1. 20 Things I Learned From Tech Support

at the time i saved this, i was working tech support at the college of fine arts and communications at byu. somewhat funny, somewhat sad, but very true.

2. Election ‘08 Chart of Where the Candidates Stand

well, a little political nostalgia is always fun.. i always find it interesting to look back at these sort of things to see what we were debating about in the past. however i am a bit sad that mr. obama hasn’t lived up to his promises (torture… wiretapping…).

3. Cats

my favorite lolcat of all time.

i saved these links on 2007.08.07.

i think i actually saved this so i would look at it later. never did. seems like some good tips in here though.. maybe i will work through them slowly and see if i like anything.

i saved this on 2007.07.30.

i want this shirt baaaad. (via Kenji)

added the old blog posts to my current blog’s archive. comments on them are here.

as i was working on deleting my old myspace account, i came across a few old blog posts that for some reason got left behind in the three blog transitions i have done (myspace -> facebook -> blogger -> wordpress). i’m glad i snagged them before i cancelled the account forever. for some reason i love reading these old posts, remembering how different i was just 3 years ago. if you are i interested, check them out:

april 15, 2006 - i’m a song writer!

contains my english translation of a japanese pop classic.

april 17, 2006 - things i don’t like today

a short interesting look into the end of my sophomore year at byu.

april 17, 2006 - things we have learned from today

here i talk about realizing how stupid it was for me to go posting something on a public forum that i shouldn’t have. it was about someone i knew, and it turns out people on that forum knew that person too. lessons learned.. the rest is just some random stream of consciousness. at the end i mention “girl musings” which i believe are other blog posts that are lost forever (see the large gap in posts in between january and april..).

april 30, 2006 - baraboo is no longer my home.

this was written while at home in between winter semester and spring term. the last sentence (“now i just have to finish up my undergraduate degree so i can get out of utah once and for all.") makes me smile…

april 30, 2006 - i don’t feel like sleeping yet..so another web log!

this is a rather angsty post about me not liking old high school acquaintances who still lived near baraboo. no idea what prompted it, but it is ironic that i am moving back to wisconsin… also, this is notable for the mention of the domed utopia.

may 16, 2006 - protests over the da vinci code

one of my occasional social/political/religious commentaries.

these are the first four bookmarks that i saved on delicious.com and i want to share them now:

1. 10 ways to entertain young children for $1 or less (without the TV)

i dunno why i saved this… maybe i thought i would be having kids at sometime in the near future? maybe someone will enjoy it.

2. Approaching Mormon Doctrine

i saved this link during the doctrinal debates that followed the dick cheney visit and the student protests at byu. the arguments evolved into many directions: whether or not the byu board of trustees was divinely inspired and how much weight we should place in church leaders' political opinions. this was an official source i used to back up my viewpoints.

3. Brigham Young University: A House of Faith – Standards & the Honor Code

another link based on theological debate: discussing the divine inspiration of the byu board of trustees also led to debating the origins, purposes, and religious significance of the byu honor code. this book chapter was quite revealing.

4. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch Station Sign

apparently this sign has the longest city name in the world. sweet.

i saved these links on 2007.07.29.

it’s time for reciprocating a little link love to those wonderful people who link to my blog. the following are the top ten blogs of people i know that send people my way. but just like its wrong to barf out a #followfriday tweet with a contextless list of names, it would be wrong for me to share these links without explaining a little bit about them. so, here we go:

1. windblownandhappy.blogspot.com this is my old friend sophie and her husband morgan’s blog. sophie was the roommate of my first girlfriend at byu, but our friendship continued after the relationship didn’t. she is big into the outdoors and every time i read her blog i realize how lazy i am for reading blogs instead of being out running.

2. itsallyellow.blogspot.com yellow is one of the head editors for the byu 100 hour board. he is also a former coworker, former roommate, and current friend. he doesn’t update this blog much anymore because i think he is busy with other things in his life, but there are some occasional fun posts.

3. nataliefoell.blogspot.com i met natalie at a church fireside last summer. i don’t know her too well but every time we saw each other on campus we would say hi. and since she links to my blog, she must be cool.

