Writing in the Corner

Ah, number five. One of my favorite people blogs (vs. blogs about ideas or Mormon stuff). Joe in and Around Las Vegas, aka VegasJoe, writes a really cool blog that’s a stream of consciousness blend of text and photos of Vegas life as lived by real people, interspersed with links to fun YouTube videos, travel, and his beautiful granddaughter, E.

I found Joe when he found me. He either linked to my blog or found it at random and I saw he’d been there by his IP address. We swapped e-mails a couple of times (remember my unemployed days, Joe?) and found that we are/were both actually FoxPro developers - a very, very small niche. He liked my blog and some of my friends’ blogs and after almost five years we’re still together

What I like best about Joe’s blog is that it’s always surprising. He works for a company that has a huge convention center right on site. He posts photos of setup and teardown and sometimes of the shows themselves. His blog gives me a sense of being “on the scene.” His video blogs are also, to hammer the adjective into the ground, surprising. I’m always entertained and amused and often delighted by what he chooses to link. And anybody who can look at the unruly mop of hair on his beautiful, cheeky little granddaughter E and not be entranced has no soul.

Joe’s blog and his generous link policies have made him friends all over the globe. If you go to Vegas, look him up! But warn him you’re coming - I was there last fall, and didn’t give him enough notice, so we’ve never yet met in real life.

This is number two in a series of posts about the blogs that are in my feed, and why I read them. I will write about the blogs in the order they show up on Google Reader and no preference or ranking should be inferred from the order they show up here in posts.

MikeandJohn.com is the blog of my friends Mike Karpowicz and John Hamer. John is a cultural Mormon; a writer, editor, historian and mapmaker. Mike is his partner, a software developer and business owner. Mike has never been a Mormon, but John’s interest has rubbed off on him. They are co-Executive Director’s of the John Whitmer Historical Association.

They are both great guys, smart and fun. And handsome! They are both just delightful to look at, albeit a little young (maybe that’s why they’re so beautiful). They both have great hair and neither exhibits any signs of encroaching male pattern baldness. I’ve met Hamer (why do I call him Hamer? He’s never John; always Hamer) twice; at the annual Sunstone Symposium last August in Salt Lake City, and for dinner in Ft. Wayne, Indiana on one of my occasional midwestern Mormon meetups. I met Mike for the first time at the Ft. Wayne dinner and I had a lot of fun talking with him about computer stuff.

John and Mike write separate and very different posts. John’s most recent post was a video that VegasJoe would get a kick out of - A YouTube video that’s an image montage of the “Nixon Now” reelection song. Mike’s is a photograph of SBBRPC 85 Pork Coating. John writes a lot about politics, while Mike writes about adventures - scroll down from the Pork Coating post to get a taste.

I read their blog to keep up with their interesting lives; which are very different from mine. They travel, they write, they have adventures. I, on the other hand, rarely leave my house. They don’t update their blog as often as I would like, but that’s not surprising, considering how much time they spend actually living their lives (vs. living vicariously through others).