My wife Jen posted a list generated from FindYourSpot.com that asks you a few simple questions then figures based on your answers places that you may want to live. I thought I’d post mine as well:

Medford, Oregon   Gateway to the Pacific Northwest
This gorgeous spot boasts the West’s only operating water-powered grist mill, located on the banks of Little Butte Creek since 1872…Population: 190,000  |  Average Home Price: $238,000  |  Precipitation: 19″  |  Snow: 8″

Eugene, Oregon   The Emerald City
This Oregon city is home to the Hendricks Park Rhododendron Garden, famous all over the world for its beautiful blossoms…Population: 142,000  |  Average Home Price: $226,000  |  Precipitation: 48″  |  Snow: 7″

Anchorage, Alaska  City of  Lights and Flowers
Cries of “Gold” echoed through this town in 1882 after prospectors hit paydirt at nearby Crow Creek…Population: 271,000  |  Average Home Price: $247,000  |  Precipitation: 15″  |  Snow: 71″

Frederick, Maryland   Where The Past Comes Alive
This Maryland city’s Great Fair is one of the nation’s oldest county agricultural fairs…Population: 56,000  |  Average Home Price: $305,000  |  Precipitation: 36″  |  Snow: 21″

Denver, Colorado   The Mile High City
At an elevation of 5280 feet, this Mile High City boasts world-class skiing within a short drive…Population: 557,500  |  Average Home Price: $280,500  |  Precipitation: 16″  |  Snow: 60″

Baltimore, Maryland   The Sparkling Harbor City
This Atlantic seaboard city is home to the National Aquarium…Population: 651,000  |  Average Home Price: $310,000  |  Precipitation: 40″  |  Snow: 18″

Corvallis, Oregon   Heart of the Willamette Valley
This Oregon city hosts “da Vinci Days,” a festival of unique events revolving around art, science and technology…Population: 50,000  |  Average Home Price: $225,000  |  Precipitation: 43″  |  Snow: 6″

Portland, Oregon   City of Roses
This Oregon city has the nation’s largest forested municipal park, the aptly-named Forest Park…Population: 2,000,000  |  Average Home Price: $259,000  |  Precipitation: 36″  |  Snow: 5″

Charleston, West Virginia   The Home of Hospitality
For a taste of yesteryear, catch the boat races at this West Virginia city’s annual Sternwheel Regatta…Population: 248,000  |  Average Home Price: $216,000  |  Precipitation: 41″  |  Snow: 26″

Fort Collins, Colorado   The Choice City
This Colorado town is home to the Sweatsville Zoo, a sculpture park with over 100 works made entirely from scrap metal…Population: 125,700  |  Average Home Price: $243,000  |  Precipitation: 16″  |  Snow: 48″

Ogden, Utah   Where Utah Comes Together
This scenic “Crossroads of the West” is set between Utah’s Great Salt Lake and the magnificent Wasatch Mountains…Population: 77,200  |  Average Home Price: $160,000  |  Precipitation: 17″  |  Snow: 63″

Bellingham, Washington   The Victorian Seaport
The annual Ski to Sea challenge held in this breathtaking port city includes snow skiing, running, biking, and kayaking…Population: 67,000  |  Average Home Price: $300,000  |  Precipitation: 36″  |  Snow: 7″

Bend, Oregon   Oregon’s Natural Playground
This Oregon town’s municipal airport was used for pilot training during World War II…Population: 59,800  |  Average Home Price: $278,500  |  Precipitation: 12″  |  Snow: 34″

Salem, Oregon   The Heart of Oregon
This capital city is the home of the Oregon State Fair, as well as the state’s largest on-going fine arts & crafts fair…Population: 143,000  |  Average Home Price: $200,000  |  Precipitation: 39″  |  Snow: 6″

Missoula, Montana   Cosmopolitan Mountain Town
This eclectic town supports a symphony orchestra, boasts the country’s first Smoke Jumper fire-fighting school, and has its own honorary French consul…Population: 60,700  |  Average Home Price: $177,000  |  Precipitation: 13″  |  Snow: 48″

Seattle, Washington   The Emerald City
The game “Pictionary” was developed by a waiter in this town in 1986…Population: 3,300,000  |  Average Home Price: $435,000  |  Precipitation: 35″  |  Snow: 15″

Kent, Washington   The Heart of Puget Sound
This family-friendly town is centrally located in the heart of the Puget Sound region…Population: 79,500  |  Average Home Price: $240,000  |  Precipitation: 35″  |  Snow: 15″

Provo-Orem, Utah   Living and Learning at their Best
These twin cities in central Utah are home to some of the world’s top collections of dinosaur bones…Population: 189,500  |  Average Home Price: $205,000  |  Precipitation: 12″  |  Snow: 30″

