I am making new year resolutions this year, and yes that’s resolutions (plural). I’ve decided to use the internet as the place to jot them down, so that I will never lose sight of them. Thus, this post is mainly a reminder for me in case I slip up along the way. Anyhow, here they are:

1. Read one book a month - I enjoy reading, but never seem to make the time. I’d like to shift some of my time wasting away at the computer to reading a good book in my leather chair.

2. Run 8 miles a week - I am an on again/off again runner. Ever since the Cville 10 miler in late March, I’ve been off. The challenge here is once again, finding the time to do this in between 2 kids, a dog, and running my own business, but many people do it. My life is not that unique.

3. Go to lunch once a week with a different person each week - This resolution is both personal and professionally motivated. I’d like to reconnect with more old friends (and not in the Facebook way of reconnecting) and this resolution will hopefully get me off my butt to do it. In addition, some of these lunches will be used to network, so that can only help Business Bullpen in the long run.

4. Take and upload a photo every day of the year - This is project 365, which I am very excited about. I enjoy photography, but am purely an amateur. This resolution should help improve my photography skills and give me a very cool visual history of 2009 once the year is done.

Finally, I have some goals (or tumblelutions as I’ve termed it) for my scrapbook (tumblelog) in 2009. I’ve already debuted this content on my home page, but I invite you to check them out.

This past year I’ve both enjoyed and struggled with having two platforms for my personal website: WordPress and Tumblr. I’ve bounced back and forth, and I’ve finally decided to work with both. WordPress caters to the long blog post format, or article as I call it here, and it’s rich offering of plugins makes it so easy to enhance a website. In addition, Business Bullpen is using WordPress as a publishing platform for some of our clients, and I like having a hands-on approach to keep up with the application as it progresses. Tumblr, on the other hand, was made for the short post or for “scrapbooking”. Tumblr’s simplicity and community are it’s two strongest characteristics, which have transformed me into a big fan of the social media platform.

The quest for me then has been to figure out how WordPress and Tumblr could “co-exist under one roof”. This quest has not ended, but I’ve made some headway to report on. First off, the design of the WordPress-driven pages and tumblr site are the same. Both leverage the same stylesheets, but I’ve now added specific tumblelog entries to my home page thanks to the SimplePie plugin for Wordpress. My home page now lists in order from top to bottom:

1. Page Header (pulled from WordPress or hard-coded in some cases)

2. Last six photos uploaded to my flickr account (Flickr badge code)

3. Photo of the day and Song of the day (pulled from my tumblelog using the SimplePie plugins)

4. My ten most recent articles (pulled from WordPress)

My goal is to present this content in a simplistic and consistent manner so that the Tumblr content blends in well with the Wordpress content. The SimplePie Core and SimplePie plugins for WordPress enable me to meet this requirement. Here is a step by step tutorial on how to display content from your tumblelog within a WordPress page (similar to what I’ve done on my home page).

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It’s that time again, end of the year countdowns.

I saw a lot of concerts in 2008, a whole lot for a 37 year old happily married father (thank you Lisa). In fact, 2008 ranks up there as probably my second best for live music. Only 1989 beats it, but you be the judge.

Who I saw in 1989: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, The Replacements, The Allman Brothers Band, The Who, R.E.M., The Grateful Dead (twice), Living Colour, and The Rolling Stones

Who I saw in 2008: Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Tea Leaf Green, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Widespread Panic, Van Halen, Radiohead, The Black Crowes, Modest Mouse, Phil Lesh & Friends, The Whigs, My Morning Jacket, The Avett Brothers, Drive By Truckers, Indecision, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Spoon, and The Raconteurs

Without further ado, my top 3 …

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So I’ve playing around with Yahoo Pipes! (finally) thanks to this article from Fast Wonder. It took me about an hour to set up my very own super feed, which is essentially my life stream online. Most importantly, I designed it in a way where there should minimal repeat content since I like to broadcast my new blog posts and bookmarks to my Twitter account.

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I’ve decided to house all of the interviews/conversations that I’ve conducted for my various side projects here on wick.me. Right now this consists of TechHoops.com and The Butter Room. Both sites align well with my main interests, which I write about here - music and sports.

Check out these past conversations by browsing the Conversations category. Going forward, I plan to post all of my future interviews on wick.me one week after the original publish date.

If you have any good interview subjects in the fields of music, sports, or technology, please let me know by emailing me at todd at wick.me. Enjoy!

Tired of all those Facebook vampires, pokes, and zombies? Here is a simple way to get the best out of Facebook without having to deal with those annoying requests each and every time you log in. What’s the best of Facebook, you ask? Status updates, photos, and posted items. These three things are the true power of Facebook. Status updates and photos keep us connected. Posted Items keep us informed of what our friends like.

