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Gage and I celebrating the Hawkeyes' undefeated season.  He wanted to wear the black since the gold contrasted the color of his coat, but I'm bigger than him.  Go Hawks!

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I'm just starting to play with Posterous and getting it setup for my blog.  I love the idea and can't wait to get started.  They have an iPhone app, work with about every social network and they guys there are smart and easy to work with.  So it's time I get more into "micro-blogging" and back into updating my regular blog again.

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RAGBRAI officially gets started on Sunday.  Everybody is starting to get into town and get prepped, I can't wait.  Saturday night there is a big concert with the Bare Naked Ladies in Council Bluffs, that I heard could have 30,000 people.  That would be the only way to get RAGBRAI kicked off.  A couple of my friends aren't going to join us until a couple days in, but I'm excited to meet Team Fast As Hell and see everyone else that comes out.  I always find people I know at RAGBRAI.  Since this is my first year, I will have to do all the Virgin stuff.  I know I atleast have to get my legs marked up, we'll see if there's anything else.  I'm just hoping my legs can make it through the week.  I've pretty much decided, that they have to, no matter how long it takes me to get through the days.  I also don't know exactly what to pack yet.  I've read the checklists, and I tend to overpack, but I don't want to be the guy that brings way too much stuff or forgets something obvious.

As I always do, I'm going to try to incorporate tech into the ride.  I'm planning on tweeting during the week as long as I can keep a charge on my phone or ipod.  I found a way to constantly show my location with Google Lattitude.  So you can check the map below anytime during the week and be able to tell where I'm at (again, if I can keep my phone charged).  You can also stay updated by following the twitter feed to the right, by visiting http:\\twitter.com\oneniner or checking my facebook page .  I'm hoping to upload a few pictures to there and track how I'm doing.  So feel free to text me if you're in the area, but I may not get back right away.

Just went on a run with a co-worker today, I thought I was getting into shape, but he really kicked my butt.  It reminded me why I only ran with him once last year and gave up until I fell for it again this year.  I've been training for a 5 mile run at Boys Town on Memorial Day.  Last year Amy, her dad, and I ran the hilly, 5 mile course in a little over 47 minutes.  We were pretty happy with that, but when I did't run for another 8 months after that I decided I should get in shape for it this year.  Especially since I'm planning on riding the full week of RAGBRAI this summer too.  So I found a 10K training program and then adjusted it a little for 5 miles instead of 6.2, Amy and I have gotten up to running 10 mile weeks with our longest run being 4.5 miles so far.  This Saturday we reach the peak of our training at 5 miles.   I thought it was going to be a tough week, but I didn't realize a co-worker was going to take me out for a 4 mile run at an 8 minute pace on my 2 mile day.  I was hoping for a relaxing 2 mile run to get me ready for the long run on Saturday.  Now that it's 2 hours later and I'm just starting to recover I realize my 10 mile week just turned into 12.  I guess I should be a little more ready than I was last year after running about 4 miles a week on a treadmill.

I've been tracking most of my runs on my iPod with Nike+ and felt like trying to display them here.  So here's what it says so far.  That has helped to motivate me, I enjoy knowing my pace and having a record of my runs without have to write them down or get a fancy gps watch. 

The P90X workouts have been struggling a little for me since I started running more.  I've had trouble getting 2 in a week.  Which I guess is a ton better than I was doing a couple months ago, but I may not look like Tony now.  But who knows maybe I'll drop about 40 pounds in the next 3-4 weeks and get pretty cut.  Then I would have to get new biking shorts that are smaller and resize my tux for the wedding, I don't know if it's worth all that extra work.  Amy did want to marry me for who I am, so I should be happy with it too.  :)

RAGBRAI is quickly approaching, I'm getting so excited for it.  I've hung out at a couple overnights every year, but never actually rode in it.  Last year we met some friends and went about 10 miles, but I wouldn't really consider that riding RAGBRAI.  This year I'll find out what it's really like.  I had kinda talked myself into it, then found out the overnight towns and got really excited.  One of them is Indianola, the home of the Simpson College Storm.  I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in that town.  I was also happy to see it's going through Ottumwa.  My sister lives in Ottumwa now, so that should be fun.  Plus I know people for college through most of the towns, so I'm sure I'll come across some old friends.  It'll be interesting since I don't know how to pack or what to expect for the rides, but I think I'm ready for it.  Is anybody else planning on riding?  I'd really enjoy meeting up with you and hanging out a little.

