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nerdflood

the online home of nathaniel payne


Front yard renovation and Father’s DayJune 23

This past weekend, my brother and his wife were looking for a home renovation project. They had already finished work on their own home, and were looking for something new to tackle. Yes, they’re insane.

So, I gave them a project to work on. We wanted to remove our cracked and ugly front sidewalk and put something new in place. We had decided instead of replacing the sidewalk with more boring, grey concrete, we would put in some nice colorful paving stones. This decision dovetailed nicely with my brother’s extensive experience in installing decks and patios with paving stones.

The result of the project is nothing short of wonderful. See for yourself below! The old photo on the left, and the new on the right.

Old vs. New
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There’s an Flickr photoset available that includes step-by-step pictures of the entire project, from before to after, and everything in between. I even added descriptions to all the photos that outline in very basic terms what we did on this project. It was a big, long, exhausting day, but thankfully it was beautifully sunny, and we were working the entire time und



Facebook landgrab sucessful!June 13

I was able to successfully acquire my desired name in the great Facebook vanity URL landgrab of 2009. No longer am I Facebook Random User ID# 501415487. I can now be found at facebook.com/nathanielpayne. It’s a minor thing, truly, but one that I’m happy to have secured. And yes, I was up late at night acquiring the username. It was fun to watch the posts from my Facebook and Twitter friends, seeing who was able to get the usernames they wanted, and who ended up having to settle for their third or fourth or even fifth choices. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well the Facebook servers held up. There had to have been about a million users simultaneously hitting the same /username page trying to select the name they wanted. It didn’t even slow down or falter for me when I was making my attempt.

So, kudos to Facebook for enabling a great feature and making it run so smoothly. Hopefully enough people got the name they were looking for. If not, tought toodles. There’s always Orkut.


Ficly is now live!May 31

I mentioned a while back (holy crap, and it’s still on the front page) that Kevin Lawver was going to re-incarnate the long-lost property that AOL killed, Ficlets, into a new creation. And now that day has come.

Introducing Ficly! I haven’t had a chance to really play with it yet, but here’s some things I’ve noticed right away.

1) You can sign in by linking your account to either Google, Facebook, or even OpenID (which, in the end, stopped working on Ficlets). I linked to my Facebook account since I’ve been using that particular social network more and more these days. Will this mean that any story I create can be automatically published to my Facebook profile? That remains to be seen but would be an awesome feature.

2) There’s a special section devoted to challenges. I love that they decided to do this. Challenges were something that appeared on Ficlets where authors would post a challenge of some sort–such as “write a story that takes place following a future apolocalypse”, for example–and fellow authors could create sequels to that challenge with their themed creations. The fact that Kevin and the Ficly team included this as a standard feature shows that they really understood the Ficlets community. Challenges appeared organically as a resu


What have I been up to?May 26

My regular blog readers have probably noticed the silence these past couple of months. I’ve been extremely busy, both at work and at home. At some point within the past few months, I slightly altered the sidebar description of this blog to denote that it is reserved for “larger more encompassing thoughts, essays, concepts, and arguments” in an attempt to at least partially dissuade the fictional constructs in my mind that incessantly harp on the fact that I don’t update the blog very often. However, I don’t feel comfortable leaving the site empty for weeks at a time. I also don’t just want to throw together one of those boring “Wow, it’s been a long time, hey blog?! Hurr, hurr” kind of posts. So I thought that I would rather assemble a bulleted listing of things that have been occupying my time lately.

Online

  • Working on my Nintendo-centric blog, It’s Dangerous to Go Alone. It’s a bit exhausting having two blogs, but I like the dichotomy. This is still my one true home online, but my long-form essays on how pathetic Nintendo has been lately need to go somewhere. IDTGA has been a good outlet for those rants.
  • Being fairly active on both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook more than Twitter,

A random assortment of things that happened in 2001May 19

It’s been a bit too quiet around here lately. So, how about a timely trip down memory lane?

In 2001….

  • George Bush officially became the 43rd president.
  • Dale Earnhardt crashed and died on the last lap of the 43rd Daytona 500 (Coincidence? I think not).
  • The Baltimore Ravens won their very first Super Bowl.
  • I started a new career, leaving behind my beloved Half Price Books store.
  • The World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists.
  • Microsoft released Windows XP to the world.
  • We bought a house! (That we would now desperately like to move out of.)

Yikes. 2001 wasn’t a very good year, was it?

Well, at least one thing happened that was a bright shining light in 2001. I married my best friend, Amanda. And we have spent the past eight years taunting each other mercilessly for being so short-sighted.

Happy anniversary, my dear! I love you.