Spokane, Washington   Northwestern Jewel
This Washington golf mecca hosts a Lilac Festival every year; in 1974 it also hosted the World’s Fair…Population: 427,500  |  Average Home Price: $138,700  |  Precipitation: 17″  |  Snow: 50″

Olympia, Washington   The Evergreen Capital
Set on a magnificent peninsula in the South Puget Sound, this spot was originally called “black bear place” before being renamed after nearby mountains…Population: 222,000  |  Average Home Price: $225,000  |  Precipitation: 51″  |  Snow: 10″

Great Falls, Montana   Where the Rockies Meet the Plains
Captain Meriwether Lewis and his companion William Clark encountered a hostile grizzly bear near the waterfalls of this great spot in 1805…Population: 56,200  |  Average Home Price: $145,000  |  Precipitation: 15″  |  Snow: 44″

Idaho Falls, Idaho   High Tech meets the Great Outdoors
This gateway to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons has restaurants, shopping, and a regional park along its Snake River Greenbelt…Population: 51,500  |  Average Home Price: $250,000  |  Precipitation: 10″  |  Snow: 31″

Salt Lake City, Utah   This is the Place
In 2002, this spot became the largest city ever to host the Winter Olympics…Population: 181,700  |  Average Home Price: $185,000  |  Precipitation: 15″  |  Snow: 55″

Billings, Montana   Star of the Big Sky Country
During the Wild West days in Billings, Montana, the cowboys and scarlet ladies of every saloon performed impossible dances atop bars, tables, and in some instances upon atop the pianos…Population: 94,200  |  Average Home Price: $162,000  |  Precipitation: 15″  |  Snow: 57″

Consumer Reports released some advice for potential shoppers. Here’s their advice:

Get a receipt or gift receipt. Despite longer grace periods, retailers are becoming more insistent on a receipt in order to get a refund, and they’re more inclined to turn away customers without proof of purchase. Without a receipt, they may offer a store credit for the lowest price the item sold for.

Keep packaging intact. Stores are likely to refuse a return if the packaging materials are open or discarded. Even a missing instruction manual, cords and cables or warranty card can give retailers reason to deny the return.

Be wary online. Don’t just throw it in a box and mail it back. Online returns usually require a packing slip (typically included in any gift order), and a return authorization number. Call ahead to ensure that all requirements are being met.

Don’t break seals or cut out UPC codes. Items like computer software, video games, CDs and DVDs aren’t generally returnable for another title after the seal has been broken. If an item comes with a rebate offer, make sure it works before removing the UPC code to redeem the rebate.

Also, watch out for restocking fees at major retailers, mostly for big-ticket items.

• Amazon.com: 15% restocking fees for computers and fine jewelry
• Best Buy: 15% restocking fees on laptops, camcorders, digital cameras and GPS navigators
• Bidz.com: 15% restocking fee on all items. Plus shoppers have only 15 days to return items.
• Sears: 15% restocking fee applies to electronics products returned without the original box, used, and without all of the original packaging. The penalty also applies to some other products.
• Home Depot: special-orders and some cancelled orders are subject to a 15 percent restocking fee.
• Macys: 10% restocking fee on furniture
• Newegg.com: 15% restocking fee on all major purchases if the box is opened

Blatantly stolen from Consumerist who quoted Consumer Reports.

At the March OC Podcasters meeting I did a presentation on how to get wordpress to interact with some popular 3rd party web applications such as Twitter & Facebook along with sharing posts on social networks. The day started out with me putting the final touches on my Keynote presentation I’d be showing at the event. If you were to ask my wife she would say I spent all day messing with it… and most of the day before too. Never again will I wait until the last minute to prep my presentation like I did this one. I’ve never used Keynote before and was very impressed with what I was able to do with very little effort. I did have a learning curve but that’s to be expected with a new app. After I learned the ends and outs I was able to make interactive slides that didnt require me to go slide by slide to make elements change on the screen. I also was able to get the Keynote Remote app to work on my iphone which is pretty damn cool.

Anyhow, back to the talk… I started out with a quick intro on wordpress themes (I should have included how a widget works in the slides but I did discuss that which you can see in the video) then later went into something new and fresh: Facebook Connect. This tech enables you to allow your readers to login to your wordpress site using their Facebook login info. The plugin I finally settled with was the one developed by sixjumps which took the basics of just authenticating with wordpress to a new level. With this you can leave a comment on the blog and allow the comment to be sent over to facebook. You can also share links from the site to facebook with ease and lastly be able to see who else is using the site from facebook. Pretty cool stuff to be totally honest.