4. sushiigirl.blogspot.com this is jackie’s blog. jackie and i go way back… actually i met her sister only a week or so after getting back from my mission in japan. then when i came out to byu, i recognized the connection and we had an awkward hello at the cereal bar in the morris center (RIP) cafeteria. ever since then we have had various levels of friendships, including spending two months in japan together during summer of ‘07. she needs to update her blog.

5. amycchow.blogspot.com amy is a new addition to my group of friends! she worked with my group here at intel for the first month of this summer and we still see her a lot her on the campus. she is hardcore about triathlons and also makes me feel quite lazy.

6. nanti-sarrmm.blogspot.com nanti is an online acquaintance (only met once or twice in meatspace) met through a couple of byu-related message boards. the first was the illustrious but now lost in internet history byu facebook network message board. we also had a number of interactions on the still active 100 hour board reader message board.

7. brittbeelynn.blogspot.com britt is another friend i met indirectly through the 100 hour board: her sister, a current writer at the time, took me up on my request to date writers in order to gain access to exclusive parties. we went out for lunch, and though things didn’t go anywhere, i started hanging out with her and her sister.

8. canuckette.blogspot.com eileen is anther friend from those freshman days long past spent in deseret towers. we met, i swooned, and i asked her on a date. didn’t go anywhere except that i found out she was a totally cool girl and we have been “internet” friends ever since. she plays world of warcraft, which means we can forgive her for being canadian.

9. chillygator.blogspot.com chilly is one of those people who apparently knows everyone. in fact, most of you reading this probably already read her blog. we met through some mutual friends and quickly became close pals. i even spent this last weekend hanging out with her in san francisco. anyway, go check out her blog at least for her cool photography.

10. tismabel.blogspot.com mabel and i were in hello dolly together. we spent the rest of the spring and summer of ‘07 having crazy times with the gang. her blogs have been lacking lately…

ok, hope you enjoy some of these blogs! and btw, for those of you with blogger based blogs who use the blog feed sidebar widget: i think you need to put my RSS feed in again since google screwed everything up with the feedburner conversion. though, i guess if your blog has the wrong RSS feed, you probably aren’t reading this anyway… explains my 50% drop in readers…

edit: if you aren’t getting my feeds anymore, try this address: https://iambismark.net/index.xml

i’ve decided delicious.com really isn’t all the worthwhile to me. i don’t use it for backup and keeping around old links really doesn’t seem all that important with the power of google and local bookmarks (of which of course i keep both local and remote backups). for a while i was using delicious.com as a way to share links with small comments on them with people. but i realized this really wasn’t all that great of an idea, since it wasn’t possible to comment on those posts! so, i’ve decided to clear out my delicious.com account and shut it down. i enjoy consolidating my online presence, and this is just one step of many that i have been taking (perhaps more on that later). but it seems a waste to just let the 100 or so links i’ve saved over time just disappear into internet history. so, i am going to start writing posts with a few of those shared links at a time. i will include both original comments (if there were any) and new comments that i have on links that i am now revisiting.

sunday morning i dropped off adam early at the airport for his flight home. afterwards i decided to sleep in until i had to check out just because i was so worn out from the previous week. at noon i started my long trip north. first i decided to stop by the san diego temple grounds. to be honest, it was smaller than i had imagined. pretty though. then i made the dumbest decision ever: i thought it would be cool to take highway 1 up the coast. just to finish off my drive with some pretty views. well, reader beware: don’t get on the 1 until you are well north of los angeles. took me hours to get out of that mess. i finally got north of it all and started enjoying the drive along the coast, but then sadly i started hitting fog. by sunset, i barely had any visibility and i missed out on the view. it was getting late, so i stopped at morro bay for the night. motel 6 certainly made a killing from me over that week.

10:02 PM May 3rd:

stopping in morro bay for the night. been a really pretty drive up the

1. on to monterrey and the bay area tomorrow. one week of driving!

the next morning the fog was sadly still around. i tried to check out morro rock, but only was able to see a small hunk of it. i hoped that the fog would burn off as the day went on so i continued north.

10:21 AM May 4th:

well, i’m all out of clean clothes. i guess i better end my road trip now. up the coast to monterey, santa cruz, then into the bay area.

i got glimpses here and there of clear sky, but most of the way was foggy, which was quite disappointing since i know the views would have been amazing.

one of the few times i was able to see through the fog.

12:34 PM May 4th:

elephant seals battling on the shore!

i came up on one of the elephant seal beaches and stopped to watch for a bit. it was pretty fun.

