I now have a page up to try to keep family and friends up to date with what is happening with the wedding. It can be accessed here (full link below). I have not included a navigation link to it in the site links above because a lot more people visit the site than just family and friends. This link will also be featured on our invitations and other event related communications so if you forget to bookmark it now you will be seeing it other places. Although, it should be easy enough to remember:
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Merlin Nails It On Meetings
Merlin Mann once again nails it. This time it is nine tips for making meetings more productive. I am not so secretly thinking of printing this out tomorrow and doing a little mailbox stuffing at work. My favorite quote:
…this is coming from a man who often was compelled to spend the better part of one day a week on a bi-coastal video conference call with two dozen people. Staring. Wishing death. Listening to the CTO opine at length about how exciting it would be to build and sell a national yellow pages app from scratch. If there had been cyanide capsules on the table instead of M&Ms, I don’t think I would have hesitated to indulge."
Oh yeah, everyone needs a copy of this…
Personal Update
I wanted to take some time to update everyone on what has been keeping me too busy to post as regularly as I (and I am sure you) would like.
I have been taking some action to try to keep people up to date with what is going on with me. One of these is a redesign of my profile page. It is now more of a status page. I became sort of fascinated with the idea of personal status pages after a post on 43 Folders regarding them. Basically the idea is to have a page that it very frequently updated with your status on a number of items. For instance, what is my level of business and what projects I am working on. I basically drew ideas from several examples of them that I found and incorporated it for my own use. I have been updating this page very frequently as it is easier than a full post such as this and conveys enough information to keep folks up to date. It also still does include a short “profile” which is done as a personal summation of my life in del.icio.us style tags.
Bethany and I just returned from a wonderful trip to New York City. I love NYC and being there for the first time with Bethany made me love it even more. Even though it was only two and a half usable days we, as you may imagine, managed to pack a lot in.
The first night we had some unbelievably good sushi at Bar Masa. We did not have much because, well, we are poor but what we had was great. We then kind of stumbled upon a free concert at the Samsung Experience featuring the work of a young award winning composer who was on hand to introduce the pieces. We did not stay for the whole thing as we were still pretty hungry but it was long enough to drink the free glass of white wine and get a sense of the work. We then headed down to Soho to a wine bar our friend Bruce recommended to us called Ino. It was well worth the trip. We ordered an excellent half bottle of Borello and had some bruchetta and an excellent chef’s selection platter of panini sandwiches. All for a very decent price. Then it was off to meet up with friends for drinks in the bar at the Marriott Marquis which overlooks the neon circus that is Times Square. Not a bad way to start off a trip.
The following day was spent mostly with Bethany at work (she was out there as part of her work for Nautilus Music Theater) after breakfast at Zabars. I did take some time out for a little bit to walk around and window shop. We had dinner that night at Tao, which was really hip and cool, and followed that up with a trip back down to Soho to see if Ino was crowded. It was, so we went to Cafe Henri which was a couple of doors down and had a beer and got some wedding planning discussion taken care of… Oh, I did not mention that we were trying to burn up some time as the lock on the door of the apartment we were staying in decided to break so we were locked out until Bruce, who’s apartment it was, got off work to help us figure out what to do. The solution was calling a locksmith to drill out the lock for a price we were not quite prepared to pay but what could we do?
Undaunted by this misfortune, we soldiered on Saturday morning with a trip back to Soho (we like it there) for brunch with friends at Kittichai. Beautiful restaurant and good food. After that, we made a mad dash to Lincoln Center in order to catch “The Light in the Piazza“. It was a brilliant show with the best lighting design I have ever seen and astonishingly good performances. The songs are still stuck in my head. We were going to take a carriage ride in Central Park following that but it was way too cold and windy. Therefore, considering the weather and being we had basically been voluntarily mugged by the locksmith the night before we decided a more comforting and inexpensive dinner option was best. This was well served by Homer’s Malt Shop. Bethany had the fried macaroni and cheese, I had a patty melt and we split a malt. Very yummy. We had every intention of going back to the apartment to warm up and then go out later but we were so exhausted by this point that we simply had a bottle wine and went to bed.
A special place is always made even more so by the people you share it with. It was so nice to spend time in one of my favorite places on earth having so many new experiences with the woman who I think is the coolest person on the planet.
In other news, wedding plans are moving along. More slowly than I think either of us would prefer but they are moving. A search for a place for both the ceremony and reception have proved tougher than I think either of us assumed it would be. We have two front runners for the reception in mind at least. We will be trying to get the paper for the invitations this upcoming weekend and I have a wedding web page in the works for this site that will try to keep everyone up to date on the goings on.
I should expand a little bit on the details on the wedding and reception itself. We are planning on having the wedding on the night of June 15th in a small, intimate, candlelit ceremony with our family. We want the wedding to be a celebration of the joining of not only Bethany and I but also of our families.
We want the reception, on June 17th, to not only be a celebration of us but a celebration of love itself. Love of each other, love of our families and love of our friends. We want as many of our loved ones as possible to be there and to help us throw the party that such a celebration deserves. It will have cool music, good munchies, dancing and drinks. It will be a celebration of the people we love and that love us. It will be casual, fun, exciting, open, accepting and warm – just like the love it is meant to honor. Therefore, don’t expect to come to your usual, boring, formal, chicken dance, mystery meat or funny fish plate type of reception that everyone and your cousin seems to always have. Expect to come to a really good party, hang out with us for a while, dance a little and have a good time.
Other up coming items include a guest spot on my friend Scottie’s Podcast. We will be discussing web based applications and the whole “Web 2.0” thing in general. Should be a lot of fun so stay tuned for that. Bethany is out of town this week so I am on my own and perhaps that may allow for more posting but I do have a lot still on my plate so don’t hold me to it.