cooking up the offense like he's cooking ravioli

When I started the month I knew writing one blog post everyday for an entire month would be a challenge. My previous average was about one post a month. Before the month began I made a list of topics I could cover each evening. There were only a few topics I didn’t get to that I originally planned on discussing.

I planned on telling more about my job at AppNexus. We are building applications that give large buyers of internet media the tools they need to make effective buys across a wide range of inventory.

I planned on talking more about the books I was reading on my Kindle. I wanted to finish the book I am currently reading, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, before discussing it, but unfortunately it is quite long and didn’t get through it this month. I will say that book has been eye-opening so far, but hasn’t forced me into any drastic eating changes yet.

Finally, I had planned on talking more about my experiences with Google App Engine. I decided to branch out from PHP and try some other server-side languages and Python was my first new language. GAE provided a great platform to begin playing around with Python web applications because of its solid and useful APIs and because of its simple deployments. Since beginning with Python on GAE, I have strayed away and have begun working with Tornado. Tornado is really fast and runs nicely behind Nginx. I was able to bring up an application I have been playing around with on a brand new machine in about thirty minutes last night. That isn’t quite as fast as a GAE deployment, but still not too bad.

I don’t think I will be able to keep up the daily posting, but I am going to try very hard to past more often than every month. I have enjoyed sharing something different each day and receiving comments.

Here’s a teaser for what you can expect in December:

• I bought a new camera. It’s in the mail right now and should be here by the end of the week. I am not a photographer in any sense, but would like to learn.
• Rachel and I have a couple trips into Manhattan on the upcoming weekends planned. We will be doing some holiday shopping and definitely some holiday sightseeing.
• Rachel, Crusher and I are going to Kansas City for Christmas. I hope to get out to the middle of Missouri for this (and foil dinners) while we are there.
• New Year’s Eve in NYC! Expect Rachel and I to ring in the New Year from our apartment. I can’t imagine going to Times Square, but I sure enjoy watching it.

We had the most awful churros ever today.

The day started off with a trip to the dog park and then we took off for Battery Park to go see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We didn’t get in line for the ferry until about noon and as the line conveniently passed a cart selling churros, it came up that Seth had never eaten a churro before. I had to put an end to this travesty and treated the group to the warm, cinnamon delicacy. The only problem was that these $3 treats were neither warm nor had cinnamon and tasted absolutely terrible.

They tasted so bad, in fact, that after each taking a bite of our respective churro I decided we had to return them to the vendor. I told him they were absolutely terrible and I wanted my money back. The vendor told me he would give me my money back for two of them and I said that would be fine. He gave me $6 back and took two of the churros from me leaving me with one to throw out. Before I could even walk away (are you ready for this?) he placed the two churros back in display case with the other churros. He intended to resell the two returned churros!

I wish I could have seen the face of whoever bought our second-hand churros when they realized that someone else had already taken a bite out of one end.

We got up early today to go see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There were people everywhere once we made it down to the parade and it was harder to find a place than we expected. After more than an hour of walking and maneuvering we found a place where we could see the floats and balloons from the park.

We were at 64th St, which is up near the start. Apparently, the famous people join the floats at a later point in the parade because we didn’t really have any extra entertainment. From where we were standing, the parade took about an hour to pass.

Even though we did a lot of walking and didn’t get a great view, I had so much fun. It entertaining to see people everywhere in the holiday spirit.

After we returned home from the parade, Rachel started making the meal. It was a fantastic meal. Rachel outdid herself again.

This year (like so many previous years), I am extremely thankful for my amazing wife, Rachel. The year didn’t start out too great, since I didn’t have a job, but Rachel was very positive as we decided to move from a home we loved to New York for me to take a new job. She has done so much work to get us settled in out new city. I am so lucky to have such a perfect wife.

I spend a little time tonight cleaning up the RSS items I subscribe to in Google Reader. Recently I have subscribed to sources that create way too many posts. It was too easy for me to get behind on items and so I would stop going to Reader and checking in on the things I cared about.

So tonight I dropped any feed that I didn’t feel like I had to read in its entirety and now have a much more manageable list.

I mainly dropped tech and advertising feeds that either produce too much garbage or that just post news I can get from other sources.

I am hoping this new strategy will help me keep up to date on the news I care most about.

Seth, Rachel’s oldest brother, is in town for the week. He arrived this afternoon and we just finished planning our weeklong adventure. I am working Monday through Wednesday, so will only be able to join in the evening activities, but am still quite excited for what we have planned.

On Monday Rachel and Seth are going to the taping of The David Letterman Show. Robin Williams and someone from Twilight are the guests. After the show, we are going to meet at City Hall and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. At the end of the walk we are going to eat at Grimaldi’s pizza. We did this last week with Shane and Alli and it went well enough for us to try it again.

Tuesday and Wednesday are a still bit up in the air. There will definitely be a few trips to museums and sightseeing, just not sure which ones yet.

On Thursday, we are leaving our apartment around 6:30 to get over to Columbus Circle (59th St right by Central Park) for the parade. After the parade, we are going to come back home and fix a traditional meal and watch a bunch of old movies.

Friday we are going to hit the streets early for some Black Friday deals. We’ve never seen how they do holiday sales and figure we should experience it and least once.

Saturday is Seth’s last full day with us. At this point we are thinking about going to Ellis Island. We haven’t been yet and it seems like one of the important places we really need to visit.