Tony Cordova

On August 2nd Melanie and I will be moving out of California to Las Vegas, New Mexico (here) so she can continue her education in a masters program at New Mexico Highlands University. She applied at this school at the last minute because of a letter she had received and overlooked at an earlier time. After quickly applying she got an acceptance email with a full tuition waiver, a job, and a stipend for that job. Obviously it was a no brainer for us to pursue this but it’s much easier said than done.

We will certainly miss the Central Valley despite all its faults and all our friends and family despite their faults . But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about selling stuff.

Since we are leaving and moving into a house that will already be furnished we don’t really need a lot of the stuff we have. So I have compiled a list of things that we want to sell/give away. If You have been to our house and seen something you would like to take off our hands please let me know. This is a preliminary list, we haven’t gone through everything yet. Email me at tony.cordov @ gmail.com if you see something you want, or you can call me. Or you can just come over. Make sure I’m home first. You don’t want to drive all the way to my house to pick some random movie up just to find I’m out doing something else.

Movies:
Wayne’s World 1 & 2
The Boondock Saints
The Cable Guy
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Get Shorty
Dumb and Dumber
Saw
Beverly Hills Ninja
Platoon
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Grandma’s Boy
Underworld
Underworld Evolution
High Fidelity
Lost in Austen
Ever After
Family Guy Vol. 1,2,3
Ace Ventura Movies
How I Met Your Mother SSN 1,3
Across The Universe
American History X
SNL 25th Anniversary
Family Guy Movie
Heat
Clerks II
Easy Rider
Tommy Boy
Equilibrium
SNL: Chris Farley
Matrix
Matrix: Reloaded
Eddie Izzard: Cirle
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Seasons 1-7
House: Seasons 1-3

I am giving away about 60 CDs. Some of the bands include Five Iron Frenzy, Avenged Sevenfold, Rancid, Nine Inch Nails, The Faint, The New Pornographers, The Mars Volta. They will be disposed of otherwise.

Furniture & misc:
100 CD rack
~32″ CRT TV (Very cheap)
TV Stand
5.1 Altec Lansing Surround sound for PC.
7″ Digital Picture Frame
Mini-Fridge
Bookcase
Small Bookshelf
Glass Table with 4 chairs
Couch with uncomfortable pull-out bed
Twin Bed Mattress with Box spring and Metal frame

I know the pictures are big, but I’m too lazy to resize them.

There are more items to be listed, I need to get approval to sell first(Kitchen stuff coming soon!). Contact me if you want anything, I will give you a heck of a deal.

I’m not messing around with boring intros.

Best Albums of 2009 in no particular order except number 1.

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Brendan Benson – My Old, Familiar Friend

Modest Mouse – No One’s First, And You’re Next EP

The Mountain Goats – The Life Of The World to Come

The Decemberists – The Hazards Of Love

1. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

I finally got the Favor Playlist done after a normal amount of procrastinating. I think it turned out awesome.

Melanie looked at me the other day and said, “I will be so happy when people stop asking if we’re excited.” I told a friend what she said and he told me to just get ready for the next question, “When are you going to have kids?” His answer was funny: “We’ve been trying for years!”

Marriage is great. The idea of devoting your life to someone you love and making the choice to love them in any situation is amazing. A wedding is supposed to be me screaming at the top of a mountain, telling everyone how excited I am about living my life with someone, yet I find myself setting up tables and chairs, choosing colors, defending my decisions, and eventually not caring about the draconian rules people place on “such a sacrament.”

Throughout the wedding planning process I let all of the fluff and meaningless rituals go because my vision is set on my bride and the life we would start together. But as we get closer to the date (2 days now) the more I just want to go pick Melanie up, go to my Pastor’s house, and say “I do.”

Maybe I just need to find a way to renew my optimism.

