We are now e-friends and will be plotting to take over the world as only similar in name people often do.

Tube Steak Challenge
Last Friday my Tube Steak Challenge took another leap forward.

The Ice Dragons celebrated our summer hockey season with a wrap party at Gord’s where beer and food was provided from the team pot of our subs. Even though my method for remembering the number of dogs I consumed with the caps of beer bottles didn’t work out as planned I reached double digits before the end of the month.

I will be joining Gord and Tyler on a hike in the wilderness later this week up to Landslide Lake and there are hot dogs on the menu so I hope to return from the trip and have a a few more tubed steaks under my belt.

On November 9, 2007 Christoph Rehage set off to walk across China. While on his journey he photographed his hair and beard growth over the year (which is documented here). He put in over 4,500KM solely on foot and put together a fantastic video of his hair growth over that time.

There are numerous ‘photo a day’ videos but this one really stood out to me because of how creative the pictures were, the soundtrack he used and how unruly he looked after a year.

I can’t help but feel a sense of deep respect for what Christoph accomplished with this video. The walk he did alone is worth being commended for but the artistic result is amazing. I have photographed a month of growing a playoff beard and have nearly three years of doing ‘photo a day’ and I can only hope to capture something as remarkable as that with these challenges.

Watch the video here, you won’t regret it.

Extreme Prize

I completed an online survery for Value Drug Mart and was quite intruiged by the prize they were offering me if my entry was selected.

I guess this could be an interesting prize.

Tube Steak Challenge

Canada Day marked our nations 142nd birthday, but it was the official end to my innagural Tube Steak Challenge. We celebrated this years holiday at work but enjoyed a BBQ for our troubles of working July 1. It was here that hot dog number 54 was consumed.

Of course when the Coney Island hot dog eating contest from July 4th has a record breaking 68 hot dogs eaten in ten minutes it puts my ’1.03846′ hot dogs a week to shame.

Still, I am proud of it all the same.

Months of Waiting

In March I lost everything to 1and1.com. In addition to losing blog posts and photos my domain was held for ransom by 1and1. I had to wait for my registration of the domain to expire, then wait the month for the redemption period to run out. Following that I entered an auction to purchase the domain.

After winning the auction I had to wait 60 days to move the domain over to GoDaddy, and now seagurs.com is rightfully mine.

Last week I was speaking with Gord and jested that I would buy CanSeanSeeYet.com and have it similar to IsItChristmas.com or IsMacTFired.com. Gord talked common sense into me, got me off the ledge and basically said that registering a domain for a joke “3 people will get” was a waste. I thought it was a fair argument and that it was impulsive on my part. I gave up my quest for this joke site and did not think about it after that.

Wednesday morning I was renewing another joke domain, IReallyLoveTheMcRib.com. I selected the domain and went through the checkout process for renewal. I must have been too busy making sure no other GoDaddy ‘upgrades’ made their way into my cart to really see what I was buying.

I completed the purchase without error, however when I received an email notice thanking me for purchasing a new domain I realized something was wrong. I went back to my domain manager and saw the horror! I had purchased CanSeanSeeYet.com without realizing it.

CanSeanSeeYet.com was still in my cart from last week and I purchased that instead of renewing my intended domain. I had already paid a years domain registration for it so I might as well make the most of it.

I present to you: CanSeanSeeYet.com, in all of its blurry glory.

I like to think I have a healthy variety of technology, news, friends, locals and people that I have a common interest with on my Follow list but that doesn’t give me the full story. I follow any discussions marked with the Edmonton “#yeg” hashtag and routinely go into Trends to see what is making news on Twitter. I am often informed of news from Twitter before it comes up on my RSS reader.

However keeping tabs on all of that at once can be trying and I have recently become addicted to Twitter desktop applications. I have tried several clients and will talk about them below. Notably missing from this list is Twhirl. I have used it but it was no comparison to my favorite application and removed it immediately and I could not be bothered to install it again for screenshots.

