Clay Tickets and Orkut

I woke up this morning, all geared up for ordering tickets for the Clay Aiken concert at the RBC Center, in Raleigh. The tickets went on sale at 10 am. I cheerfully told my mother of my plans. She discouraged me, reminding me that there would be lots of screaming kids. Then she asked me who I was going to take with me. When I told her that I had been planning to take her, her opinion miraculously changed. It must have been a coincidence. At any rate, I'm all excited about going. Last year I went to see Billy Joel and Elton John, which was great. This will be even better, because the tickets were much much cheaper.

Not long after that, I got an invitation to join Orkut, from my brother. It's a new "online community" that was launched by Google on Thursday. Just a few days later and thousands of people are using it. I've enjoyed using Friendster since October, but, from what I've seen so far, Orkut is better. It's easier to find people, since they don't have to be 3-4 friends away from you in order to see their profiles. It does allow privacy, though, because you can set specific info fields to only be seen by friends or their friends. There are also little "communities", for things like colleges and hobbies that make it easier to find people with similar interests. Plus, each of those communities has a built-in forum for posting messages. Friendster sort of had a similar idea in that people created users for particular locations and colleges, but all of the colleges disappeared one day.

I went over to the house in the afternoon and it's looking great. All the windows are installed. They had to get a motorized lift in order to put in the huge trapezoid window in the master bedroom, since it weighed several hundred pounds. I'm still having trouble deciding if the chandelier is designated to go in the right place. It only really matters because it dictates where my dining room table will go. The weather was beautiful today, so that made the stay all the more enjoyable, particularly compared to freezing my fingers off on Friday. Unfortunately, a yellow breasted flicker got in the house and fatally flew into one of the windows. It's very sad. I hope that the doors arrive and everything gets sealed up soon, before birds start building nests in there.

Tonight, my parents and I went to Nikos. They had a special with shrimp in a creamy garlic sauce, over angel hair pasta. Very nice. For some reason they are completely tearing up the courtyard at Brightleaf Square. I wonder what on earth they are doing. For those of you who haven't been there, Brightleaf is a couple of old brick tobacco buildings that were remodeled and converted into a small shopping center.

Just in case anyone else searches to find out what cell phone Jack Nicholson was using in Something's Gotta Give, I believe it was a Sony Ericsson T68i.