Later I went into some plugins to connect wordpress with Twitter: TwitterTools by Alex King, TwitMe by Johnny Mast and Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk. I love Alex and Joost’s work and their plugins kick some serious ass. TwitMe and its dev are new to me but there are some great features he put into that plugin. Lastly I discussed sharing posts with friends using using Joost’s plugin Sociable and ShareThis.

One thing I learned with this is the power of the masses… If your doing a presentation on social media or new media, get your audience involved by asking them to get their friends involved. At the beginning of the demo I put a tinyurl link up on the screen and asked everyone to hop on twitter and send that link out to as a tweet so we can get some people in the chatroom. I also learned to have a videotape in the camera before using a sony camera as a videosource. Ends up that without a tape the camera goes into store demo mode and did all sorts of fun with the video demoing how you can do mosaic and sepia and other things. Next time I need to drag Jacob Morales out and have him record me with his kick ass setup.

Below are various ways to consume the content:

YouTube Video of me doing the presentations:

SlideShare of the Presentation:

PDF and KeyNote if you’d like to use these files for your own presentation.

Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.

WordPress 3rd party web service by Jason Tucker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

On my way to work this morning I saw this amazing rainbow. I pulled out the jailbroken iPhone and recorded the video using cycorder. After doing so I gave my wife and call and told her to go outside so we could share this awesome view.

Happy Birthday Jen!

At 10:00pm I headed over to hang out in front of the GameStop on Santa Gertrudes and Whittier Blvd in Whittier, CA. Three people were already waiting in line, playing DS and talking about high school. They attended the same high school my wife did and some funny stories came out out of that. Around 10:30 one of the workers came out and asked a trivia question “What is the name of the protagonist in GTA 3. I was sitting there reading Wikipedia on my blackberry and told one of the high school kids next to me “say Claude”. He did and he won a Liberty City GTA IV license plate. I personally saw no use for the item and he looked excited to win it which made me happy all the same. Later they came out and asked each of us “Red or Black?” I chose BLACK and got a black Mario Xmas Stocking… a $0.99 value. For being one of the first 5 in line (I was 4th) we received GTA IV stickers, the first guy in line got a 2′x2′ version of it. Mine is about 8″x8″

At 11:00 they opened the doors of the store and let 5 of us at a time come in and have our receipts stamped indicating we could get a copy of the game. They attempted to upsale us on anything we wanted to buy and also on the BradyGames Guide Book. By stamping the receipts they knew how many people were at the event and to get enought ready to hand out at 12. They also had us form a new line once you got your receipt stamped the front of the line was near the side exit of the facility. At midnight everyone was excited to get the game and more and more people were showing up. People in cars were driving by screaming “GTA!!!” out the window. At one point someones girlfriend in front of me walked the line and counted 65 people behind us. Once the side door opened the midnight sprinkler system turned on and some of us got our shoes wet, jokingly people asked for a new copy because theirs were getting wet. It’s in plastic wrap, I doubt that happened. My new found friends each bought the Limited Edition version which came in a bigger white box they didnt want theirs to get wet so ran off to head home and play it. Earlier they indicated that they were going to call in sick to school the next day and would be playing the game all night. By the time I got my copy and arrived at home it was 12:07, I loaded the game up and gave it a whirl, sure enough after playing for 2 hours it’s as good as the review websites say it is.

In the next few days I wanna checkout the online play and hopefully more of my friends on XBL will have their copies of the game. Playing with random people is fine but playing online with friends is even better. Sandbox style multiplayer should be pretty fun and the Mafiya Work and Team Mafiya Work sound interesting too. Not to mention Team Car Jack City and Turf Wars and the many other modes of play as well. I can see how this game is going to be popular with the online players for quite some time.

Wanna play? I’m abstrak01 on XBox Live

Link to the video

[HTML1]

http://www.discoverycube.org/

[bliptv 792429]

We talked about my background, my podcasts, MAME, Xbox hacking, Asterisk, WRT45G hacking (with DD-WRT) and other fun stuff.

Give it a listen:
Geek Week on A Geek and his Wife podcast – Tucker Time
Subscribe via iTunes

Lately I’ve been taking Jessalyn (and a sibling) to the park to play on the weekends. Jess is cooped up at home most of the time and we dont have a yard to play in. I feel bad for her since she doesn’t have anywhere outside to play. Our courtyard at the apartment consists of a gated pool that takes of the majority of the free space out there. Because of that most of the kids in our complex just run around it. One of the gates in the court yard (not the pool gate) doesn’t latch all the way, this gate leads to the cul-de-sac we live on. Since we don’t want Jess playing in the street we try to limit her time out in the courtyard or be very watchful of her when shes out there. Because of all of this I’ve been taking the kids to the park to run around. I grew up with a decent sized front yard, 2 trees to climb and a make shift “tree house” consisting of 2 boards nailed between branches of the tree. I want Jessalyn to enjoy running on the grass and playing on the playground equipment both of which don’t exist at home. I think taking her to the park also give the big kids and her some time to bond. Jess is a pretty big girl now she can slide down the biggest of slides and climb up just about any of the playground equipment.