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I was born and raised in SEC country. Grew up in Jacksonville, a Florida Gator fan, but my Alma mater comes first and that is Virginia Tech. Since the Hokies joined the ACC in 2004, I thought I might finally convert to a ACC football fan. Not so much. Outside of Tech games, I really don’t enjoy watching ACC football. Last weekend, for example, my remote seemed to gravitate to Alabama-Mississippi State, Vandy-Kentucky, or Florida-South Carolina. It’s just higher quality football.

So it should come to no surprise that I’ve been trashing the ACC as a football conference, but over the course of this season my perspective has changed. At the end of September, I thought the ACC was the worst conference in football. At the end of October, my viewpoint had lightened up a bit. I thought that the ACC was mediocre. Now I think it’s the most competitive conference in football. It’s not the best, but it’s definitely the most competitive. All 12 teams still have a chance to be bowl eligible. Both divisions are going to be a fight to the finish, which should make for a highly competitive (there’s that word again) conference championship game.

And who does the winner of the ACC get to play in the Orange Bowl?

It appears that would be the Big East Champion or potentially the highest ranked team from a non-BCS conference. Talk about a ticket sales and TV ratings nightmare. ESPN is projecting Maryland/Miami (FL) vs. Cincinnati. I don’t know anything about the Cincinnati fanbase. This might be an exciting match-up and opportunity for the Bearcats, but from a national perspective, this potential match-up (any ACC team vs. the Bearcats or Pittsburgh) sucks. Throw in the recession, and I bet the Orange Bowl sells the lowest amount of full-priced tickets in it’s storied history.

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Jay Bilas has been great for TechHoops.com. We’ve interviewed him three times since the blog launched in January of 2007. None of the site contributors knew Jay previously. He has kindly agreed to do the interviews each and every request.

The last conversation that I had with Jay was my first one over the phone. The interview occurred on November 4th 2008 and the focus was a preview the 2008-09 Hokie basketball season. The majority of the questions came from the King of TechHoops.com (our Senior Writer), Niemo, but I threw in a couple as well. You can listen to the conversation by clicking the play button below.

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This is the third chapter of The Golden Road to K Street, which was a cross country trip that I took with one of my closest friends (Woodsie) from October 18, 1998 to November 8, 1998. The final destination was Las Vegas for Halloween weekend where Phish was performing. Chapters 1 and 2 take a look back at our nights in Vegas, while this chapter is a recount of our night seeing Phish in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 2, 1998.

If you are a Phish fan, everyone knows the 11-2-98 show. In front of a half empty arena, which rarely ever happened after 1996, the boys covered Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, sandwiched in between Harpua. It was complete shock and awe, especially at the show following Halloween.

After a night of well deserved rest on November 1st in Salt Lake City, the four of us (Woodsie, Phatback and his cheatin’ girlfriend, and I) descended upon the E Center.

The journal that Woodsie and I took on this trip has a lot more entries about this night than Vegas, probably because we were not in Vegas. I wrote this review of the show in our journal 2 days later so the amazement would wear off …

The lot scene was non-existent, but there was an energized vibe because there were so little people at the place. At 7:37 local time, I wrote in our journal, “we are inside the show and there is hardly anyone here. The floor is filled up and the lower level has only a smattering of folks.”

First set opened great. I dig Tube a lot and I didn’t expect Drowned. Both were jammed nicely. The rest of the set was interesting. I liked the two songs that Trey played on acoustic, especially Driver. I was a little disappointed with the Sample closer, but overall the set was played well and unexpected (with 2 rare songs to open and 4 straight new songs in the middle).

Phish from 11/2/98

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This post originally appeared in TheButterRoom.com on October 30, 2008.

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If you have visited the Butter Room this week, you should know that Robert Randolph and the Family Band are playing the Charlottesville Pavilion this Halloween. You can buy your tickets here.

We were fortunate to have a conversation with Bartley McGowan, the tour manager for Robert Randolph and the Family Band, in the Butter Room this week. The Butter Room thanks Bartley for his time and answers.

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What’s a day in the life of Bartley McGowan like?

Bartley McGowan: First off, it’s usually long. I’m often the last to go to bed and the first to wake up. My day usually starts out by having our bus driver Steve call me about 15 minutes before we get to the venue. Crawl out of my bunk and get my bearings. Hop out when we get there and help get the bus parked where it will usually be for the day - try to get shore power (basically plugging the bus in so it can run the a/c, fridges, lights, tv, etc), if not we have a generator on that can run all that. Go in to the club and meet the local production folks that will be helping us out for the day.

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