Colorado

Greg and I have been obsessed with tasty and healthy sweet potatoes lately, and have incorporated it into the unlikeliest of places...like breakfast pancakes!

Sweet Potato Pancake ingredients

• 2/3 cup flour
• pinch salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1.5 cups milk
• 1 egg
• 1 large sweet potato mashed
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• pinch of favorite spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom)

Sweet Potato Pancake process

Peel and cut up your sweet potato and put in pot of boiling water until soft. While the potato is cooking, mix dry ingredients and add them to the wet ingredients. Finally, mix mashed potatoes into mixture and stir briefly. Use plett pan or regular skillet. Buen provecho!

It's hard to judge the proper ratio of ingredients because sweet potato sizes can vary. The consistency should be just like your favorite pancake batter.

Following on from my post last summer about Concerts in Colorado here's a few summer concerts I plan to attend and a new service.

My Summer Concerts in Colorado

I just saw the Highland Ramblers at Dulcineas which was passable, but not great. I have big hopes for this band, but the venue choices are not awesome. Where is Denver's intimate theater setting for quality music? These guys need it.

I'll be going to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival this year. I'm nervous. It should be awesome, but I imagine I won't sleep nearly enough. Oh well. After that my only plans are seeing Punch Brothers at Chautaqua Auditorium which should be epic because we're in the front row and the Chautaqua has really solid sound.

After that, Leo Kottke in Breckenridge in August should be pretty fun. I plan to head up early, maybe go mountain biking, see the show, and spend the night up there. Should be a solid time.

Finding Concerts Near You

I started using two new services: Bands In Town and Songkick which both have "add an artist" feature and you set your location and then they alert you when those artists come to your town. Great feature, but I wish that they also alerted me when artists like the ones I like come to my town. Seems like a perfect opportunity for Pandora integration...but it doesn't seem to work well for either of them.

Anyone else have summer concerts

So, I'm officiating a ceremony and we get to be creative. I know what christian/catholic weddings are like. I don't know Jewish ones, much, but I've seen them in movies...? I wanted to research weddings in general to get some ideas of some universal elements and fun things that we shouldn't miss.

Here's the stuff that's been helpful to me so far:

a short Hindu wedding
Red Hot Curry's guide to Hindu weddings

Some wedding scripts from a unitarian universalist celebrant

I recently re-launched a little side project called Colorado Health Community. The initial goal is to just better highlight some articles about complementary medicine from some practitioners that I know in the area. Eventually I will add back in the directory of service providers and a calendar of events, but this is all for now.

Also, I had the logo done by my good friend Anita at A Cuppa Creative and I'm really happy with it. Thanks, Anita.

According to 9news.com IKEA is finally coming to Colorado!

My Past Discussions of IKEA Colorado

I've written about this in the past and become somewhat of a rumor hound on the subject:

• IKEA Store Located in Commerce City, Denver, Colorado
  *IKEA in Denver or Boulder or Front Range of Colorado
  *Ikea adding store to Denver, Colorado?
  *IKEA Fort Collins - 2008?
  *ikea store locations in the US

Often the comments on those posts are more interesting than the posts themselves...

I'll post an update comment on Wednesday after the real announcement.

Edit: Ikea Centennial

According to a comment I just received it will be in Centennial, Colorado. Centennial just recently incorporated into a city as expansion has grown south of Denver. I guess this makes sense since that area of colorado (Douglas County, southern Jefferson County) has been the fastest growing area in Colorado and one of the fastest in the nation for the last few years. I imagined they would put it north of Denver because my perception is that IKEA is popular with college students and the CU/CSU combination in Boulder/Fort Collins is the center of our college population.

And more sources are identifying it as coming to centennial.

We're just a few days away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 and things are becoming more and more tangible by the minute. Just now I got a package in the mail at the new offices.

The stickers just happen to be 2"x4" which is exactly the right size to emblazon them on the back of your iPhone. Ever since lijit gave it to me my phone has rocked a lijit sticker:

but now...at least for the next week...it's a DrupalCamp phone:

About quarter of the calls I get are organizing the camp so it seems only fitting.

If you're not convinced by these stickers that this will be a rocking weekend, here are the sessions.

Also, my best to the sticker's designer Don Hajicek and to the other logo designer amytremper.

This was the first "New Tech Meetup" that I've attended. It was quite interesting. Perhaps more interesting was the before the session I was at "The Cup" in Boulder talking to a VC/Consultant/Entrepreneur type and comparing Boulder to Denver he said something like "The thing about Boulder is that there's more VCs up here so the Entrepreneurs from Denver have to come here."

At that exact moment, sitting in the Cup working on their presentation was Dandyid. Point proven?

Without further ado - my notes on the sessions.

Gnip (Guh - nip)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and Ubuntu.

Basically they want to go from the "polling" model (think of all the rss requests that your rss reader makes in a day) to a push model. But it has to be polling, so they will do the polling in one big poll and then share the resulting data with you either by polling or pushing. Their model seems to be like Facebook, but in a B2B way. I'm not sure that I see the problem that they are solving, but they already have several big name partners which means that those big name partners see a business model which is really all that they need.

I like them more now that I see their website: "We got $h*t to pop". Ok, fair enough. They had a real demo - well done. The demo didn't 100% work. Oh well.

Question from the audience: Who saves money? Who spends money? What's the revenue module?
Answer: Uh, this is the new _tech meetup. I'm not a business guy....Let's say for now we're doing this for public benefit._

mobileXware (nice site!)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and WindowsXP and they couldn't get the presentation to work. Whoops.

All presentation, no demo (it's hard to demo handheld stuff). Basically it's a fitness guide via cell phone that's for sale now.