The past couple of trips that I have taken have been to major metropolitan areas. New Orleans, Sand Diego, New York, etc. I have found that my iPhone has been invaluable in these areas when trying to find my way around the cities and finding things to do. Here is a list of my favorite travel apps (for the city)

Transit

I put this one first because I think it is the least well known of the bunch. Transit is a must if you are in a city where you will be using public transit. Open it up and you can instantly see all of the public transit options around you. What is really nice is that you can set your destination on the map and it will automatically calculate your public transit options for you. It also has real-time updates of routes for those cities that make that data available. 

Foursquare

The split of Foursquare last year was a tough one, but to be honest I have found it to probably be good for the company in the way the apps are used. The new Foursquare is a way to find things around you and is more than just for restaurants, but that is where it excels. I like it over Yelp, because it categorizes restaurants and locations using a crowd sourced tagging system, which I think is very efficient. It is super easy to pop the app open and see what are the best tags at a place for food, etc. 

Swarm

Swarm is the other off shoot app that came from the Foursquare separation. I not longer find it quite as useful, but checking in is still a fun process, especially if you are separated from other people on your trip, it makes for a fun way to keep track of where someone has been throughout the day. I still miss my favorite app of all time, Gowalla so let's hope Swarm can take some of those old Gowalla ideas, like the geocaching aspect and make the game more fun. 

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is a great app that should get more attention. It has a bit of overlap with Foursquare in its purpose, but it's strengths lie in its reliance on photos. Instead of just reading about what is good at a restaurant, instead see what other people have taken pictures of and read how they liked it. It is a sort of app that if you are really into food, then it is a must have. 

Evernote

Not much I can say about this one, that I haven't already said. I store a lot of info in here and for vacation planning it is ideal for throwing all of your receipts, digital tickets, event lists, to dos and other stuff for your vacation in here. I even throw in .PDf files of maps or brochures which I can easily bring up on a moment's notice.  

This past week I had an opportunity to goto New Orleans. Megan was having her annual art educator's conference there and I tagged along like I usually do. I never really had a desire to go to New Orleans before. I always sort of imagined it as a  sort of drunken college town (and it is that)  but I was pleasantly surprised after my weekend there. I was able to genuinely find some great music, great food and some great history. 

Day 1 - Thursday

We flew in to the city Thursday afternoon. We checked into our hotel which was located in the rehabilitated Warehouse district and then went out and got our bearings of the city. Our hotel was the Renaissance Arts Hotel which Megan thought was cool because it had a Chihuly sculpture in the lobby. Food was foremost on our minds though and we got some fantastic Happy Hour drinks and food at the Swizzle Stick Bar and had some gumbo and turtle soup. We then made our way to the downtown area and had some beignets a Cafe du Monde and checked out our first glimpse at the French Quarter. 

The night wrapped up with us taking a stroll through Bourbon Street late that night to see what it was. It was pretty much exactly what I thought it was. Expensive bars with crappy cover bands. We saw strip clubs and twenty or so drunken people standing in the street laughing at people who walked through horse manure. We decided pretty quickly that we had our fill. 

Day 2 - Friday

Day 2 had me heading out to a bayou kayaking tour. It is amazing how much of the area around New Orleans is really just swamp and bayou. There are almost no suburbs in the way that we think of them and everything is basically just under water. The kayak tour was a lot of fun. 

I was able to get some good tips for checking out some places in the area from our guides. I ended up going to Mother's Restaurant for lunch and had a huge po' boy sandwich and mustard greens. I had a chance to head back down to the square to to get some photos and found a bunch of street performers out and about.  I then attempted to see some of the old cemeteries, but the main one in the city just outside of the French Quarter unfortunately required you to go with a tour and it closed at 3:00 PM, so I was out of luck on that. Megan and I met back up and we had dinner at a place called Cochon. It was good, but honestly it reminded me a lot of a Chicago restaurant like Carriage House or something. 

We then decided to spend an hour over at the Harrah's casino which seemed to dominate the downtown area. I put in $2 in the slot machine and ended up with $8, which Megan then quickly made disappear. 

Day 3 - Saturday

Saturday was a really fun day. I started out at the World War II Museum, which was quite impressive. If anyone has a chance to go see it do so. There is a really great interactive movie there that features Tom Hanks that is very immersive. The museum is really well made and features a really heartbreaking but also partially romantic look back at the war. I thought they did a particularly good job at covering the Pacific front of the war which all too often seems to be overlooked. 

