There’s Grand Old Day tomorrow, which isn’t really part of my list, but it did force me to go do some Grand Ave shopping today - avoiding the pure chaos tomorrow.

I hit Northern Brewer and picked up a Cream Ale kit to brew this weekend.  Northern Brewer is a nationally reknowned home brew shop that is primarily mail order, but if you live in St. Paul you are lucky enough to be able to pick up your supplies in person.

I then went down to the new St. Paul Cheese shop - run by the France 44 folks.  As far as I know this is St. Paul’s first Cheese shop and the staff was great. I tried about 10 different cheeses and walked out with my by the slice selection of a few great cheeses.  The Montenebro, a ripe full bodied goat cheese I hadn’t ever tried, is now one of my new favorites.  To round out my cheese buying, I walked next door to the Breadsmith to pick up some cheese delivery vessels.  This is a killer combo of locally owned and operated shops.

There are lots of other places that recently have been springing up that make staying in St. Paul  to eat worth it:

• The Cheeky Monkey Deli - I have raved about this place already – house cured and smoked meats, fresh baked breads, awesome sandwiches on Selby.
• Brasa – some of the best rotisserie anywhere is opening on Grand Ave.
• Barrio – Minneapolis’ tequila bar and taqueria is opening a second spot in Lowertown.
• The new Mississippi Market is opening next month and will hopefully continue to roast their own sandwich meats.
• The Blue Door, Flat Earth Brewery – I could go on and on.

The list is only new stuff, I could go on about some of the ol’ standbys, but need to go eat more of my cheeses.

We’ll see if anything ever gets written down. If not, see you next year.

Photoshop finally announced their online Photo Editing suite called Photoshop Express.  The answer to the layman’s photo editing needs.  While the online factor is cool – I think the most important thing is you can get your photos back when you are done with them. Photoshop Express could have just as easily been a desktop install, but that is not the way of the software world these days.

Photoshop Express is still in Beta, but it is available to everybody and you should definitely try it out and see if it is right for you. 

First thing I noticed was the 2GBs of free storage, not bad – but with 7 megapixel cameras being the norm this will fill up fast if you use the service regularly.

However, the 2GBs free is probably just a way to bait you into purchasing a larger ‘digital locker’ to keep all your photos in. A not half bad idea considering then your photos are safe (or safer anyway) from a hardware catastrophe at a reputable location.

Another interesting features – it allows you to login into other Web 2.0 worlds where you may have pictures stored and edit them directly. Currently you can edit pictures from Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket – so you can essentially grow your storage capacity by using external sites that integrate with Photoshop Express.

All the photo editing options are extremely easy to understand and show you 7 ranges for each effect and allow you preview each interval within that range in real time.  Good enough!  Some of the coolest editing features are the ‘Pop Color’, which allows you to create a grayscale image except for one color you isolate and the ‘Exposure’ which lets you quickly fine tune the exposure of your photograph.

There are also some standard Social Networking elements that all web 2.0 sites require. In this case you can share and browse Galleries. Essentially albums you have uploaded and selected as public.  Hopefully – if you don’t select them to be public they are in fact private. (Facebook I’m looking in your general direction….).

The biggest advantage I see is all the processing is on their end, as long as you have a high-speed Internet connection, the age of your computer shouldn’t really affect performance, unlike installing the full blown Photoshop.

For now, I think it is a pretty good tool and so far it is free.  I will continue to use it until I forget about it, which always seems to happen.

And definitely Amazon’s fault for creating another proprietary format wrapped in some ugly DRM(!!!) to keep them from being portable, unless of course you have one of the 8 obscure MP3 players that actually will support them. Basically these players have a mini version of Amazon’s player – which is the opposite of portable and not user-friendly.  Aaaargghh. While Amazon does specify the players it supports (in fine print) I think they should have definitely made this more clear in the Amazon player, when you are prompted to download a portable version of your recently purchased movies or TV shows.

Plus, 12 of the 20 players supported are old and not even for sale anymore, not even on Amazon.  So, unless you own the Archos 404 from 2006, you are pretty much out of luck.

Stupid Amazon, and Stupid Movies.  Figure it out already and make it easy for us.

After losing all of my $40 dollars – being a high-roller, naturally I was sad to have lost soooooo much money and was ready to leave. 

It might have also been excitement to head out to San Francisco  to meet up with Jo and visit with E&K and crew. We headed to Lake Tahoe for a leisurely and/or grueling  vacation depending how you look at it. Two days in the warm spring snow at Northstar, couldn’t have asked for better conditions for a relaxed snowboarding trip.

In fast forward, it would read something like this:

Snowboarding, Eating, Hot Tub Beers, Jenga, determining the trustworthiness of historic icons, a little sleeping, and Eating some more. Repeat. 

If you aren’t much of the wordy type, here is a hyperactive visual tour of the outdoor portion of the trip:

All in all it was a blast and sealed the deal on the decision to make it to Shasta for the houseboat extravaganza which has only existed to us on film and through folk lore.  I am already preparing for the undoubted trip to Little Star Pizza for the corn meal crust deep dish we missed out on this time around….

I highly recommend this movie if you like The Office, or any mocumenatry films like Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show.

Check it out. It is fairly short and if you have Netflix you can use the “Watch Instantly” feature to stream it to your computer.