I got a chance to make it to the girls opener last Thursday. It was fun to watch them beat Marshalltown. I don't think we ever beat Marshalltown like that when I was coaching. They played well together and had some fun at the same time. I also can't remember starting off the season undefeated. I know we played Ames first for 3 years and I'm thinking we played at a Valley tournament and got beat by a Council Bluffs team my first year. My second year we won at Valley's tournament, but I can't remember if it was the first game or not. Either way to start the season with a win against a 2A team from the CIML is pretty good. It's a great confidence builder, especially after losing a key player during the week before the game. They are playing well for the new coach and I think he made a good debut also. He is very positive in the paper and I can tell he has a lot of faith in this team and program. I'm glad to see that. We made it to the game, just barely after it started and I spent most of the game talking to the Athletic Director and Marshalltown's previous coach, then some of the parents, but I was glad to be back. Afterwards some of the girls said hi and were excited to see us. They asked about the wedding and thanked us for coming, it was fun.

They also mentioned the Pella game coming up. Pella is the only team from the Little Hawkeye conference that we haven't beat yet. It seems like we outplay them every year, but just can't finish. They usually have a few really good players and control the ball well. They also have a big field, and just like that other team from Pella, it seemed like we always played at their place. They hire local officials and you can never get a break there. My last year coaching there, the college coach from town was the official, so you know he was trying to help out the local girls and get them to his school, it was so frustrating. I did like Pella's coach though. I didn't talk to him much, but he was a good guy at the all-conference meeting. So Newton played at Pella again on Tuesday and from everything that I heard, they outplayed them and were in it the whole time, jut had 1 minor let down and Pella squeeked a goal in during the last couple minutes of the first half. I'm proud of the way they played, that's a tough game to have this early in the year. They are just getting used to a new system and Pella is ranked, and they were able to hold them to 1 goal. Pella only beat us by 1, but we allowed 3 goals. So they are going to have an uphill climb on winning conference and need some help from other teams, but it's definately possible. I think they can win the rest of their games, they just need someone to beat Pella. Last year I wasn't as confident, don't get me wrong, I still think they can beat anyone on a given day, but I drove down on a Tuesday to watch it last year and left with a bad taste in my mouth. It just didn't feel like they were playing together or were that confident in themselves and the program. This year it's totally different, they have great senior leadership and those seniors think that's going to be their last loss. I wouldn't want to be one of the next couple teams to play them. I'm hoping I can make it back to a few games, but it's going to be a busy spring/summer leading up to our wedding.

Best of luck to the Cardinals, I'll be following from 175 miles away. Here's a couple links to stories about the team and the first couple games. If they links are broken, I can get you a pdf copy of the story. If I missed an article somewhere, be sure to let me know.

