I was just informed by Vidya that I have my own place for music in Atlanta. Cool!

I know all the “cool kids” did this about a year ago, but I only now discovered the site where you create your own visited states map.

Mine looks like this:

Though I’ll be marking Alaska red in about 6 weeks on a cruise ship with the family. 🙂

Lauren and I are hosting a (non-)traditional “8th night seder” on Saturday, and I’ve never made charoset before. So I e-mailed my Mom for the recipe and here was the response:

Apples, nuts and cinnamon, make charoset chop chop chop. Also wine, brown sugar vanilla extract if you want. Enjoy.

Love ya,
MOM

The thing I love most about family recipes is the exact proportions. 🙂

Senior year of college, I took a class on “Web Programming in Java”. One of the projects was to create a promotion site for a fictional movie. I came up with:

You need to have Java installed, and I apologize in advance if there’s a broken link at the end of a game (you may need to replace “zoo.cs.yale.edu:8000” with “pantheon.yale.edu”). If I can divine my old password to the system (I didn’t even realize the site still existed until today) I’ll try and fix it. Until then, have fun with some crazy Kenny Wolf humor.

Last night, Lauren discovered that ligers actually exist. Tonight I realized that this has spread to a complete fascination with hybrid animals. There really are some crazy mixes, like the Cama (camel/llama hybrid), and the Lepjag (also known as a jagulep!).

I guess it’s a good thing that I’m a capricorn, which for the unintiated is a goat/fish hybrid 🙂

Lauren and I spent yesterday afternoon in front of the X-box. But instead of kicking alien butt in Halo 2, we were the ones getting our butts kicked by Maya, the innocent looking personal trainer of Yourself Fitness. The game will utilize whatever props you have around the house (hand weights, step, exercise balls, etc), and target a 45-60 minute workout for cardio, flexibility, upper, or lower body workout. Yesterday we did the upper body workout with hand weights. In 45 minutes I was more worn down than from my normal 90 minute gym run. Maya provides inspiration (“work your cardio!”), but is also relentless (“I want you to feel muscle fatigue with this one”, “do it right!”). She never needs more than 10 seconds of rest, so why should you? While I was skeptical at first, I must say that it’s a killer workout, and awfully convenient to fit into your schedule.

In related news, it seems Dance Dance Revolution has gotten recent press on its health benefits, and is even being used in child weight studies. While I can see DDR working your cardio, after experiencing nonstop sets of lunges, squats, and curls, I’d put my money on Maya in a head-to-head jelly your muscles competition.

Some amusement courtesy of Lauren:

I’m back on the internet with a mission to reclaim my good name in google (right now the top match for “Kenny Wolf” is a machinery auction from ’01).

The last time I had my own website was in college, back in the days before CSS and WordPress. Back then I thought that personal “home pages” were a passing fad, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. With some fabulous tools support, blogging is all the rage (Mom, it’s short for “web log”, the new form of online personal diaries).

So here I am. I expect to post a lot about Indigo, the Xml Web Services platform I’m working on at Microsoft. We had a customer event last week, and as you might expect there were a bunch of questions that weren’t addressed by the documentation. And now that we’ve made an early version of Indigo publicly available, I can start doing my part to help our customers.