New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys

The New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys are sharing the stage together on our block. Here are some Tweets on the subject (oh, yeah, I know how to feed the trolls):

New Kids on the Block/Backstreet Boys are on the stage...girls with daddy issues are swooning.

New Kids on the Block & BackStreet Boys on the same stage... together... My ears just threw up.

Wait...are we saying goodbye to 2010 or 1990? I think I've been watching too much Back to the Future.

I'm not sure what is more disturbing. Dick Clark's condition or the Backstreet Boys/New Kids On The Block mash-up ABC is going with.

New Kids on the Block and The Back Street Boys together! The world just might be coming to its end.

Intentional or not, the Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block provided me with a great final laugh of 2010 :)

Backstreet Boys-New Kids On The Block playing together. This answers the question "What's the opposite of a Supergroup?"

For those that complain about D Wade-Bron-Bosh formation, you clearly haven't seen the Backstreet Boys-New Kids On The block collabo.

Backstreet Boys and New Kids On The Block performing together. Do you need more proof that the apocalypse is coming??

Hey Soul Sister

As we prepare to usher in the New Year, Dick Clark's show just featured Train. Watching Katie cut the carpet to "Hey Soul Sister" is hilarious. As I reflect upon the semi-coherent lyrics to the chorus, I think it is very fitting song for Katie:

Hey soul sister,
Ain't that Mr. Mister
On the radio, stereo,
The way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister,
I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight

This should be Katie's theme song. After spending the last several months chasing her around, Wife and I agree - the way she moves ain't fair. We also agree that we don't want to miss a single thing she does.

You can see the song performed here:

Ke$ha

When I hear people mock Ke$ha as a talentless hack, I've always felt badly for her. It's not her fault she's not Lady Gaga. I just heard Ke$ha perform on our street. I don't feel so badly for her any more. Feel free to mock away.

Gmail Tip of the Day - Star Important Messages

Sometimes you’ll have an email that needs your attention but you don’t have time to get to it right away. By putting a star by it, it allows you to quickly find the email later. I frequently use this trick to keep track of emails that I will need to reference later, even if I don't need to respond later (such as directions, shopping lists, etc.).

Will 2011 be the year that Gmail catches up with their competition and offers unlimited storage? Let's hope so.

This is the picture daddy intended to upload yesterday, but he uploaded the one without me smiling

Here I am all ready to go to my second Christmas Eve church service

Gmail Tip of the Day - Importance Indicators

One of Gmail’s features allows you to instantly know which emails are meant just for you and which are from mailing lists and less important sources. Simply select this feature from the options, and you’ll get a helpful indicator arrow next to each email letting you know the degree to which the email is exclusively for you.

Now, we just need to hope that 2011 will be the year that Gmail catches up to the storage limitations that Yahoo! put in place in 2007.

Our Blizzard in 38 Seconds

Click HERE for a nice timelapse of this week's blizzard.

Gmail Tip of the Day - Event Invitations

You don’t need to use Outlook to send out invitations to an event or meeting. Gmail has the same function. Simply create a new email and select "Add event invitation."

All these features and such archaic limitations for email storage.

This is my head shot

Gmail Tip of the Day - Viewing Documents

Gmail can view PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without an external viewer.

Now, if Gmail would just offer the same storage space their competitors do.

Yummy

Gmail Tip of the Day - Gmail = Googlemail

Email can be sent to @gmail.com or @googlemail.com - they both route to the same domain. If you are sending email to another Gmail user, you can skip the "@gmail.com" or "@googlemail.com." Just type their username in the "to:" field.

Thus, I can send an email to any of the following and they will be received exactly the same way:

• jsmith@gmail.com
• jsmith@googlemail.com
• jsmith (assuming I am using a Gmail account to send this email)

Now, wouldn't it be great if Gmail would start increasing the amount of storage they provide at the rate that they used to?

We Had a Blizzard!

Gmail Tip of the Day - Searching for an Attachment

If you are searching for a particular email that has an attachment, add to your search string "has: attachment" so that only emails with attachments will be displayed. You can then search for mails that have specific filetypes as attachments, like this: "has:attachment filename:doc" or "has:attachment filename:pdf."

Of course, with Gmail's storage limitation, you may not be able to store too many emails with attachments. Let's hope they increase the limitation in 2011 to catch up to their competition.

Our New, Winter Saturday Morning Tradition

As our regular readers may know, Wife and I have made weekly tradition out of Saturday morning breakfast. When we first moved to Greenwich Village, the excitement of real New York bagels kept us busy for our first year. Every Saturday morning, we would go to a bagel shop and enjoy a bagel (and usually share a coffee) at the most famous bagel shops in the area.