I then left the museum and headed out on the trolly to finally get to see the cemeteries. This time I went to the Greenwood Cemetery to the north. It was an interesting place and it was neat to see the gravestones dating back to the 1800's. From there I met back up with Megan and we grabbed a bite to eat and killed some time in the afternoon before making our way over to Frenchman's street for the evening. Now if you want to see some local music that isn't cover bands it seems that Frenchman's Street is the place to be. We got luck and found a seat at the bar of a place called 3 Muses. They had an amazing jazz ensemble with a clarinetist, accordion player, guitarist and upright bass player. We spent our evening there and had a wonderful time. It really was the perfect way to close out New Orleans. 

This past Christmas Megan bought me the Hyrule Historia for the Legend of Zelda series. LOZ has always been one of my favorite games series, but I am ashamed to say that I haven't played through all of the games in the series. While reading through the historia I found that there is now a timeline to the LOZ series. It happened at that same time that I also picked up a copy of Skyword Sword. My goal now is to play through all of the LOZ games tin "chronological" order.

I have been toying with the idea of potentially getting into Twitch streaming some games and this has also sparked my interest in doing this. I am in the process of looking at what sort of small PC box I can get that I can put in my entertainment center to capture and stream the video feed to twitch. The problem is I don't want to drop $500 on a small PC just to capture a non-HD stream. If anyone out there has some advice on a small box I can build for $200 or so, let me know. 

For as long as I can remember I always had a fascination with space. I have always loved science fiction and the stars and the constellations and planets. All of it. When I was a little kid I remember that my parents bought me all sorts of books, but there are two that stick out in my mind. One was a book all about our solar system, but I can't remember the name. I do recall that it had these fold out pages that would expand to talk about each of the planets and moons. I remember those pages got sort of trashed as I folded them back into the book improperly. 

The other book that sticks in my mind is a book about the constellations called "The Glow in the Dark Night Sky Book". I remember it distinctly because all of the stars and constellations in the book would glow in the dark. It was such a cool book. We also had a telescope that my dad had. We rarely ever used it, but I remember it would sit in the corner of the dining room. It had a small dent in the side of it. I do remember using it one summer night though and we looked at the moon and I thought it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. I remember having to track the movement of the moon with the small parts on the telescope. It really gave you a sense of how fast and how much the moon actually moves. 

So where is all of those going? Well, over at Reddit I have seen several posts of some amazing backyard astronomy shots from this post.  I really has be chomping at the bit to look into getting a telescope for some backyard viewing and hopefully some photos as well. 

Let's see where this goes. 

I have had a small obsession recently with a game called Warfare on the Xbox. It is a free to play PC/Xbox/PS4 game that came out about six months ago. I picked it up initially and played it for a few weeks and then put it down. It came out on the consoles right around the same time as Destiny and it a lot of ways it is the same sort of game as Destiny, except that it is third person to Destiny's first person. It is a loot based, quasi-MMO. You play as a Tenno, a being of some sort that can inhabit bodies call war frames. The story is pretty thin, but the gameplay is quite fun and I honestly think it does right what Destiny was trying to do.

It is a loot grind, which means you will be playing the same missions over and over, but it does succeed in providing you all those juicy item drops that and loot based game does. Recent updates have made the game much more playable on the consoles with a controller and I have found it is one of the few games on the new Xbox that consistently has people chatting in it. 

There is something done right about this nice, mindless online component to Warfare. It is almost all cooperative so if you are the type of person who doesn't enjoy or isn't good at online competitive play, then you can still get into the community here and enjoy your time online. The pacing is just right with the loot you get where you can still keep progressing forward and building more gear for your Tenno. 

What surprised me the mot though is how well the developer has done the FTP aspect. You can earn almost everything in the game without paying a single dollar. The purchase platinum in the game basically gives you really cool cosmetic upgrades and also allows you access to what they call "Prime" versions of war frames and gear. So, I'll admit that I gave the developer $20 and picked out some Platinum to get some cool additional gear. 

Megan and I had a great time heading to the Chicago Auto-Show yesterday. It has been several years since we last attended and it is always a fun thing to go see. The show is always huge and the crowds are always insane. We were exhausted by the end of the day, but it was ultimately fun to see some of the cars on the show floor. 

I have always enjoyed looking at the concept cars that these companies put out. I was surprised that there didn't appear to really be than many concept vehicles. Overall though there are some nice cars and it puts some things into perspective for a future car purchase that may be coming down the pipeline in the next 12-16 months. 

Here is a bit of a weird post, but below is my recipe for chili. Now, I am not normally a chili person. I fact I hated chili most of my life. I was never able to find a recipe that I really liked. Every year at work we do a chili lunch before the Super Bowl. Some people really make some fantastic chili's. This year we had a few retirements and less people making chili. A week before the lunch we still had three slots still open so I decided to sign up and see if I could make something that was passable. 

