Generally I like to keep my blog a little upbeat, and thats why I write about things like theme parks and holidays. I figure that unless you are famous no one really cares how horrible your life has been or the struggles you deal with. We accept it from celebrities because it somehow humanizes people we have put on a pedestal. It is unlikely that this post will even get half the number of hits that one of my trip reports. Which is fine for me. I am not writing this to get a swarm of traffic. This post is for both my close friends and my extended network of friends. I feel they deserve an explanation on why I flake out sometimes.

A few months ago I posted my coaster riding plans for the year. Since then I have added 15 new coasters to my total with my tally being as follows:

Since my travel plans have changed since that first most I figure I would write up an updated of the coasters I have left for the year:

Back in April, Valerie and I went to St. Louis for a weekend to see my friend, Kate, get married. Prior to the wedding she expressed interest in having Valerie and I come out for a weekend and take a trip to Six Flags with her husband, Jeff. Due to scheduling conflicts as well as wanting to wait until after the new Evel Knievel coaster we weren't able to take our trip until the last weekend in July. Valerie and I were excited to ride this new coaster and Kate and Jeff were simply excited to be going in general since neither one had been to the park since before they had moved to St. Louis to attend school at the university. Click on through to see my photo trip report.

Halloween is about 83 days away so I needed to start making plans for my yard haunt display. Earlier in the day I bought about $250 worth of LED flood lights that I will be using for both Halloween and Christmas. In addition to making sure I had enough lights it was time to start testing my equipment again. In 2006 I bought a couple of fog machines (two of which were returned because they didn't meet my quality standards) to use in my haunt. The one I used that year worked for most of the night, but was obviously not meant to be ran for 3 hours straight and I think the heat exchanger went out on it. Last year I bought a Chauvet 1250 to replace my broken machine. Unfortunately the first one I received was DOA and had a bad pump. My replacement was not going to come before Halloween so I scrambled to buy one on eBay. I ended up getting one similar to the one I used in 2006, and I thought the heat exchanger on that one crapped out as well. Of course as I was writing this I wasn't satisfied with accepting that my cheap fogger was broken so I just did a quick test and was pleased to find that it still works. While I haven't been able to use my Chauvet 1250 for Halloween yet, I have been pleased with the results I have gotten during tests. Video of that test can been found below as well as tips to keep your machine in good condition

I was bored so I decided to do some analysis of my BrightKite friends. BrightKite is a mirco-blogging service that allows users to post notes or photos with captions of 140 characters or less. BrightKite is different from other micro-blogging services such as Twitter since it allows you to tag your posts with the location you are at. I didn't have an easy way to collect stats so I looked at the profile of every person on my friends list and recorded their age and sex. If their age was not give I left it blank. Sex was the easiest stat to look at. On my list 65% are male and 35% are female. I checked to see how this compared to my friends on Facebook and the ratio is a little more even at 59% Male, 41% Female.