Took this picture for someone special and decided to clean it up a little bit. To everyone else, I promise this photocrop was worked on while listening to the most masculine metal on the planet.

I dropped from second place last year to fourth and finished poorly with a series of consecutive losses. My performances were strong just nowhere near as strong as the top three in the leauge. Fourth place is where I belong.

Payner is apparently on his way to “becoming a hall of famer”. Congrats to the top three this year in a very hard fought and competive season.

Agent Smith: Wait. I’ve seen this. I stand here, right here, and I’m supposed to say something. I say, “Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo.”
Agent Smith: What? What did I just say?

Yesterday the Official Google Reader Blog posted notification of the “retirement” of all social features including “friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader”. Of course the one social tool I’ve embraced is changing and being moved to Google+  another social networking tool I have no interest in at all.

Seems to be a lot of confusion of what is going to happen with the change but I’m primarily concerned on how this is going to effect the fragmentation of conversation between my friends. I don’t really see due to the tools being removed from Reader a big push of everybody I know moving to Google+. I don’t have an account there and at this point don’t see that changing.

A change I’ve been debating is turning this blog into an articles and shared list site where something I would share using Google Reader would just end up here. With services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ it’s always bothered me as you really don’t “own” your content. With these Google Reader changes sure they let you take your data but that doesn’t change people’s habits and attention. Using vanlandw.com if anybody wanted anything to do with ‘vanlandw’ it would be here and nowhere else.

On receipt of reading the news of the Google Reader changes I shared out the post and these are the following comments from my friends.

Where to go for this type of intelligence? “So in a week’s time” where will this all be? Right now I’ll just wait and see.

To say I was shocked was an understatement. This Dunkin Donuts was placed here for a reason and it was for my own personal enjoyment. As a coffee drinker Dunkin for a long time has been my favorite chain to get coffee.

After the feelings of shock and denial waned then a stronger feeling of dread came over me. There were two other Dunkin Donuts locations in Grand Rapids and could it be possible they were closed as well? At this point I decided I must find out what happened to those other locations or if it’s possible my Dunkin Donuts might be coming back.

On my way to another destination I stopped at the West 28th Street Dunkin Donuts location to see if they were still open. What I saw my feeble mind still hasn’t fully comprehended.

Dunkin Donuts is now called “Honeydip Donuts”.

All the Dunkin branding is gone but at least they were still selling donuts so I went in there to do some data mining. There was a nice young lady working and I asked her what happened to my Dunkin the Eastern most Dunkin on 28th Street. It appears the same guy owned all three locations but he didn’t own the properly on the East location so they closed it. The Dunkin location on 28th between Kalamazoo and Eastern is also still open but now also a Honeydip.

It seems they were running into franchising issues with Dunkin Donuts and decided to proceed without them.

Dunkin Donuts is now called “Honeydip Donuts” and Baskin Robbins is now named “Kaleidoscoops”. The donuts appear to be the same donuts Dunkin Donuts used to sell but the coffee is a different brand. Donuts and coffee are offered at the same prices for single and combos but buying take home bagged coffee is much cheaper. The coffee in my opinion is also not even close to as good as the Dunkin coffee and not worth the same asking price. The ice cream seems to be also a different brand then Baskin sells.

After doing some browsing it looks like there are Franchising Opportunities “Brewing” now in Grand Rapids to open new Dunkin Donuts so hopefully somebody will open a new one on my way to work. Honeydip is still a quality stop. I’ve been going to those locations for years and they always have nice people working there but beware the coffee is not worth a special trip.

Right now vanlandw.com is registered though Hostway and it just cost $12.95 to renew for another year? When I got this domain it was $7.99.

Just curious…

What a dope.

Checking ones Google Web History can be quite eye opening.

Top Query: yahoo fantasy football

Top Site:  en.wikipedia.org

Rather then braving the department stores battling the crazies everybody should just go to Saugatuck. Take a walk, get some coffee, and loaf around. This mug was $6 dollars and was something I’ve been meaning to buy for practically years.

Quick edit I did this evening. The original is here and it was pulled from a PDF file I got from work. For some reason looking at this girl reminded me of Vivi so I wanted to do something with it and not make her happy. She is much more interesting with a little worry on her face.