or thereabouts, anyway, i was in rome. jesus h. christ. that is a long time ago.

i haven't done a photo entry in a while, so for nostalgia's sake, i thought i'd link to my posts from my time in the eternal city. for your browsing pleasure. i hope to go back this spring. if you've got any rome tips, let me know, because it's probably one of the italian cities that i know the least about.

Have I mentioned that I love the internet? I know you all know it, but I still don't say it enough. I'm just a very lucky guy. How do I love thee, internet? Let me count the ways: free shit.

That is all.

But oh, what a way it is! I remember the heady days of my freshman year, when venture capitalists blissfully handed sacks of money to legions of incompetent ASP programmers. In between rounds of Starcraft and Being Terrified Of Girls, I amassed piles of $1 DVDs and ill-fitting promotional t-shirts. It was a great time to be young and pale.

That well has dried up, but you can still find a great offer here and there; my enthusiasm for finding too-good-to-be-true deals on the internet is only slightly tempered by the knowledge that most of them are attempts by the Russian mafia to steal my credit card number and, if possible, internal organs.

But here's a free offer that seems to be on the up and up: freeipods.com. I know, I know. But it appears to be legit -- even trusted sources seem to say it's okay. Complete the requirements and you can get a 20GB iPod or a 4GB iPod mini shipped to you for free, for serious.

For those of you who haven't seen these links kicking around, the deal is pretty simple: sign up with the site, complete one of their free trial offers, and refer five friends who must do the same. The free trial offers are for things like credit cards, BMG's music club, a two week trial of Blockbuster's Netflix knockoff... that sort of stuff. Personally, I signed up with Ancestry.com's "14 days for $1" offer and my account was credited immediately. If I forget to cancel within 14 days I'll be out of a couple hundred dollars -- as you might have noticed, all of these "free" offers are of the sort that can net the companies offering them a lot of money if the signee isn't careful. But they're from reputable companies, and having set up free email and SMS reminders for myself at MemoToMe, I'm not too worried about forgetting.

The trick is the referrals, of course. Fulfilling an offer doesn't pay for your iPod, it pays for your referrer's iPod. The whole thing is a pyramid scheme; since you won't be out any money if you play properly, that isn't a bad thing. But it does mean that the so-called "conga line" sites, where people line up in message boards to refer one another, are useless for everyone but the first few people in line.

Which brings us to the title of this post. I'm taking the freeipods.com plunge -- if anyone feels like trying it out for themselves, here's my referral link. Conga lines can't work in the long run -- the last people to sign up won't get anything out of it, and the problem gets worse the bigger the list (bonus points to the first person who comes up with a function to express the number -- I suck at math). On the other hand, there's no benefit to having more than five referrals, it doesn't cost a participant anything to use someone else's referral, and the first few people really do benefit. And you can always bug your friends for referrals if the conga line fails you. So if you decide to join in, post your referral link in comments, and we'll see how many people we can help out.

Oh, and there's one catch you should know about: there's a limit of one iPod per household. So if you and your roommate both want to take advantage, you'll have to play your cards right -- you can't change your address once you sign up. I've got a sneaking suspicion that this has more to do with increasing the number of completed sponsor offers without increasing the number of iPods shipped than with any legal or practical requirements. With that in mind, I'll mention that if you live in say, apartment 3, your mailman will usually be able to figure out that a package addressed to apartment 3G should go to you (even if you live in a house). Promotional websites will not be able to figure this out. Not that I'd ever do something like that myself. Ahem.

something i did this weekend that i forgot to mention - my family and i went to visit the house in foxhall village where i spent the first eight or nine years of my life. my father was browsing the real estate section of the post a few weeks ago, and noticed it being listed for - god good - almost $900,000. a neighbor we were close friends with when we lived at 1417 44th street nw is still there, so we borrowed a key from her and broke into the house to check it out.

the whole thing was supremely weird. none of us had been on the inside for nearly 17 years. i don't think my littler sister had really ever seen it, given that she was like, 5 months old when we moved out to vienna. peter only remembered bits and pieces; he was five or so when we left. i remembered everything almost perfectly, but i still felt like i was an overgrown oaf lumbering through a beautiful dollhouse. thing is, when you live in a house from ages 0-8, rooms seem a lot bigger and more scarily grown-up than they do when you're 24.

the house itself is absolutely gorgeous, though the man whom we had sold it to and who is selling it now (strangely enough, who also happens to be j. bradford delong's father) had done almost nothing to improve on it, except replacing the bathroom tiles and putting in a new stove. the house needs some improvement - it was built in 1932, and though my parents and grandparents (who lived there immediately before my parents) took excellent care of it all, a house is bound to need some updating 70 years later. but all the fixtures and such are original - it's still got gorgeous crystal doorknobs, hardwood floors, a huge backyard and lots of light. even if the kitchen is the tiniest thing you've ever seen (it is literally about three feet wide). in fact, the whole place is rather tiny, but certainly cozy and quaint.

anyway, if i had a billion dollars to spare, i would buy the house because it's adorable and was such a wonderful place to grow up. it's on a quiet, tree-lined street; glover archibald park is directly behind it, along with a secret path we used to take to the c&o canal; it's a short walk to georgetown; and it's close to the many shops and restaurants of foxhall village. unfortunately, i am a bit short of the million dollars it would take to close, so i can only hope that whoever gets to the house next takes care of it. want to buy it? you can check out the listing here.

