Joe and Jamie's Blog

Before I start, this is the second post thats about a week late. I know, I know, I was busy what can I say.

My Uncle Jimmy turned 60 this past Sunday. My cousins threw him a surprise party at the Oyster Point Hotel in Red Bank, New Jersey. It was a very fancy hotel with great service and food. Uncle Jimmy received a very nice surprise gift, but you have to scroll through the pictures to see what it is!

Red Bank is a nice little city, nothing like the crappy parts of Jersey, which is almost the entire state. The catering room we were in overlooked the Navesink River. I wish I was the guy out on the jet ski, it was even hotter out than Saturday.

Again, forgot the camera. These were with the Treo again.

Here’s the Birthday Boy along with my Aunt Susan and sister, Katelyn, in the background. My aunt is going to kill me if she sees this!

Here’s almost everyone cramming for photos before we left. Now here comes the surprise gift.

My cousins got my uncle a 1968 Oldsmobile 442. He almost had a heart attack when it rolled up. He honestly didn’t know he was getting it nor it was his since we were in the valet area. Its a very nice classic. He used to have one, same year and tires, just he had the hard top.

It was a great party and good weekend full of awesome food, free beer, good views, great weather, and fun times with the whole family.

This past Saturday we went to my cousin’s baptism, well actually two of my cousin’s baptism at the same time and place. My cousin Suzanne and her husband Howie baptized their son (King) George and my cousin Keri and her husband Chris baptized their son Matthew. Matthew is 5 1/2 months old and George is 2 1/2 months old. It was good to see the whole family together for something happy after the long series of sad events. Both babies were baptized in St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church at 856 Pacific St, Brooklyn, NY.

From there we went a few blocks to a very nice catering place, Giando On The Water at 400 Kent Ave, Brooklyn, NY. This was the same place Keri had her wedding reception, if I am correct I believe they are relatives of Chris. It is a beautiful place right on the bank of the East River with a wonderful view of Manhattan. The Williamsburg Bridge is practically right over the building (its the cool one with the train that goes in between the cars across it). You can see all the major skyscrapers from the outdoor patio. The food was great. It was 97 degrees out that day, but it wasn’t too bad in the shade.

Like usual I didn’t grab the camera, I need to keep a second one in my car I think. Excuse these photos as they were taken by my Treo, which has no flash or focus.

This clown actually stole our seats!

Very good chocolate cake with real strawberry and banana filling.

Suzanne and George(left). Carmine and Matthew(right).

Keri and Matthew.

Look at George tasting the cake!

Keri and Matthew(left). Suzanne and George(right).

Here’s Jamie and I just hanging out. I’m pretty good at taking reverse pictures like this. That’s right, I took this!

Well I just hit my 100th spam comment today. It’s rather sad that a very new blog such as mine would already have more spam comments than real ones. I’m glad the Akismet plugin works very well and is part of Wordpress otherwise we would all be pulling our hair out more than we do already.

I have nothing more to say, just noticed it said 100, minor milestone for the blog. Lets see how long it takes to get to 200.

Hats off to Nigeria, Russia, and all the rest of the spam nations, keep up the good work.

Mozilla will eventually be launching the awaited Firefox 3. There is already tons of hype about it everywhere.

Mozilla is taking this to the extreme and setting the precedent for a new category in the Guinness World Records. They want everyone to download it on the first day it comes out. Their download logs will be picked apart by Mozilla and Guinness and the record will be set for anyone else to try and break from that point on.

When Firefox 2 came out, there were 1.6 millions downloads in the first 24 hours. Let’s help make 3 even more.

Go to http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord or either of the buttons below and pledge!! They’ll even remind you to download it when it is released, which the date hasn’t been made public yet. You know you’re going to download it anyway, so pledge and help keep America #1 on the pledge list!

Don’t cheat and download it many times, let’s all be a part of a legitimate World Record.

We’re going to Newport, Rhode Island.

We decided on this because it’s a lot closer for us to get to since we didn’t want to blow most of the vacation money on gas. I booked our 8 day stay at the Newport Beach Hotel & Suites just 2 miles from downtown Newport. It looks lovely and has received great reviews. It’s a historic old hotel, which I will have to do some more research on; I typically just wing hotels and see how it turns out. The hotel just finished renovations in May for many upgrades to all the rooms, which should be nice. The hotel’s front yard is a park with a beach in front of that. I can’t wait to wake up with an ocean view.

Here’s some pictures I took off their website.

All photos show above are copyright Newport Beach Hotel & Suites, the Newport Hotel Group, and the photographer.

This next photo I took off Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, Google Earth’s competitor. I love Google Earth and all Google’s products, but Microsoft Virtual Earth has the Birdseye View feature which renders the photo so much clearer and lifelike, and also it gives it the feel of flying around the place in a helicopter, not the straight down look of a satellite. Google does have street view though, which is just amazing.

I didn’t zoom in all the way because I wanted you to see the surroundings. Go to MSN.com and on the top search bar click on Maps and then do your search and play around with the Birdseye View.

Back to the topic now.

I will take thousands of pictures like I do every vacation. I promise I won’t post them all, but a bunch of really good ones scattered throughout many posts.

