One of my recent absolute necessities was a “nettop” computer.  These little things are pretty cool.  They are very small PC’s, and most newer models come with HDMI connections so you can plug them into your digital TV.  I’ve been shopping them for several months, and finally decided on the Lenovo Q150.  I almost built one from scratch, but when you price everything out the Lenovo actually comes in cheaper.  (When it’s on sale, which it was last week.)  So, what can you do with this little thing?  Well, it’s first use was to video chat with Ed & Kim and the baby.  I might get a nicer webcam for it someday, but the one I have did OK for the time being.  Since then I’ve installed Boxee on it, so I can use it watch TV shows, Netflix movies, etc.  Mostly I just sit on the couch and surf the Web though.  It’s like having a 32″ monitor for your computer, it works great.  The only downside I’ve come up with is that it sort of makes me wish I hadn’t bought my recent webserver and the PS-3, as the new toy could pretty much take the place of those two purchases.  I do occasionally play games on the PS-3 though, so there’s a little justification there.

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.  My Valentine has taken off for parts unknown so it’s just the cat and I for dinner.  Boo hoo.  Actually we already had our Valentine meal.  We went to the Blue Bird Bistro on Saturday night, and had just a fine dinner.  (We had a coupon, naturally.)  I would honestly say that was one of the best dinners I can remember eating.  Donette had a ribeye, and I had the bison tenderloin, both of which were just awesome.  If I’ve ever had a buffalo steak before I don’t remember it, but it was great.  Granted, a good part of the flavor may have come from the 1/2 stick of butter it was soaked in, but it was delicious at any rate.  Everything was so good we didn’t want to quit eating, so we ordered dessert too.

So, what else did we do this weekend…  Well, not a whole lot.  Friday night we went to 75th Street and had a pizza.  Something of a trend as of late.  Saturday afternoon I met Munkirs & Belanger up at the new Bike Source on 95th, mostly just to check out the new digs.  Quite a store, although I tend to agree with Bruce that they may be a little optimistic with their inventory.  Are you really going to sell dozens and dozens of $5,000 bikes in Kansas City?  Who knows.  Not to me they ain’t, I know that much.  Speaking of Bruce, I was pleasantly surprised to see him there.  My first thought was that he was going to take up cycling with us this Spring.  Fat Back Cycling is always looking for new team members.  Turned out he was just there to make fun of our hobby though, darn.

Sunday morning Donette drove to the downtown airport and participated in the “Love 2 Run” event.  I would have joined her, but I do not “Love 2 Run,” which automatically disqualifies me.  It sounded like a good time though, or at least as good of a time as exercise can be.  After that she hauled me down to the Brooksider so I could enjoy the nice-ish weather on the patio, and she headed out of town for some kind of class she is taking.  I will be accepting any type of charitable entertainment for the next two evenings.  Oh, and you have to come get me too, I don’t have a car.

I got to hang out at the Phoenix last night for a while.  I do like that place quite a bit, but I’m usually in such a hurry to catch the bus and get back to midtown that I walk right by it.  Last night I was feeling rather what-the-heckish though so I dropped in to listen to the piano player for a while.  It was more crowded than usual but not too bad.  I stayed for about 3 hours, for his entire set actually.  He’s a good pianist, at least as far as I know, not being the biggest piano fan in the world.  I like listening to him at any rate.  If I had my choice he would skip the singing, but it ain’t that bad and he seems to enjoy it.  Might just go back next Thursday…

Nothing to report from last night.  Donette went out with some friends, I stayed home and played Wii games.  My amusement of choice was Cabela’s “Big Game Hunter.”  I don’t play the part where you stalk and shoot the animals though.  That part requires too much thinking, coordination, and all that stuff I have no need for.  I just play the “Shooting Gallery” part, which is a lot like the old Nintendo “Duck Hunter” game, with better graphics.  Man if they’d just put the dog in there, they’d really have something.  It passed the evening remarkably quickly;  Might just do that again tonight.

The first thing I usually do when I get up in the morning is check Weather Underground and see how much misery I’m in for.  Helps me know how many dozens of layers to put on for the march to the bus stop.  This morning, the first thing that caught my eye was the phrase “Today is forecast to be much warmer than yesterday.”  Well that’s just great.  The predicted high is sixteen freaking degrees.  I suppose when you really get down to it though, that is “much warmer” than yesterday.  Dang near twice as warm as a matter of fact.  I’m no meteorologist but I think “Not quite as brutally cold as yesterday” would have been a more accurate summary though.  Maybe I’ll email them my input, I expect they would be about as receptive to my wonderful ideas as the KC Transit people were.

Last night Donette called me on my long, slow, boring, noisy ride home and suggested meeting at 75th Street for dinner.  Sounded good to me, so I stayed on the bus all the way into Waldo and walked down there.  (“All the way” being a grand total of four more blocks.)  As I think I mentioned, we decided to start using up our “points” we’ve saved up there.  I seriously think we have enough to eat there once a week for the rest of the year, so we might as well get started on it.  While we were waiting for our dinner to come out, we played several rounds of our favorite video game, photo hunt.  You know, where they put up two pictures and you try and find the differences between them?  I think it’s more geared towards 6 year old kids, but for whatever reason we enjoy it.  I have to say, last night we totally killed that thing too.  We were ON.  My idea of a “good round” is getting into the six-figure score range, usually topping out around 103,000 or so;  Last night we were consistently over 600,000.  We even hit high score on the machine, not once but twice.  Oh yeah.  I am considering flying out to Vegas and seeing if there is any money to be made as a photo hunt pro.  Yes, I think the winter boredom is kicking in pretty hard.  For dinner we had a tasty mushroom and cheese pizza.  I was enjoying it thoroughly, then the manager came out and apologized for it being “over done” and took it off our bill.  Tasted fine to me, I don’t think I even would have noticed.  But hey, I’m not going to complain about a free meal, although it didn’t help much in our quest to use up our points…