Here are the songs in the playlist:

I’m trying to put together a mix CD to give away at our wedding, a collection of songs that Melanie and I have really enjoyed together or have some kind of special meaning to us. It has proven to be a very difficult task because there is so much I want to put into it but there are a few problems:

1. There are some songs that were influential to us that we don’t particularly like anymore
2. I want there to be 6 MGMT songs
3. Some songs are particularly good when looked at from the perspective of the entire album they are on, not necessarily the single song.
4. There are just too many songs from too many artists that we want to represent.

So here is a list of what we have so far. This is very close to the final playlist, but the order will likely be different:

Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
Arctic Monkeys – Teddy Picker
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour – The Sun Ain’t Shining No More
The Beatles – Octopus’s Garden
David Bowie – Moonage Daydream
The Decemberists – The Legionnaire’s Lament
Five Iron Frenzy – On Distant Shores
Gogol Bordello – Ultimate
The Last Shadow Puppets – Meeting Place
MGMT – Electric Feel
The New Pornographers – Go Places
Pink Floyd – Us and Them (Symphonic)
Queen – You’re My Best Friend
The Raconteurs – The Switch and the Spur
Ratatat – Montanita
Sigur Ros – Staralfur
Super Furry Animals – Presidential Suite
Wolf Parade – Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts

After dealing with AT&T’s mediocre service, expensive plans, and annoying business practices I officially decided to switch carriers and get a new phone.  My smartphone experience included a Samsung Blackjack and a Blackberry Curve, both of which were solid phones but lacked personality. The iPhone was ever present but I didn’t want to have to stick with AT&T, plus what better way to give up personality than to buy an iPhone.  When I was seeking out a phone that would give me a feature rich experience as well as being open ended and customizable the answer was obvious: Android.  A friend of mine has the T-Mobile G1 and loves it show it off, especially to iPhone toting friends.

So, to make a long story short I had my eyes set on the HTC Hero. When I became aware of it the phone was only available in Europe and had not been announced for the US yet, then Sprint announced it would be available on October 11th exclusively with them. The phone was styled differently specifically for Sprint, but I though the new design was actually better than the original. Enough talk, here’s the phone:

In the week that I’ve had it I have discovered the really great things about the phone and the not-so-great things. I will outline them simply here:

Pros:
Incredible amount of functionality
5 MP camera
Healthy amount of apps
Customizability
Great GPS including turn-by-turn
Most apps are free
Touchscreen is responsive in the right ways
Background applications
Standard mini USB cable connection.

It’s hard to say much else because this phone has pretty much everything you can imagine. You name it, it probably has it.

Cons:
Battery isn’t as great as I would hope
Phone can be kind of sluggish, I don’t think the handset can keep up with the operating system
Not a gaming platform

Here is a video and come more pictures:

These pictures were taken with the phone:

You can check out what’s happening on 12/12/09 at http://www.tonyandmelanie.net

Hope you enjoy it!

I had been thinking about making my own beer for a while and finally my roommate (Justin) and I bought a beginners kit. The kit came with all the tools we needed (except a large brewpot) along with the ingredients to make a Brown Ale. This is the kit.

When we got started we took inventory of the ingredients and set up our “brewery” in the kitchen.

1. First we filled the brewpot with water (about 4/5 full because we needed room for the other ingredients) and started to heat it up. During this process we put the specialty grains in a cheese cloth bag and let it steep until the water reached 170 F which ended up being about 15 min. The specialty grains were Roasted Barley and Chocolate Malted Grains.

2. Then we turned off the heat and added the malt extract and dissolved it all into the wort, which is now what our mixture is called. Once dissolved we heated up the wort again to a boil. At this point we were having trouble getting the wort to boil and finally decided to put the lid on for a few minutes and it started boiling right away. Putting the lid on is a great way to heat up the wort faster but be careful of boil overs and remember to constantly stir the hops from the malt extract back into the wort. You are supposed to boil it for 1 hour. Be sure to continue to watch the time because you are supposed to add the Irish Moss or the clarifier that we used 45 minutes into the boil. 5 minutes after that you need to add the Flavoring Hops and 8 minutes after that the Aromatic Hops. All during this time you should be stirring and scraping the sides of the pot. We screwed this part up a bit because we were not watching the time carefully enough and added the hops about 10 minutes too late.