This is where I kicked into my "research mode". I have this thing where whenever I need to find information on something, I go into this really deep process of looking up all the information I can on it. The result is that I identified some "base ingredients that I saw in all of the recipes, looked at a "tex-med" flavor and then sort of made up my own recipe. 

To my surprise my chili actually turned out amazingly well and it was actually a hit at the super bowl lunch. I think it turned out so well is because it cooked for nearly fourteen hours in the crockpot. So, here below is my chili recipe as it stands today. I hope everyone enjoys it.

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I consider myself to be a fairly handy individual. I'm not going to go and build a canoe or tear down an entire car engine, but I think most house projects I can handle. Last week my dad came over to help me install a new floor in my house. Now my dad is certainly a few steps up from me. All my life growing up I always remember him tackling all sorts of house projects. He is one of those old fashioned, flannel shirt wearing sorts of dad's and he is always eager to help me with projects when they come up. 

You would think that installing pre-finished, hardware laminate floor would be a fairly easy task to do. It ended up being a significantly larger project than I fully anticipated. What I thought would be a two day weekend project has now turned into a three weekend project after the staining and cutting and all of the craziness. I don't know how my dad does it. I was just completely exhausted at the end of each day and my patience was completely shot after this project, and this was just the foyer in my house. I still have on the horizon to do my mudroom and then ultimately my kitchen. 

This is going to end up being three projects that will be ongoing for the next several months at least. 

Last week we were having a conversation at work about the "heaviest" movies we have seen. These are the sort of movies that I felt were emotionally draining. Perhaps they were movies that were fantastic or perhaps they were mediocre, but you just don't ever want to see them again because they leave you emotionally exhausted. You walk out of a matinee on a sunny afternoon and you can't help but feeling depressed. Warning, there may be spoilers here. 

1. District 9

District 9 is the movie I immediately think of whenever we talk about a movie like this. I was left just completely exhausted and depressed at the end of this movie. It's whole critique on apartheid really hits home with the portrayal of the aliens and the shear brutality upon the refugees and the camp really hit home for me. I had never seen a movie portray the sadness and hopelessness quite like District 9. 

2. We Were Soldiers

It is probably impossible to create a list like this and not include a Vietnam movie in here. There are several excellent and striking Vietnam movies out there, and I wouldn't classify this as the "best" Vietnam movie, but this is the one that stuck with me the most. The cinematography work on the ground really showcased the mayhem that was all around the U.S. soldiers and their landing zone. Watching Mel Gibson's character breaking down and crying at the end was the pivotal, emotional upheaval that put this movie over the top. As a viewer you really get a sense of the weight that his character bears with all of the soldiers who served and died under him. 

3. American Beauty

I chose American Beauty because of the solemnness it leaves you with at the end. This film doesn't quite have the sadness, that some of the others due, despite the tragic ending. Instead it almost felt like a "release" of sorts. Almost as if our main character finally got out of the mundane world. 

4. The Green Mile

If there is going to be a straight up tear jerker in this list, it has to be "The Green Mile". Michael Clarke Duncan puts on an amazing performance playing a death row inmate who I think personifies a sort of messiah type character. The relationships that are developed between his character and all of the guards during the film really turn the final execution scene into a very personal and heart wrenching final moments. 

5. Hotel Rwanda

A movie you have to watch once but don't ever want to watch again. What makes this movie so impactful is knowing that it all actually happened. The defining scene that is etched into my mind is when Don Cheadle's character has to drive down a road strewn with dead bodies. He is forced to drive over those bodies and the movie shows the physical and emotional impact of each bump in the truck as he has to drive over those bodies. 

This weekend Megan and I happened to swing by the local thrift shop just to see what they had for records. We actually scored nicely, especially with the Bing Crosby Merry Christmas album (sadly not an original though). Not everything was the hit we thought it was though.

Apparently you have to look a bit closer sometimes as to what is actually in that record sleeve. For example I found Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 in the bin. I pulled out the record and gave it a quick look over. The center label did indeed say Tchaikovsky on it, but what I didn't notice at the time is that it said Tchaikovsky Serenade in C Major. Whoops!!!!! But, there was a plus out of this. On side B is a recording of Barber's Adagio for Strings. Also in that pile was a shellac 78 RPM copy of Rhapsody in Blue. Unfortunately, I cannot play that album and it appears to be incomplete. The shellac record though is thick and heavy. I honestly thought it was made out of metal when I first held it. 

Some other nice finds in there though are a 1966 Best of Benny Goodman album, the Bing Crosby I mentioned above and this 1958 record called "Port Of Suez - Exotic Music Of The Middle East". How could we not buy it for the curiosity? We haven't listened to the album yet so perhaps this evening.