Epic did something pretty cool today, and decided to provide a central location (actually several) were we could watch live streams of Obama’s swearing in and inaugural address. Unfortunately, the Hulu stream wasn’t cooperating when I got down there. Someone found a radio, and they swapped out the computer audio for the radio. It wasn’t cutting in and out, but there was a fair amount of static and the audio and video weren’t even close.

After a few minutes I got an idea. I have the TWIT.am app on my iPhone; sure enough, Leo was streaming the inauguration. The best part – my audio was 5 times better than the radio. Since the video was pretty bad anyway, I went ahead and walked back to my desk. I missed the oath, but I heard most of the speech. I’m impressed.

I just got out of my first one on one meeting with my team lead in over a month (she’s been on sabbatical). Let’s just say the entire complexion of my job is about to change (and change fast!) and I don’t have much choice in what’s going to happen. I’m not sure how I feel right now. Not supposed to talk about it yet; more details to come shortly…

Amber and I decided a while ago that we didn’t want to renew our current apartment lease when it ran out, nor did we really want to move to another complex. We’d been planning to start seriously looking for a house sometime in April or May and hope the timing would work out well as our lease comes to a close. Then a little over a month ago one of my friends mentioned they were looking into building a house with a local builder. They’re pretty big in the area, so I’d certainly heard of them but just assumed that building a new house was not something we would want to pursue. After hearing him talk about it though, I decided it was probably a good idea for us to at least look into it.

After getting some preliminary info and asking about a million questions, it didn’t take long for us to be more than mildly interested. This builder offers a set number of plans and starts each house with the same basic features, with lots of upgrades availabe. It wasn’t long before we were checking out various models trying to decide if there were any plans that we liked. Within about a week we were pretty sure this was something we were going to do, we just needed to choose a plan and nail down the type of upgrades we’re willing to pay for. After narrowing it down to three plans we liked, we ultimately chose our plan and started working on our upgrade list.

Last weekend we took the first real step toward having a house built not far from where we currently live. We chose a two story plan with 3 bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms. Now that we’ve signed the initial paperwork, we’re getting into the phase of actually making all of our choices for the look and feel of the house. On Monday we picked out our appliances, and on Thursday we made our lighting choices. We have a meeting with a designer scheduled in a few weeks to make the rest of our choices, and then the real work will begin in late March or early April.

This is obviously something we’ve never done before, but we are pretty excited about the whole process. This builder does quite a few things to make the process as easy for us as possible. We’re scheduled to close on August 18 and I’ve already taken that week off for plenty of time to move. The friend who initially got us interested is also going through the process at the same time, so we have plenty to talk about lately. Ironically, there house will be just down the street (and no, it wasn’t planned).

Today is the 50th birthday of the LEGO Brick. Gizmodo has a timeline summarizing it’s lifetime.

I never had one of the really big sets growing up, but you better believe I remember helping my friends put together the LEGOLAND Castle and LEGOLAND Pirates sets. And then there were the guys who had enormous totes full of LEGOs who built all their own stuff.

While I had a few small LEGO kits, I had lots of Construx. Most people don’t really remember these because they were only around for a few years and they weren’t well advertised, but I had several sets and played with them for years. My favorite thing to do was build bases on opposite sides of the basement and create a zipline to send the figures back and forth. I wonder if my old sets would be worth any money today…