Firstly, I’m not really that motivated to post things with any sort of regularity. I am not trying to be a “blogger”, necessarily. I just like the idea of having a place on the web to post whatever I want. Usually, when I’m inspired to actually write something, it’s about a subject I know a lot about or am very interested in, or some event that recently occurred. I also tend to post things that I think others will be interested in, or will find interesting or amusing in some way.

The other thing is taking the time to actually sit down and type something out. I have notebooks and papers full of ideas, but I don’t often do anything with them. If I stop and think about it, it really doesn’t take too long to type out a few paragraphs. Although in my case, I usually spend a lot of time doing it, treating it like a high school essay, rather than the informal blog post that it is. I really don’t need to do several drafts of something that few people are going to read. Especially since I’m not getting marks or money for it…

To be honest, two things recently inspired me to even write this up. The first is my friend’s girlfriend telling me robmaeder.com is her new homepage. Whether or not that’s actually true doesn’t matter, but the fact is that I have this site up here on the Internet for everyone to see, and I’m not doing anything with it. If it’s just going to sit here idle, I might as well shut it down.

The other ‘recently inspiring event’ is I just finished helping my brother Chris set up his new website, chrismaeder.ca. He’s convinced the Internet is the key to riches, and I’m starting to think he might be onto something. If he’s going to be 2010′s hottest new blogger, I figure I should try to keep up.

I’m not going to make some outrageous promises that I’m going to post every day, or even on any sort of regular schedule. But if I’m going to keep robmaeder.com alive, I’m going to have to post at least a couple times a month.

I made myself a cup one morning last week and drank it plain, without adding any sugar, milk or honey. It was gross! It tasted like grass and has a really weird smell/aftertaste that reminds me of painting. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I was able to finish it. I have another packet, so maybe next time I’ll listen to that recommendation and try adding some honey to see if it improves the taste any.

How much does this look like?

Would you believe that is $177.50 in just coins? I guess I don’t use as many coins as I thought I did. They usually sit in my pocket and get tossed into the dish at the end of the day. Over time, this adds up to a lot of money. I was most surprised that I had $70 in quarters alone. I gotta go hit up an arcade…

I figured I would roll up the coins to get a bit more organized, and I was surprised that I had over 1000 pennies! Having one thousand of anything is a lot, but when it’s money, it seems a lot more exciting. Here’s what $10 in pennies looks like:

One of my coworkers lives near me, and offered to drive me to and from work until I get a car, which was really nice of her. I had to adjust my schedule, since she starts at 7:30am and I used to start at 8. Today was the first day and it was a bit rough getting up earlier, but that’s not what this post is about either.

So anyway… on our way to work, we stopped by Tim Horton’s to get morning coffee and tea. When we got to the drive through window, the cashier informed us the lady in the car ahead of us paid for our order! That was a pleasant surprise and brought a smile to our faces. My driver (the nice coworker, not a real chauffeur), in turn, paid for the order of whoever was in the car behind us. Hopefully it sparked some sort of chain reaction that continued all day, but I’ll never know how far the giving went.

I have heard of this sort of thing happening before, but never seen it firsthand. I hope the nice lady in front of us had a great day.

During the first week of February, I received a letter from Best Western International. It wasn’t from the president directly, but from Greg Trotter, who is manager of Customer Care. According to the letter I received, Mr. Kong was made aware of our situation and the issues we faced while in Nashville. In the reply, I received an apology for the poor service, as well as some comments about how Best Western strives to provide excellent service and value for all of its customers.

Mr. Trotter went on to explain that he’s aware travelers have a lot of options available when selecting accomodations, and he hopes we will consider staying at a Best Western again in the future. To make things right, he is sending me a check for $80 (Canadian) to cover the cleaning fee and is also sending me a Best Western travel card worth $25.

Best Western locations are all independently owned and operated, so I can see why, despite their best efforts, the level of service provided is not always up to par. It sucks that I had to write a letter to the president to get any sort of help, but I am happy with the way they handled the situation and the end result. My faith in Best Western International has been restored, but I don’t think I’ll stay at their Nashville location again.

Obviously, this isn’t new, and I’m sure this has been going on for years and years without the attention it is now getting in the news. This really makes me wonder how much lead and other dangerous chemicals I came into contact with playing with toys as a kid. I’m sure the rules have become stricter over the years, but as we’re seeing, the toys of today are being recalled for safety reasons, so I believe the toys of the past were even more dangerous.

I don’t really know what else to say about this, except I hope I don’t die an early death because I used to play with lead-infested toys…

In total, they got $55 back. There were about 270 beer bottles, 20 empty 40s (1.14L) and 60 empty 26ers (750mL) and a handful of mickeys. By my quick math, that’s over 90 litres of beer, and 70 litres of liquor. In total, it was an estimated $2300 worth of alcohol.

Over time, I redesigned the site a few times, attempted regular updates, and added in some actual content.

Below is a brief rundown of robmaeder.com through the years. Click the screenshots to see how the page looked and acted back in its day. The archived copies of my site are available thanks to the Wayback Machine.

First off, the original look. It’s pretty plain and kinda not good. I created a simple php backend that allowed me to update the news section through an admin form.

The second edition of the site was pretty different, being very minimal and light.

This third version of robmaeder.com was quite good for my skills. I put a lot more work into it and it contained a lot of pages showing off some of my projects and experiences.

The site you’re looking at now is the fourth and latest version. I made the switch to WordPress a while back, and I really like how simple it is to add new content. I’m getting kinda bored of the design and the broken stuff, so I might mess around with it sometime. I also want to move a lot of the pages from my old site to this one, so I can consolidate everything in one place. I get a lot of obscure hits from Google searches that lead to my old site, and it would be nice if everything was in one spot.

There you have it. Solid proof I have been a nerd for at least five years.