A three-day weekend was very much needed.  As always, I did less — much less — than I planned and had an extremely lazy weekend.  That’s not to say it was boring; On the contrary, I had more happen in the past several days than I have had happen in the past several months.  Starting last Wednesday through Saturday, I learned of a pending jail sentence, a pending divorce, two pregnancies, and a severe motorcycle accident — all involving family or close family friends. If there is one thing family is good for, it is keeping things interesting!

Marriage is a hot topic.  Gay marriage, marriage rights, “what happens in the bedroom… “, etc, etc.   These all pop up in the news regularly.  Should ____ be allowed?  What about ____ ?   Maybe I’m missing something but I’m curious why marriage is a legal institution at all?

I’m living the hypocrisy so I can appreciate the tax benefits from being married… but I don’t understand why I deserve those tax benefits.  Regardless, not only taxes but health care, visitation, power of attorney, inheritance, citizenship… all of these are heavily influenced by your marital status.  The religious folks out there believe marriage is sacred… but it seems  but in the past month, I’ve had two friends reveal their marriage plans.  Neither was due to any dying desire to rush into marriage — it was simply for the health care.  A business transaction, nothing more.

It seems to me that if marriage is a sacred institution, which it should be, it should be removed from government supervision.  I’m not the only one who seems to think this way.  Replace it with a legally binding agreement unrelated to the religious ceremony known as marriage.  Marriage can then remain a bond between a husband and wife and the government can legislate w/o getting bogged down in the religious ramifications of laws.

Recently, Facebook altered everyone’s home page to provide a more real-time, “life streaming” type of view of your friends.   The changes are a direct adoption of the Twitter phenomenon, a company Facebook tried but failed to acquire earlier this year.

While the Facebook community revolted, as they do each time Facebook changes, I think the whole idea of “life streaming” is fascinating. I learn a lot more about my friends by observing their behavior and activity online than I do from “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Relationship Status”, etc (the typical stuff found on a social network).

Even better than viewing miscellaneous status updates from my friends are viewing the items they find interesting.  I use Google Reader to aggregate news and it has a built-in method for quickly sharing articles from the web.  That is automatically displayed to all my friends and vice-versa when they find interesting articles.  I use Reader more than even Search or Maps.   The feed of items along the right pane or via the “My Life In Links” tab above is an RSS feed of my Google Reader Shared Items.

The consistent problem with life streaming is that activity on one online site doesn’t show up on my activity at another site.  There are any number of approaches to resolve this including propagation websites like Ping.fm, aggregators such as FriendFeed, multiple site-posting functions in applications, and any number of others.  They all have varying degrees of usefulness but all seem to be lacking in some way.

In the meantime, I’ve been testing various items.

• Google Reader RSS/Atom Feed or click the “My Life In Links” above.
  
• FriendFeed or click the “FriendFeed” tab above.

This afternoon, Wil Harris, a guy I follow on Twitter and a frequent guest on the TWIT podcast, sent along a link to the new (probably not safe for work)  “Love Me Tender… or Else” Agent Provocateur ad.  I’m not all that familiar with the company though it appears to be a British version of Victoria’s Secret, though quite a bit more suggestive.  The Love Me Tender ad is pretty good and I showed it to Christina this evening.  Afterwards, she took over the laptop, started navigating the Agent Provocateur site…  and immediately starting looking through the shoe section.  Shoes!  I don’t think any guy watching that ad would immediately start shopping for shoes…

In college, I was almost universally referred to simply as “gergi”.  Since then, there have been numberous times I’ve come across an old college friend where they can’t recall my real name but can usually pull “gergi” without a problem.  No complaints from me – I like my nickname.

On the other hand, Christina acquired the nickname “killer” at her previous job.  When she quit there last year, she thought she had finally outlived down the nickname.  Unfortunately, at her new job there are many Christinas, Kristins, etc so they mentioned that they’d have to give her a nickname.  Christina foolishly told them about her previous nickname, they readily took it up, and now she’s stuck with it again.

At the wedding this past weekend, her friends family has referred to Christina as “peanut” as long as they’ve known her.  I’m sure it has nothing to do with her dimunitive size.

Most likely, the two of us will be known as gergi and the killer peanut for many years to come.

