner rather than later. Catch some pufferfish in their habitat. I don’t really know of any places to go once I’m certified except for Bon Aire. I’m certainly jumping the gun and dreaming before I’m doing but that is the first step.
I could also wait till I’m back in Illinois for the summer and maybe hit up Dave for some supplies to borrow??? Quickly becoming not only my car expert, but my Scuba expert as well.
This week I’m looking to grab some sushi at Miyabi and get to work on my fantasy baseball strategy. Really need to buy some goggles so I can start swimming at least once a week, up till now I’ve been biking and running almost everyday, but have not even begun training to swim. DJ has said he’d be up for making the trip to Rockton for the triathlon this summer. Should be a blast. Just need to work on building endurance; I feel dead after running about 3.5 miles, though the pharmacy roommates are convinced it has to do with my stomach issues.
Anticipating a pretty mundane week, so expect a friend profile post and likely another infomercial gem post.