There's so much buzz going on about Twitter right now, especially with Ashton Kutcher beating CNN to 1,000,000 followers. I think I joined about a year ago, but hadn't really heard much about it being applicable to me until RAGBRAI posted any tweets with the hashtag #RAGBRAI in them to the Des Moines Register's website.  I thought this was a creative way to share with everyone, basically from your phone while on RAGBRAI.  Then like everybody else, I made a couple "tweets" that said, "Just trying to figure this out". I didn't really understand it, but liked to follow a local band and see what they were up to and where they were performing. Once I had followed them for a while, I started to learn how it works and some of the lingo. I felt pretty dumb trying to Google "RT" and what the "@" or "#" meant. For those friends of mine that aren't on twitter, which you must not be, I only know about 10 people on there compared to the hundreds on facebook or myspace, "RT" stands for retweet. Which means, when someone in your network says something you like, then you retweet it to your network, trying to spread the word or show gratitude to the person that originally posted it. And it's abbreviated to obviously save characters since you can only use 140. So back to the showing graditude and giving credit, when retweeting be sure to put a "@" before the person that orginally posted the tweet. You also use the "@" to reply to someone. So if you're answering their question, or just saying something to them publicly then use the @. Next the "#" which is to note a subject or event that you want to point out. With search.twitter.com parsing every tweet this isn't as important anymore until you are trying to point out something with a common name as something else less unique. I can't think of a good example right now, so that's not much help. Also if you're going to use a hashtag, be sure to use the same one that everyone else is using so the tweets can be grouped. Often an event will have an abrieviated tag so that it's shorter, those can be found on hashtags.org.  Which brings me to one of the cooler features of Twitter. Twitter Search, which was acquired by Twitter from Summize, will show the most popular words mentioned in all tweets. Then it shows the top 10 "trends", this will usually tell you what's going on at the time, like earthquakes in California, who got kicked off of American Idol, or bombings in Mumbai. If your timing is right you will find out about stuff before it's in the news. Here's a twitpic from the plane that landed in the Hudson twitpic.com/135xa, it was a first hand picture taken among the many that made it to twitter before the news was on TV. Twitpic is an easy way to send pictures from your phone or computer and have them resize the pic, then automatically post a link to your twitter account with a note about it. The one from this link is probably the most popular twitpic ever, although I perfer this one from Ashton twitpic.com/2bj58. There are tons of other applications built by people outside of twitter that aggregate similar tweets, or messages from the same geographical area.

It's a fun service, that has been popular in the tech area, but just went crazy when celebrities starting using opening up a whole new level of communication between celebs and their fans. There are a few things that bug me about twitter. For 1, I hate that some people make it out to be a big popularity contest. To be honest, who cares if Ashton has more followers than CNN or me as far as that goes. I think you get more out of it if you actually interact and read your feed instead of just trying to get the most people to follow you. I guess it's kind of a cool feeling to be listed as a top for some catagory (http://wefollow.com/tag/omaha), but that's not really my goal. This also leads me to how people try to use it to market themselves. Once again, it has been amazing the traffic that it has brought to my site, but I'm not out there saying how cool I am, and how good I am at stuff and how I can make you money. I just don't get that, I guess maybe it's cause I don't have to rely on it for an income, but I just want to use it as a socializing tool, and yes find out about some new cool blogs and people along the way. The marketing part is real annoying people will follow you to get you to follow them back, then they will remove you from their list and just spam you with "how to make millions" messages. I'm pretty generous, I'll follow anybody that looks like they are following me, because they are interested. I also go back and check to make sure that the people I'm following are following me back (http://friendorfollow.com/). There are quite a few people I will still follow if they're not following me, but mostly it's the people that added me first then removed me. There are a few tools that make it easy to follow as many people as you want and sort through them. I use Tweetdeck the most, but Seesmic or Twirl are other good ones. They allow you to create groups and follow a small number of people more closely. I like to follow people from the Omaha & Des Moines areas just to see what's going on in the area. I've found out about some pretty cool startups and interesting entrepenuers. They also annouce local Tweetups, to get a chance to meet people in the area and network in person.  I also have groups for celebrities, musicians, and "tech celebs", I think they are the ones that really have brought twitter to where it is and have the most interesting ideas on how to use it.