Dreams are funny things.  Every guy knows that all girls do when having sleepovers is have pillow fights but somehow, when I’m there to see it, it doesn’t seem quite as exciting as I thought it would be.  Granted, in my case, this is almost certainly due to the fact that 1/2 the girls are feline.  That’s right, Argo and Christina are at it again.  Argo has rekindled her love for Christina’s pillow and each night consists of Argo gradually pushing Christina off her pillow until she has the whole pillow and Christina is left with her head hanging off the side of the bed.  It would be funny except that Christina doesn’t seem to find it so very funny and that means I get to deal with the resultant grumpy Christina.  Somehow, I thought these pillow fights had a happier ending…

This weekend, I helped my sister Amye move down in Richmond.  She moved into a good-sized house though she seemed to have enough furniture for 3 or 4 houses.  I pity her for having to get it all straight.  We didn’t get it all unloaded until about 9pm Saturday night and, by that point, no one was particularly interested in helping to get it organized.  I have a feeling her boyfriend is going to be sore for several days (as I am) and my 8-month pregnant sister probably isn’t going to be moving too much furniture for awhile.

I was supposed to repeat the process next month to help my other sister but unfortunately, Erin moved up her move out date to one of my otherwise busy weekends.  My mom is about to have whiplash as she goes from a house of 5.5 girls to just herself in just 2 weeks.

Networking is the key to getting ahead.  It’s much easier to get what you’re looking for if you already know someone that has it, be it a job, a random piece of knowledge, directions, etc.  I’ve collected contact information from most people I’ve become acquainted with and have consistently come across one problem: There is no easy way to store and synchronize the contact information between my phone, laptop, desktop, and webmail.

I use an iPhone to make calls, GMail to send/receive email, my laptop when I’m traveling, and my desktop primarily as a media storage center.  Each of these things needs to have an up-to-date copy of my contacts or else I have to scramble around to find the device that has the certain phone number or email address I’m trying to reach.

Syncing between certain things is relatively easy, like my laptop address book to my iPhone, but even that tends to be buggy — lost contacts, missing information, randomly merged contacts — and only syncs some of my devices.  I even signed up a couple years ago for dotMac, now Mobile Me, primarily to sync contacts between my desktop and laptop and while it worked better than any other solution I’ve come across, it was also susceptible to the same problems and doesn’t integrate with GMail contacts.  I’ve glanced at Plaxo and numerous off-the-shelf solutions but they inevitably disappoint.  The new Google Contact API seems promising but is going to be limited by the support it receives from other application developers.

For our final anniversary-related activity, Christina and I joined another couple for dinner at Quarterdeck, a crab house in Arlington.  The restaurant was one of the more idiosyncrastic places I’ve ever been.  It was right in the middle of the city of Arlington, surrounded by skyscrapers on all sides, with a military base next door.  Yet it was a small wooden building with a slightly worn look and decor that looked like it was ripped off the beach.  It definitely worked for the place though as you usually need reservations to get in and it’s filled with locals.

There was a tourist couple in there though and they asked us how to eat the crabs.  We’d never really though about it but unless you live on the Mid-Atlantic, East Coast, the idea of a crabhouse might be foreign to you (a quick Google search and every first page item except one is on the East Coast).  The best moment of the night was the expression on Christina’s face when Jason told the guy “You just rip this stuff out, it’s not good — it’s the lungs and other things”… she preferred to be in the dark as to what pieces she was tearing away at.

Today was my 1st wedding anniversary and to celebrate, we decided to take a day trip out to Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown, WV yesterday.  Harpers Ferry is a historic town where the WV, MD, and VA borders meet.  It’s a National Park devoted mainly to the significance it had during the Civil War.  Christina and I had gone kayaking down the river Harpers Ferry lies on awhile ago.  All in all, a short but very nice trip for anyone interested in hiking, history, or kayaking.  Afterwards, we had lunch up in Shepherdstown, a small college town in WV.  Christina checked out a few of the shops and then we headed back home to relax before dinner.  

Tonight, we went to Maggianos for dinner.  We had our reception there after our wedding but we didn’t actually get to eat at any point that evening…  We figured we might as well see if the food was any good!  Very satisfied, we’ve decided to try and make dinner at Maggiano’s a regular in our (many) future anniversaries.

While I think many people, including me, are still scratching their heads on how I came to be married, I’ve found that while married life is very different, it isn’t quite as different as I expected it to be.  She never leaves, she’s even more persistent on knowing everything about me, and she has all kinds of crazy notions on how we should spend our time and money and yet overall, the joy of the last year has been worth the hassle.