Saturday began with a two-hour drive over to Des Moines, where the “official” reason for spending my birthday there was taking place that morning — AIGA Iowa’s student portfolio reviews. Me, Continental and Dick were asked to be among the professionals reviewing. I had never done this before, and I wasn’t nervous — I don’t get nervous, really — but I was feeling something akin to nerves, I suppose. Mostly because I didn’t want the students to feel like they were getting ripped off after a horrible waste of 15 minutes showing their book to me.

Lucky for me, the first dude I was assigned had a phenomenal book. A U of I student, he had a book full of pieces done for actual paying clients, and most of it was very nice stuff. You could tell he’d spent serious time putting the book together, too — photos or prints of each piece appeared on a page with a small title and the original size/medium tucked away in the corner. My only suggestion for this guy was to move the order around and to trim down from 17 pieces to his 8-10 best. Because he totally had 8-10 really nice pieces, and could likely land a job with those. But the other ones needed to get the hell out.

From this point, I was rolling. No more nerves, or whatever that was.

I could tell you lots of stories about my big crazy 28th Birthday Party in Des Moines. But its so much easier (and funnier) to show it in pictures. Navigate the Awesome Flash applet I coded below to relive the day, or just sit back and let it play automatically.

There’s 70+ photos in there, so make sure you scroll right in the flash applet to see them all. You’ll want to see the High Life Lounge, the Pizza at 2am, and more.

You bet.

When we walked out of the Homy Inn at 12:56 am last night, I wondered two things:

1) How did the Twins end up winning a game 12-10 in 10 innings? I saw pieces of the highlight package on SportsCenter in the bar, but how exactly does a team starved for offense score 12 runs?

2) How did we manage to close down the bar on a weeknight yet again?

I still don’t know the answer to the first question, other than the newspaper accounts which said Michael Cuddyer hit a walk-off, two run homerun off of ex-Twin JC Romero.

I do know that after our Board of Directors meeting last night, we went for a drink across the street to Sullivan’s. We sat for an hour or so, had a couple of pitchers, and Cliff left to go grade papers at 8:30. Continental headed out about 15 minutes later, and Dick and I headed to Mother’s Good Food for dinner (for him) and beer (for me). That place closed at 10, so we went next door to the Homy. Which is where we stayed for three hours, arguing over the NFL Draft and other important things like that. So that’s how we managed to close down the bar on a weeknight. Now I remember.

This is all training, of course, for the big Max 28th Birthday Bash in Des Moines this weekend. Its a birthday so huge it had to move out-of-state, and set up camp at a fancy downtown hotel. Tonight’s excursion to Lincoln for Third Thursday is Night Two of Getting Back Into Shape For The Weekend.

Is it just that I disdain printed books, or is it that I’m a product of a generation that increasingly prefers to get information online?

When our Office Manager came around passing out the new Phone Books this week, I politely said “no thanks”. I honestly can’t tell you the last time I used a Phone Book to find a number. I go to Google and type in what I need, and without fail, get the number I’m looking for, usually quicker than I’d find it in a big yellow book, and without having that big 1000-page monstrosity on my shelf. And its always up-to-date; we were looking for places to get some photos blown-up from old negatives, and my boss once called three places that she found in a phone book. She couldn’t get ahold of them; when I heard who she was calling, I had to laugh because all three had been out of business for at least a year.

But I’m strange for preferring to go online.

Last week, when we were working on a map, I used Google Maps to get the dots in the right places. She tried to use that, and became frustrated quickly and exclaimed that the online maps were hard to use and unreliable. Preferred a trusty oversized Road Atlas.

I love big maps as much as the next guy, especially those big ones that you can hang on your wall to exclaim to all the world that you’re a Geography Stud. Nothing cooler than a big ol’ map of the U.S. of A. on your wall, with fold marks intact and push pins in the corners. Oh, you bet.

But if at all possible, I prefer to go online for my maps. One, I don’t have to do rudimentary geometry to find things — looking in an Index for the quadrant a particular city is in, then locating that elusive B-6 quadrant, and the city within said quadrant — and two, its quicker.

Call me strange (or an idiot), but I don’t foresee a need for either an Atlas or a Phone Book in my life, nor on my desk. I’m guessing most people my age feel similarly, and most people my parent’s age prefer the printed versions. Nothing wrong with either one. Just a difference. And a divide in the Generation Gap, I suppose.

So I’m sitting at a meeting over lunch, and the moderator has a list of things he’s reading off of. Each item is between 10-20 words, taking mere seconds to read, and then he would elaborate on each item afterward. But here’s what was driving me nuts: he’d put on his reading glasses, read the item, take them off, fold them up, put them in his shirt pocket, talk for a minute, and then take them back out to read the next item. Over and over again. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t because no one else noticed this happening, and a random person laughing in a quiet meeting is bad form.

But it was really bothering me. Why not just leave the glasses on? Does he even know he’s doing it? Is he doing just to drive me nuts?

Clearly I’m an idiot.