Thanks to Catherine for finding this: Jackson Publick's LiveJournal. Publick is the creator and co-head-writer of the Venture Brothers (and the voice of several characters, including the Monarch). He's got notes on most of the episodes as well as general commentary about the show and his dealings with the Cartoon Network.

i can just tell, this is going to be one of those weeks when thinking of stuff to post to the blog is going to be about as enjoyable as pulling weeds. i just. have. nothing. to. say. but when i do, dear readers, you'll be the first to know.

anyway, my inability to write is probably because i'm still sleepy from the turkey, and the wine, and the pumpkin pie. oh, god, the pumpkin pie. even though my immediate family had a delicious dinner at my uncle's this time around, and therefore we were barred from having to eat 12 pounds of leftover turkey and potatoes in the following days, i still managed to eat astonishing amounts this weekend. first, whenever i stay at my parents' house, i eat everything in sight - not because i'm actually hungry, mind you, but IT'S FREE FOOD! and i am poor, and at any point i might not be able to afford those $8 bananas at whole foods, and could starve, and therefore i should stock up on my fat cells while i can so i don't die, passed out in front of an empty refridgerator, a single slice of cold light emanating from the slightly open door and casting its harshness over my prostrate, immobile, emaciated body. etc.

then tommy made the Best BBQ Pulled Chicken Sandwiches Ever on saturday so we could stuff our faces while watching the (ultimately tragic) uva vs. tech football game. he got all into it, and also made cornbread muffins and baked beans and it was all very delicious. apparently he just took a few chicken breasts, dumped them in a pot with a full bottle of trader joe's BBQ sauce and a little bit of water, cooked them for 3 hours, and voila! pure deliciousness. this + beer was goodness personified. or foodified. or whatever. oh yeah, and then we went and saw "the incredibles", and that was goodness itself movified. so awesome. i am in love with pixar's rendition of hair. my god, they do gorgeous hair. every single strand was perfection.

sunday, tommy and i hit up the flavin retrospective at the NGA. i'd seen it already, but didn't mind coming along for a second time so i could get some more fluorescent gamma rays or whatever makes my head hurt and my eyes twitch when i see that exhibit. then we cooked a lovely curried chicken-sweet potato thing for dinner that actually turned out pretty well. again, done with a bottle of stuff from trader joe's, curry sauce this time. i have only recently become a huge fan of TJ's bottles of sauces. they are so best.

and in non-related news, this indie xmas mix is getting me excited for the holidays. only 26 more days till the big Christ.

I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving. Taking a cue from Speed Dating (a phenomenon at that perfect interesection of novelty and ubiquity where police dramas use it to kill people), I fulfilled my filial obligations in record time, making a trip from my doorstep to Brewster, NY and back in just under 31 hours. Props to Greyhound's Peter Pan service -- aside from an unavoidable conversation about cellphones with some weirdo who saw me reading Wired (human interaction? what kind of geek are you?) the trip was fast and pleasant.

My grandfather's Dutch, and consequently we had an Indonesian rijsttafel for Thanksgiving. Once they colonized Indonesia, the Dutch figured out pretty quickly that their own cuisine -- which is inexplicably boring considering their proximity to France and Germany -- could use replacing (although their breakfast and dessert items are pleasantly interchangeable). So they kind of borrowed the Indonesians' cuisine. In exchange the Indonesians got... uh. Well, let's just say it wasn't a great deal for them.

My grandfather loves Indonesian food -- partly because it's tasty, and, I suspect, partly because he's a bloody-minded old coot who gets a kick out of colonialism. After all, this is a guy who tells stories about fighting the Germans as if Hitler was a stepdad he was trying to piss off. Think Gordon Liddy with an aristocratic European veneer.

He cooked most of the Thanksgiving meal: satay, eggs in pinda sauce, krupuk (like potato chips, except made out of shrimp), coconut rice and generous helpings of sambal (fiery red goo). Good stuff, although I am sorry to have missed the traditional turkey.

It was an entirely unrelated culinary tidbit that fascinated me, though. My grandfather's live-in nurse/housekeeper is a wonderful lady named Jo, who's Jamaican. She joined us for dinner, and during it she said that Jamaican Heineken is an entirely different recipe from normal Heineken, and that the difference is sufficiently distinct and beloved that you can buy it in Jamaican groceries. I'm not a big fan of regular Heineken, but for some reason this fascinates me. Anybody else every heard of this?