3. Next comes the hard part. After we turned off the heat we needed to cool the wort to 75 F as quickly as possible. A popular method of doing this is by using a wort chiller. Since we are poor we did not have that and thought it would be easy to just put ice and water in the sink to cool it. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough ice because it all melted before we got it to 75 F. It took us way too long to cool the wort and we only got it to about 83 F before we put it all into the fermenter. Be prepared to cool the wort!

4. When we siphoned the wort into the fermenter we had to fill the fermenter to 5 gallons with cool water. Another mistake we made was we didn’t have any boiled and sanitized water ready to pour into the fermenter with the wort, so we had to use filtered water.

5. Once the fermenter was filled to the 5 gallons we sprinkled the yeast on top of the wort, sealed the fermenter with the lid and put on the airlock. The airlock basically lets the CO2 out while not letting any air in. The yeast consumes the sugars in the wort and produces CO2 and alcohol. Here we took our first hydrometer reading.

6. And now we wait.

7. After 3 days the fermenter stopped bubbling and I took a hydrometer reading. I noted the reading and left it for a few more days. I took another hydrometer reading, saw that it was consistent with the last reading and decided it was about ready to bottle.

8. I asked a bunch of friends to save and wash out their bottles for us so we could use them for our beer, they were happy to oblige.  When you get bottles from friends make sure you do not get any twist off bottles, the capper will not work with them. We sanitized the bottles with the sanitation solution that came with the kit and started to siphon the beer into the bottling bucket. While siphoning we added the sugar that came with the kit  which creates the carbonation when we bottle. We made another mistake here: we were supposed to dissolve and boil the sugar into some clean water and pour it into the beer as it was being siphoned into the bottling bucket but we just dissolve the sugar straight into the beer.

9. Finally we started filling the bottles. We set the bottling bucket on the counter and a hose coming from the tap that attached to a device that allows you to fill the bottles from the bottom up. Make sure that your friends really rinsed out those bottles. There’s nothing more disgusting than seeing a cigarette at the bottom of your brew.

10. During that process we also started capping the bottles with the cool capping device that came with the kit.

11. Once all the beer in the fermenter was gone and the bottles were filled and capped we put them all in a cupboard to sit for 2-4 weeks.

I am writing this during the second week of waiting and am very interested in tasting our home brew. My next update will probably be about what it tastes like, I hope you enjoyed this writeup!

You can see all the pictures we took here.

As I am beginning to think about what to write in this blogpost I anticipate 2500 words with pictures and videos to sum up what has happened over the last month or two. Luckily for you, I will lose interest in saying things about Russia, marriage, music, and beer and resort to a few music videos that are awesome. Shall we begin?

What an incredible video. Anyway, when I went to Russia for a month in May and June I asked my girlfriend to marry me. Well, actually I didn’t really have to ask, it just happened. Here are some pictures from the trip.

In Front of Lenin’s Tomb in the Red Square

In front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow

Me giving Melanie her ring in St. Petersburg.

You can view more pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonycordova/sets/72157620558506628/

In other news we went to Monterey for a wedding a few weeks ago and spent some time geocaching! If you don’t know what geocaching is go to this website: http://www.geocaching.com Usually when I describe geocaching to people they look at me funny and say things like, “Why on earth would you want to do that?!?!” Well, let me tell you, geocaching is one of the coolest exploration activities one can do. You go out into unknown territory with a friend (or by yourself) and look for something someone else has left behind. The satisfaction you get when you find a difficult cache is incredible. Here are some pictures of us finding a cache on Lover’s Point in Monterey.

More here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonycordova/sets/72157621319032950/

If you can’t already tell, I got a Flickr Pro account and am trying to justify putting all these pictures online.

Next up, a post about our adventures with brewing our own beer! I shall leave you with this:

and this:

There are 3 things I have found that I cannot live without:

My Macbook Pro
Resident Evil 5
Making out with Melanie