12:52 PM May 4th:

well they stopped now. here is a bunch of them though.

the drive up through monterey and to santa cruz was nice but uneventful.

3:49 PM May 4th:

eating at charlie hong kongs in santa cruz. chow mein with spicy beef. yum.

i started hitting traffic coming up through san jose, but i finally made it to my grandparents house in time for dinner. this was a pretty epic road trip, and i am really glad i was able to do it. hanging out with the little bro for the last time before he goes on the mission was cool, and we saw some pretty amazing places along the way. next time i plan on spending much more time at each one and also taking a nicer camera. and now i can finally start writing in my blog again without feeling guilty for not finishing these posts! :D

this is the joy of driving through the desert at night… a few car washes later, this mostly is still caked on… woke up probably too early on saturday to head out for san diego. in the full sunlight i was able to see that blythe CA and surrounding areas were probably more bland than the drive through arizona..

this was about the only interesting scenery along the way. miles of sand dunes, with tons of dirt bikes and four wheelers. kind of fun to watch. the air got smellier from the cattle “farms” and the ratio of english to spanish radio stations quickly slanted towards the latter as we drove south.

12:45 PM May 2nd:

eating at a hole in the wall mexican restaurant called camancho’s place in el centro.

it was recommended by yelp. we had lunch here, which actually wasn’t too bad. didn’t think it was the most amazing mexican food i’d ever had, but what do i know, i’m just a gringo. the drive to san diego was hot and longer than i expect. very mountainous. border patrol waived us through pretty quickly, though i am not sure why i had to be stopped for interstate travel… stupid at&t decided to text message me when we were at the closest place to the border. they said i was entering the international service rate area, and of course they charged me the international text message fee for it. didn’t feel like disputing the $1 charge. i started getting pretty tired again as we were finally getting over the mountains and heading down into the coast. i decided we better take a rest at the motel before we tried to do anything else.

5:05 PM May 2nd:

wandering down along pacific beach in san diego. sadly it’s overcast and almost a bit chilly.

we went out to walk along pacific beach. not a ton of people since it was overcast, but it was a nice walk.

5:27 PM May 2nd:

some lady is walking in on the boardwalk in a wet suit and heels. it’s entertaining to see all the reactions of people as they pass.

i got some tacos along the boardwalk (cuz i figured that was the thing to do) and then both adam and i realized just how worn out from the trip we were. we decided to just relax and go see the wolverine movie (which was absolutely horrible…. too bad i didn’t write this earlier to warn everyone..). after the movie we just crashed in the hotel room.

ok, time to polish these bad boys off. we were planning on eating at a casino buffet for breakfast but adam’s friend made us pancakes before we even woke up. someday.. after the quick breakfast, we set off towards the grand canyon. this drive actually took quite a bit longer than i originally planned for some reason. the scenery along the way was quite ugly and it was a pretty long and lame drive.

the one cool thing was the hoover dam along the way. well, cool except for the part when the department of the interior made us pay $7 to park and then wanted us to pay $8 more a person just for the tour. we opted to just look around the outside.

i guess they are building a bridge across the gorge. this was actually pretty cool. the drive to kingman was depressingly bland, and then on through to the grand canyon was about the same.

3:30 PM May 1st:

just arrived at the grand canyon.

i wanted to arrive closer to about 1 pm because 3:30 pm left us with only a few hours before we needed to be back on the road. but what short amount of hiking we got to do was quite amazing.

6:15 PM May 1st:

it’s really pretty here.

here are a few pics. sadly the iphone camera once again fails to do the view justice.

we took a bus ride down about 2 miles west along the rim and hiked back to the parking lot. i loved the view and i am adding this to one more place i need to spend a week at.

7:02 PM May 1st:

leaving grand canyon. five hour drive now to Blythe CA. sounds like a terribly exciting place.

so we made the decision to make it as far as possible that night so we would have less driving to do on saturday. we picked blythe and set off for the long journey back west.

10:18 PM May 1st:

leaving kingman. a couple more hours left to go till Blythe and sleep.

adam got us to kingman, and i took over from there. driving through the deserts of southern california while dead tired is not usually the best idea. since its almost two months ago, i think its safe to say i almost killed us both on this drive because of my fatigue. quite a few wild animals running across the highway too.