Desktop
Seesmic Desktop launched in April to a lot of praise and publicity on Twitter. It had an immediate market share penetration. I could no longer hide from it so I tried it out to see what all of the fuss was about. The application is straightforward and fairly robust. It wasn’t what it did that caught my attention, it was what it didn’t. I immediately noticed I could not filter columns (from my timeline or searches) and this is something I have come to rely heavily on. Since this program is still in its infant stages I may be persuaded to return to it once they improve some of their features.

The popular iPhone application Tweetie now has a Mac desktop application. On the surface it is very simple and clean, and if I primarily used a Mac at work I may consider switching over to it full time.

Still, it is my primary application on MacBook Pro because I like to keep tabs on my timeline but do not require the extensive functionality of other applications. For long term usage I would like to have saved searches that I find useful when I have a Twitter application open for 9-10 hours a day. I have not investigated what the full version of Tweetie is capable of, but it would have to be really impressive to persuade me from the free version of Tweetdeck.

I have saved the best for last with Tweetdeck. There really was no competition here, Tweetdeck may occupy more memory than I would like but it has changed the way I get information on Twitter forever. At first I was overwhelmed with this application but it is now clearly my favorite.

It can do everything previous clients can but also has Facebook integration for status updates, TwitScoop, multiple URL shortening services available (compared to others applications that would have just a few) and the ability to filter results in a column. This is something I recently discovered and it has cleaned up duplicate data between my main timeline and my “#yeg” column.

My primary Tweetdeck view gives me everything I need to know immediately and it fits perfectly in the corner of my monitor and requires no switching between tabs or scrolling to see more. The program is not without its shortcomings, such as not being able to save filters on a column and its demand on system resources. However those are small grievances to an otherwise robust and great program.

Mobile
When I am not in front of a computer I rely on my iPhone to keep me up to date with Twitter and there are just as many applications for that as there are for desktop use. It seems applications for Twitter are a dime a dozen but one notable application missing from this list is Twitterific. I tried the free version, liked it, but it had nothing to keep me coming back and I could not justify the $9.99 price point of the full version.

Unlike the desktop programs I do not have a clear favorite for iPhone applications. This is a tale of two clients: Tweetie vs. Twitterfon.

When comparing the differences between Tweetie and Twitterfon I was hard pressed to offer a compelling argument. I found Twitterfon to be as capable as the pay program of Tweetie. They provide the same information such as Trends, GPS capabilities and images are uploaded to TwitPic. There is only so much you can include an a mobile application before it becomes difficult to use and the features they do have are perfect.

Comparing the Tweetie interface to the Twitterfon interface reveals they are nearly identical. Even the Tweetie new message and Twitterfon new message are similar. I will concede that Twitterfon did something I loved with the “person” icon when you make a new tweet. That will show your entire follow list and you can select who you want to direct the message to, which saves embarrassing tweets because you spelt someone’s name incorrectly.

If they are nearly the same application then why would I pay $2.99 for Tweetie? I was able to justify it because of the subtle differences like speed at which the application loads my timeline, it doesn’t have hideous colors for unread tweets on my main timeline and replies, the ability to save searches and finally I thought the developer at least deserved that much for their work on the iPhone and Mac client.

It seems excessive to have two Twitter applications on my iPhone but that’s how even these two programs are.

I enlisted the help of Jeff and his collection of random things site Totallies.

Friday, January 09, 2009
(8:26 AM) sean: I have about 12-14 good photos so that will suffice for a couple of months.
(8:26 AM) Jeff G.: awesome

Every Monday since January 12th I have put a new photo in my frame for people to see. I started off strong with my favorites, had some prints from the B.U.S.E.Y. Photoshop SomethingAwful thread and submissions from the inspirational thread that started it all. I had some personal favorites but every week people would come by the desk and see what this weeks photo was.

Now that I am at the end of my photos I will start back over and repeat the photos again. The end came up faster than I expected and I was not prepared to add new photos into the mix. I will look through old threads and retrace my original steps to see if there are other worthy photos that could be added to the mix.

Regardless of what I find, knowing that some photo tech at London Drugs saw these photos and did a full body huh makes this whole adventure a little sweeter.