When we moved to Midtown, our Saturday tradition evolved into getting breakfast and taking it to eat in Bryant Park every Saturday morning (we went about 18 months without missing a Saturday morning). However, now that it's getting cold and we don't want Katie to freeze, we have developed a new tradition over the last couple of months: Saturday morning breakfast at Westway Diner which is located extremely close to our apartment. I realize that means nothing to everybody who reads our blog, but I thought I would share this because this diner is legendary amongst locals, and is particularly popular with tourists for one reason. Westway Diner is the spot that Larry David approached Jerry Seinfeld about what would finally become their incredibly popular "show about nothing" (rather than at Tom's Diner on the Upper West Side which is the facade that was used in the show).

Larry David (the co-creater and producer of Seinfeld) used to live in an apartment building called Manhattan Plaza just up the street from us. We understand that his neighbor, Kenny Kramer (whom the character "Kramer" was based on) still lives there.

The Manhattan Plaza offers nice apartments to those who are in the "arts" (i.e., actors and actresses). The waiting list to live there is HUGE. If you want to see some passion, ask Wife how she feels about the fact that we can't rent an apartment, but instead need to pay considerably more.

According to Wikipedia (which is always reliable), here is a partial list of current and former residents that you may have heard of:
* Al Pacino
* Alan Menken
* Alicia Keys
* Adrian Pasdar
* Zachary Quinto
* Conan O'Brien
* Terrence Howard
* Tennessee Williams
* Marin Alsop
* Dylan Baker
* Mike Freeman
* Dexter Gordon
* Charles Mingus
* James Earl Jones
* Jack Warden
* Mickey Rourke
* Andrea McArdle
* Thomas Adcock
* Lewis Black
* Larry David
* Kenny Kramer
* Tiki Barber

Samuel L. Jackson worked there as a security officer in his first and only non-acting job.

Bruce Willis used to work at the West Bank Cafe at the base of the building.

It's Starting to Snow!

Katie opening up a Christmas present - notice that she is using a loaf of Panettone bread as a stool.

Huh...I guess this is one way to teach kids geography

Gmail Tip of the Day - View Only Unread Messages

If you've gone a few days (or worse, weeks or months) without organizing your inbox, it can quickly become an unwieldy mess of read and unread emails. By entering the search string “label:unread label:inbox” only the unread emails in your inbox will be displayed. You can bookmark this search string so you don't need to put it in the search box whenever you want to run it.

Gmail's features blow away their competition - sure would be nice if their storage capacity caught up with the competition.

Something is growing out of my belly!

Gmail Tip of the Day - Add Keywords to Emails

My email account has a lot of emails. I'm collected somewhere in the realm of 100,000 emails in my primary email account (my Yahoo! account). I keep those emails because I anticipate that I just may want to refer to something in an email again. But finding a particular email can be impossible. For example, let's say that in an email sometime over the summer, my wife gave a hint about something she wants for Christmas. Finding that email is impossible. Even if I know that the email is one that I will want to refer to again, it is difficult to properly file an email from a person that you get a lot of emails from and be able to find it again quickly.

With Gmail's unique "conversation" view, I can quickly add a note to the email that says "christmas gift present wife" (or whatever other keywords I want to quickly add). When I want to find that email again, I can simply search for "christmas gift," and Gmail will pull up the conversation.

Of course with Gmail's limitations on storage (which radically smaller than it competition), I may not have the capacity to save the thousands and thousands of emails that I did with Yahoo! (despite Gmail's slogan, "Never delete another email again").

Katie's first french fry - She had it at a Chinese restaurant

Gmail Tip of the Day - Color Code Your Labels

Keeping my email organized is very, very important to me. With Gmail, I can add an extra layer of organization by color coding my labels. So, I can give a different color label to emails that come in from my wife, bills, friends, etc. When I log into Gmail, it is then instantly obvious what is in there.

Gmail certainly has a great number of wonderful features. It sure would be nice if they provided the same amount of storage capacity as their competitors.

Eating is hard work.

Gmail Tip of the Day - Never Again Forget an Attachment

How many times have you sent an email that says something like this: "Sorry, here's the attachment I referred to in my last email." Yeah, I've done that before. Gmail has a new feature (that can be turned on or off - it is off by default) that will scan your email and warn you before you send an email without an attachment if the text of the email indicates that there should be an attachment.

All these great feature, and yet Gmail still provides less storage space than their competition.

As we walked by the theater for the new Spiderman show, a stranger pointed out that my fleece snow suit looks like a Spiderman costume.

Gmail Tip of the Day - Bookmark a Single Email

Each Gmail message has a dedicated URL. What does that mean? Rather than printing the message or copying down information, you can hit CTRL+D when you read an important email and refer to it at your leisure.

Now, if only Gmail would get with the program and provide more email storage.

Hehehe...look what I found

Evidence Google has a Sense of Humor

1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy and paste the following into the translate box: pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk
4) Click "listen"

Google decided to make it more obvious that this is an Easter egg by replacing "Listen" with "Beatbox."

If you like, you could use this permalink, but it's not as fun.