Caitlin gets in on the fun and takes Jess on the various stationary toys that are out on the grounds:

Jess is starting to enjoy being on the swing for short bursts. Once she feels the effects of the swing she asks to stop. She does enjoy going on the swing with someone tho:

It also gives Caitlin a chance to be a little kid again:

I got home from work and we headed out to Norco to help my mom pack and move stuff into the truck. The plan was that Jen would go with me to help my mom box stuff up. Brandon had 2 of his friends come over to help out. Both of which Brandon picked up so he’d later have to drive them back to their houses. I played the longest game of tetris, it took us from 7pm until 2am to have the truck packed. At 2am we quit and went to sleep. Brandon took one of his friends home earlier in evening and took his other one home at 2am.

Saturday:

I woke up in the morning and started packing, it was 7am and I just wanted to get the damn thing done. My mom woke up and then my step dad. Jen and my Mom were to meet 1/2 way to give Jen the rent check I forgot to give her. We didn’t wake my brother up since I didnt want a crabby ass person working with me so i let him sleep in. Since I didnt drive here, I didnt have a car to go get breakfast for everyone. I went to wake up brandon to find out he didnt sleep here last night. Drat, now what!?!?! My Mom came back home and I took her car to my brothers friends house. Maybe he slept there. I left brandon 100 voicemails and text messages on my way there. Once I arrived I woke him up and we headed back to Moms. I grabbed some donuts on the way in to feed everyone and then we got back to packing up everything. We planned on leaving at 1pm and ended up leaving at 5pm. It takes 5+ hours to get my my moms place and the moving truck brandon was driving only went 55. Up hill he could only do 40 or something crazy. I picked 1 podcast to listen to on the way there and I had 6 episodes of it on my iPod. Love Long and Prosper was the show I listened to. I’m not a big Trek fan, but thats only a very small portion of their podcast. I had a few comments I wanted to make on some of the episodes so I called into their number on my cell and left some. Unfortunatly I found out I missdialed and called some random other podcasts number. Oh well.

We stopped at a few truck stops along the way, one of which is the Flying J. This place has everything even showers. Way weird for someone that has never delt with truckers and truck stops. We finally arrived in Seligman at 1:00am or so and we needed to find a motel. Usually this place is DEAD but we found out that the Antelope Eaters were in town to do some hunting and the place was PACKED! Out of the 7 motels in town all of them said no vacancy except one. We stopped in there and asked for a room. The lady said one of the hunters prepaid for the room and was arriving tonight so we couldnt stay in it. She really wanted to help us out but didnt want to get in trouble when the guy arrived and couldnt stay even tho he prepaid. We gave up and drove 6 miles out of town to my moms property. Once we got there (on a crazy ass dirt road) we had to setup the Trailer that my parents would be living in until their prefab house was completed. We finally got the generator running for the trailer and got the lights and heater on. It was 20 degrees and we needed some warmth. We finally went to sleep in the nice cosy trailer.

Sunday:

I woke up and got dressed. I wanted to see the sights and really take in all that my parents have been talking about. The sky was clear and the view was amazing. Granted you couldnt see much but hills and dirt for miles. Theres a train track about 3 miles away and the highway about 5 miles away too

.

Everyone woke up and we drove into town to get some breakfast. It was 10:45 and they stopped surving breakfast at 11 so we had to hurry.

Other random peoples pictures of seligman

The place we ate at was nice, the place was full of hunters in their camo and furry weird costumes. We had a massive breakfast and it was good to hang out with everyone and talk. After that we went to the general store for gas then back to the property to begin unloading. My moms house is a prefab home, it came in 2 pieces that were built off site then driven to the location. Once there they connect the two halves and brace the house to the dirt foundation. the house wasnt 100% complete and didnt have permits to occupy yet. So they cant live in it until they have a permit so we just moved their stuff into the various rooms but didnt set anything up.

We planned on leaving at 3pm or so and didnt end up leaving until 6pm. We got to barstow at 9:25 and didnt get home until pretty late. Jen stayed up waiting for us which I was happy about. Brandon had to drive to an almost empty house back in Norco in order to go to work the next morning.