Sunday was WSPK K104’s KFEST 2008 concert at Dutchess Stadium in Fishkill, NY, home of the New York Penn League Class A Hudson Valley Renegades.

The weather was beautiful and it was great to be outdoors. Since I was able to get staff badges for Jamie and I, the venue was actually enjoyable because everything was free! It was nice seeing people from the office outside of the office, they act a bit more natural and more enjoyable to be around with no stressors. The music was OK, Wyclef Jean and Sean Kingston were the main artists, along with Pitbull and Sum 41 and six other performers. Check out the lineup you missed.

I had to be there early because Pamal bought their own ticketing system, and I had to go learn how to set it up to help everyone troubleshoot it for the next venues in Albany. The system never did work and the rep they sent from the company to teach me knew nothing technical at all. In fact I got his system working and he had no clue how, but of course he then touched it and made it revert back to not working. Man I was glad they gave me free food otherwise I would have been royally pissed, but that’s another story.

I have some photos on my phone that I will have to upload later, but here are some shots that I took of the Poughkeepsie Journal’s website as well as K104’s website.

I’ll start off with some shots of the stadium so you can kind of get a feel for how full it was that day.

Now the stage was right in the center in the back, and the field was jammed packed everywhere in the outfield and the stands. No one was allowed on the actual infield.

Here’s part of the stage, can’t see the whole thing but it was your typical stage you would see at any outdoor event. My photos will show more of it.

Look past the drummer and you can see the sea of people, there was almost 10,000 at the venue I believe.

The Poughkeepsie Journal has a nice page set up with 104 pictures they took of people up close. Sift through it, you may find yourself. Check it out here.

The whole KFEST photo album can be found on their website, here.

UPDATED: Here are the photos I took with my Treo. It gives a different view since I didn’t have to join the masses to be there this year.

This was kinda funny so I had to take a picture of it. Those morning people are so silly ain’t they!?!

This is what Wyclef and Ray J rode to the stage. They must think they are just so cool because its a Lamborghini Gallardo.

Jamie and I are having a tough time deciding where to go for our summer vacation. We want to go someplace new this year. We narrowed it down to Rhode Island or Virginia. Last year we took a trip to Boston after making a stop in Cambridge, Mass. The Delaware shores and Baltimore where among the list this year, but we for some reason are settling more towards the shores of Rhode Island or Virginia Beach, the more touristy areas since they tend to have more to do.

My friend Jay just recently posted some pictures of his Memorial Day tip to Point Judith, RI. He has been to Block Island before and recommends it. You can see some pictures he took and if you take a gander at the comments he has more from older posts.

Basically we need your help. I want to book the hotel this weekend before prices go way up and nothing is available. Right now Hotels.com is running a special on a free $50 gas card if you book more than three nights between now and Labor Day. We’re planning to go July 17th though the 28th if that helps with the decision making.

Since I am a fairly new blogger with a even newer blog, I am very anxious to get and excited when I see comments. I know there are a lot more than my original two readers now, so please leave a comment if you like something or find anything interesting. I love the comments I get in person, but why not leave your mark here for all eternity?? While I was surfing around my usual round of sites to check daily I came across a post over at Blog Oh Blog about why people should leave comments.  Here are Jai’s 7 reasons to leave comments:

1. Do you know me?

If you regularly leave comments on a particular blog, it will make the blog owner recognize you and also your website. When you do this on multiple blogs, you will be socially recognized in the blogging community. Also, most of the blogs nowadays use Gravatars which can help in branding and getting some popularity for your own blog. I think that leaving comments on popular blogs is the best way to be known around the Internet.

2. Building Community

A community is built around people and their views. Leaving comments is a way of showing that you care and want to share your opinion with others including the owner of the blog. The comments can be a suggestion, feedback, appreciation or even criticism. They are good as long as they are not spammy or abusive. So, even if you are just stopping by, try to make that little effort of writing a comment, even if its just a line.

3. Getting What you Want

You should leave a comment because that’s the only way the blog owner can judge what the reader/customers want without getting a written e-mail or any other form of communication.

4. Link Building & Traffic

Most of the blogs allow you to leave your website link/s when writing comments (Dofollow or Nofollow) for the blog. This can help you in getting good inbound links and also some additional traffic to your site.

5. Selling yourself

If you are a service provider or have something to sell, comments can be an unobtrusive way to do this. I am not asking you to write your sales pitch in the comments but when you build a relationship with the people through commenting on their blogs, it gets easy to sell your wares to them. Cheap advertising for you

6. Go down in the Blogging history

This is for the people who do not run websites or blogs but just like to surf the Internet. Someday, when someone tries to search for your name on Google, believe me or not, if you mentioned your name in the comment author, the search results will pop out the comments that you wrote. For some people, the results can be very fascinating

7. Show off your writing style

Finally, if you have good written English skills, comments can be the platform where you can flaunt them. A lot of people will read them.

And last but not the least, when you leave a comment on a post, it is sort of a reward or a small prize for the blog owner. So, you know now what makes leaving comments so special! Go on, leave a comment and show me that you learned something

I found it very interesting, so support Jai and check out the original post here.