Everyone has their own methods to get their tweets out. The most popular is the web, but Twitter was originally intended for using your cell phone to send and receive text messages. I use both of those, then also Tweetie on my iPod touch, PockeTwit on my Windows Mobile phone, then Tweetdeck on my computer and Friendfeed from the web. I'm still playing with using other clients from my desktop at home. I'm also still customizing Friendfeed. It's actually a way to agregate many web services, but I use to to read my friends tweets, you can check out my web activities there at friendfeed.com/oneniner . I like to follow a lot of people and sort through their messages, but I don't get why not everybody will follow back. I have the hardest time getting half as many followers as the people I'd like to follow. For some reason most of the local people I follow don't follow back, I don't really care since it's not a contest, I just don't think it'd be that hard especially with some of the ways I mentioned to group your friends. Pretty soon, I'll reach the 2,000 cap and not have enough people following me to follow more people, but oh well, I guess we'll wait till I get there. I was pretty excited that I finally got to 500 followers and I did it in a fair way, I wasn't tricking people into adding me. It's especially good since I don't post as much as some people do. So if you like the status updates in Facebook, there's a ton more cool interesting things going on around twitter, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but try it out, follow me, I'll follow you back and just take your time getting comfortable, you'll catch on pretty fast. Then it'll be too late and you'll be addicted.

 I'm now counting down the hours until I get to see my first Newton Girls Soccer game of 2009 and it happens to be the season opener, which is even better.  Last year was tough, it was my first year out of coaching and I had to hear from everybody what was going on, who went out, who was practicing well, who wasn't, if there were any younger players making a contribution.  I also had the chance to hear the other side from the coach.  I really felt like I was part of the team again.  This year I haven't been quite as informed, but in the last couple days I think I was brought up to speed.  Really not too many big surprises, I feel like even though it's been 2 seasons, I still have a pretty good idea where people are going to be at and how they are going to do.  There's always some new faces, but thats to be expected.  I don't mean this to hurt the feelings of any graduating players, but it seems like Newton just reloads every year and doesn't have a rebuilding year.  It's getting harder and harder to make the varsity squad or start, because everyone is so good.  I think the Newton club system is the one to thank for that.  Almost all of these kids played club soccer when they were younger, that can't be said for the first couple teams I coached and it's really brought the level of play up and the confidence and expectations of the players.  The first year I coached I had players write down their goals before the season and most of the goals were to get along with everyone.  After we had a good year, the next season the goals were to win half of their games.  We met that one too, and slowly the goals got higher and higher.  The players start to believe in themselves and then who knows what can happen.  My last year the goals were, winning conference, going to state, and being undefeated.  It's really fun to see that progress into the program they have today.

Tomorrow's game is versus Marshalltown and is also the first on the new field (I think).  I personally haven't seen the field yet, but from the few games we played on turf in the past, it definately gives you a home field advantage... if you practice on it.  I don't know how much work they've done on it, but I wish we could've played more on one before going to Valley.  The new coach gets a chance to make his debut, I'm real excited for him, i think he's a great person and I think he'll do a great job coaching, too.  Marshalltown will be a good opponent to start off the season.  They are always competitive with us.  We had a couple overtime games with them, but win or lose, they're always close.  They also seem to have a few physical players.  It's nice that Newton got a couple more days of practice before it's first game and the first game isn't against Ames.  That's never a good way to start the season.  Marshalltown isn't in our conference anymore, but has always been a rival of ours.

I'm starting to ramble a little, probably because it's getting late, but Go Cards!  I'm excited to catch up with everyone and cheer them on to victory.   I'm sure I'll lean a lot more this weekend, and I'll have more news next time.

I've been a fan of all aspects of photography for a while.  I'm not a pro by any means, but I find it entertaining to take the perfect shot, then to edit the picture on your own and get it out to your friends and family to enjoy.  What little artistic ability I have, I got from my mom.  She is very artistic and loves to do everything by hand.  I wouldn't even be able to name all of the stuff she's worked on, but everything from drawing with pastels, oil paint, & charcoal to pottery, sculptures, and more recently a little tech related with editing photography on the computer.  That's the area that gets me excited, because I can use my tech experience to help.