12:37 AM May 2nd:

just pulled into the Blythe CA motel 6. gosh I’m tired out.

road trip day 4 blog post is up.

i dunno why i wanted to go to death valley, i suppose its not a normal route people take and it was a pretty big loop to take from bakersfield to las vegas (unfortunately the tioga pass on the east side of yosemite was closed still and that would have cut out a lot). something about it just intrigued me. we decided to head out early thursday morning so that we could get into the park as early as possible.

7:49 AM Apr 30th:

heading out for a trip through death valley. lots of driving ahead of us! thankfully the high will only be 100 degrees today :).

for some reason we had a bit of trouble getting out of bakersfield, stupid morning traffic. but once we hit the interstate, it was a smooth, but rather boring, driving. lots of brown hills quickly turning into desert.

10:35 AM Apr 30th:

somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

i saw some signs for “good jerky” so i figured we would stop to try it out. i thought it was pretty special stuff that was only found out on the edge of death valley, but actually i saw the exact same store in arizona so i was kind of annoyed. the jerky was decent though.

11:20 AM Apr 30th:

heading in to death valley.

things kept getting more and more desolate heading into the park. it wasn’t extremely hot and we were fine driving with our windows down. once we got over the mountain ridge, the downhill into the valley was pretty fun to drive. basically a straight downhill shot for a long long way. i got up to 65 mph without hitting the gas.

here is a view of some of the sand dunes that first come into view going into the valley. but that was just the beginning of the desert.

the picture doesn’t quite do justice to the scene. the road was on a long downhill still and the valley floor seemed far below the sign.

apparently death valley was a major source of borax back in the day, and the 20 mule brand comes from the 20 mule wagons that would take the mined borax out of the valley and to the closest railroad station. i can’t believe what it would be like to be standing out on that valley floor scraping rock from the surface.

2:27 PM Apr 30th:

at the furnace creek visitors center. about 90 degrees out, slightly overcast. some pretty amazing scenery.

one thing that is kind of jolting is furnace creek. its a little patch of green in the middle of the desert surrounding a spring. the visitors center was there and so is a little ranch/hotel. the place was packed with germans. actually, the entire trip was full of run ins with germans. must have been a german holiday that week?? after a quick lunch stop at furnace creek, we decided to head down to badwater, the lowest place in the western hemisphere. it got hotter and the air heavier the further down we drove.

this picture is pretty awesome it think. slightly right of the center about 1/3 of the way down on the picture is a small sign on the side of the rock. that’s showing were sea level is.

this is me hanging out at badwater. amazingly there was a small brine pond filled with some small animals and bugs beneath my feet. it was hot and i felt like i was being pushed down on my shoulders from the air pressure.

on our way back from badwater we drove up through the artist’s canyon. some really pretty vistas and mineral formations. once we were done there, we just felt hot and tired, so we decided to get out of the valley.

this is the last view we had of some of the amazing scenery in death valley.

6:00 PM Apr 30th:

valley got quite hot esp. at badwater. now on towards vegas.

the drive to las vegas was without incident.

6:25 PM Apr 30th:

anyone have a recommendation for a cheap but decent place to eat in vegas?

adam’s friend’s family let us borrow a room for the night, so stopped there to drop off all of our stuff. we then decided to go check out the strip to see what it was all about. let’s just say, i wasn’t impressed.

8:54 PM Apr 30th:

vegas: full of glitz, absolutely no substance. lots of lights, lots of glamour, but just all fake and tacky.

we walked around inside the bellagio a bit then wandered up and down the strip. apparently we missed some of the more exciting things, but i didn’t care. compared to the amazing places we had seen over the past two days, none of the fake glitz could impress me. the packed sidewalks lined by dudes slapping their prostitute flyers together and then shoving them in our faces got pretty old quick. we did want some food though, but we decided that the dinner buffets were too expensive. instead we found a sandwich shop inside one of the casinos. we were sitting next to some slots so i figured it would have been a waste to not at least tried it out once.

9:56 PM Apr 30th:

gave myself $1 on the quarter slots. all gone in 5 spins. sigh, guess I’m just not cut out to be a high roller.

so yeah, lost pretty quick. i actually wish i would have printed out the ticket when i had a quarter left and taken it up to the booth to cash it. too bad.