I recently got more excited about this with the purchase of an iMac.  I've been wanting to learn more and dig more into the photo & video editing with a little web design on the side, so I figured, what better way.  I haven't gotten the chance to use iPhoto yet, but here's a few tools I like to use and would recommend.  I use Google's Picasa 3 to organize all my pictures.  It's a basic and easy to understand program that can actually be pretty powerful if you want it to be.  I also use Picasa's web galleries to display most of my pictures with my family and friends.  Picasa makes it easy to just make a few minor changes and easily upload them for free.  One of the advanced features are that it will let you make batch edits to multiple files.  This is nice when you took a lot of pictures inside in bad light, it will try to auto fix the whole folder to make them look nice in a hurry.  The web gallery has face recognition, which will organize all the pictures with similar looking faces to let you name who that person is.  This came in handy for me, when Amy and I went on a vaction and took probably a thousand pictures, but only wanted to send the ones of other people to them.  Then a few other good pictures that we marked with Picasa's star feature.  If you've had problems finding pictures like I have, you'd like Picasa's photo tagging.  It took a little work to get started, but I like to tag each picture with who's in it and what was going on, whether it was an event or a holiday or something significant.  It's necesary to take the people, location, or date if you use Picasa's other features, but it doesn't hurt.  Speaking of location Picasa will geotag your photos with the location they were taken, showing them on a simple google map, or even exporting them to Google Earth, espeically fun for people that travel a lot.  It also intergrates well with the other places you would like to use your photos, like uploading to blogs or even to a Facebook photo album.  I use this feature to upload a few of my favorites to Facebook to share with my friends.

As for editing pictures and giving them artistic effects, I usually turn to Picnik.com.  It is an awesome free site with some amazing features.  You upload your picture, then it shows all these options on how to change the photo and make it unique.  It's much easier than having the 500 page book & second job that Photoshop would require.  Just a few clicks and you're ready to save the picture back to your computer or share it to a web gallery.  I shouldn't knock Photoshop too much. They have a verynice site, photoshop.com, that also lets you edit pictures online.  I've used it a few times, but I like Picnik a lot more.  Picnik really lets you bring out that inner artist and you can be as dramatic as you'd like.  If you've seen those pictures around facebook that looks like a polaroid, then Picnik is probably what they used.  It's one of their options for borders.  They also have a facebook app, that works pretty smooth.  Most of the features are free, but there is an option to pay a little bit to get more features.  I think it lets you save more of your past photos and a few other things.

I've also heard good things about GIMP & Paint.Net.  I haven't actually used either, but both are free programs used to edit pictures.  And if you're willing to pay a little, I've used Adobe Photoshop Elements and it's not too bad either.  I'm looking to have iPhoto fill this area for me to see what it can do.

The most fun part of photography for me is sharing the pictures with people.  Flickr has a great web community, I just haven't started using it as much as I'd like.  I used to use Yahoo photos and those albums got converted to Flickr, I just haven't done anything with it yet.  As I mentioned above Facebook has become the most popular place to share pictures among other social networking sites.  I use PicasaWeb for most of my pictures, then I put my favorites out on Facebook, and I just have a few of the main ones in MySpace.  Another fun way to share photos is using TwitPic and sending them through  Twitter.  Like  tweets, most of these pictures are from cell phones, when you just want a quick easy way to share them, not always the best quality.  I'd use TwitPic when I'm on the go and I see something cool, or when I just don't have a camera handy.

Next to the really fun part, bringing those still frames to life.  I used to use Windows Movie Maker or other slideshow tools, but one of the really cool web ones that I discovered is Animoto.  This site will upload about 10-15 pictures and put them to some of their music to make a 30 second music video.  I've shared my most recent one above.  I just threw some pictures in there to see what it could do, but this has some really cool posibilities.  Like Picnik, there is a paid premium version to make full length videos that cost something like $3 a video.  Which really isn't much when you think about it.  Then you can download them to your computer to play on your ipod or other media devices.  Animoto will also let you upload the videos to your YouTube account or embed them into a webpage.  I've used the embed feature above, the YouTube upload is nice again because of the community they have.  You get a lot of views on their site.  Speaking of video sites, I like use YouTube and Vimeo to upload my slideshows that I've made on my computer, because I think the HD quality is a little better than YouTubes.  I'll put one of those video's below (note to see the HD version, you have to click on it to go to the site).  Vimeo and Viddler are both YouTube competitors if you're looking for somewhere else to post videos.

I can't mention all the stuff I like without mentioning where I heard about some of it and some of my resources.  I enjoy listening to Scott Bourne on the MacBreak Weekly Podcast, then he also has his own blog/podcast called TWiPPhoto (This Week in Photography).  Another site of his I find interesting is Scottcritiques, basically you upload your pictures and he tells you how bad they are.  It's not really that harsh, but I haven't uploaded any of my own photos or it probably would be.  It's definately intersting though.  Lifehacker is also a good source for finding cheap, efficient tools to help you out, especially when you're wanting to find that free tool, that does a simple task.

Lastly, you can't spend so much time on your pictures and videos without backing them up.  Some people don't realize tell their hard drive crashes and it's too late.  My backup system isn't too extensive right now, anytime I work on stuff I run a manual backup to an external drive, then store the external drive in a firesafe box, but I'm really wanting to get a Drobo to replace my external drive, then I would have data redundancy similar to a RAID array and could backup more data than I do on my 300GB external drive.  Another service, I'd like to try out is to backup my important data to an Amazon S3 server.  You can use their storage in the cloud and pay for how much data you upload to them per month.  This way if you have a fire you can pull all your stuff back from the web.  This kinda takes backups to the next level, but I think it's important.  You can read more about "Managing Your Digital Life" from another Scott Bourne site.  I know another shameless plug, but I'm working on getting me a drobo and saving some money.

These are just a few things that have made my photo editing more fun, if I missed any please let me know, I'm always looking forward to try new things or save some time & money here and there.  I've also linked to a few of my sites that I use, feel free to add me or look around.

Jamaica from Nolan Carson on Vimeo.

It doesn't seem like it was 2 years ago, but I used to spend about 6 months getting ready for tomorrow.  The first day of practice for High school soccer in Iowa.  I coached the girls high school team in Newton for 5 years.  For some reason they always started the season the same day as spring break.  So we were always missing some of our key players and I got a chance to spend a week with about 30 new faces that I had to learn about and coach for about a week and a half before the first game.  That was always the toughest thing.  I had a decent idea of who my top 10-15 players were, but I never ruled anybody out.  So in that week and a half I had to meet new players, build there trust, at the same time try to get them into shape and not hate me.  Then also had to figure out how good they were and what kind of potential they had in all the different areas.  Then once I had a good idea of our better players, I had to prepare them for 1 of the top teams that we would play for the season.  I'm not sure why our schedule was set up that way, but we never made excuses.

 I miss soccer quite a bit, I wish I could've hung around for a few more years.  The junior and senior classes are the last 2 classes that I coached.  My last season they moved to the Little Hawkeye conference which is smaller schools than we used to play, then last year they moved down to being a 1A team instead of 2A like they had been since the Girls Soccer Program was started in 1997.  This year they are back with the big schools.  I think they are 1 of the 2 smallest schools, so they probably have a tough outlook to make it to state, but I'm sure they can do it.  The Little Hawkeye conference has smaller schools in it, but the competition is just as good as the larger one (CIML-Iowa) they used to play in.  2 of the top 1A teams in the state are both in the conference.  We were able to split with them in 2007 and get a share of the conference title.  This year will mark the 2nd new coach since I left.  I have a lot of faith in him and I'm sure he can lead them to state.  They may not be as sure, since they had a tough transition last year and are probably a little untrusting right now.  They are going to have to build that trust fast to get things going in the right direction.  I'm excited to see how they do it.

This is an intro to a series of posts I'm going to start making about my soccer coaching days.  I'm also planning on keeping up with the team and give you a few updates.  I've put together a list of things I'd like to cover, but if any one has any requests I'd be happy to hear them and see what I can do to help you out, especially my ex-players, I'd do whatever I can to help you out.  I'd also like to use this to get in touch with everyone that made my soccer coaching days so memorable, so please say hi.