Of course, if my Photoshopping skillz were better, the above movie poster would have been modified with our faces.  As such, I am entrusting you, dear reader, to use your fantastic imagination and help me out.  I want you to envision a perfectly inserted crop of Adam’s face for the bearded guy holding the baby (cringe if you must), Ren as the guy in the back, and put in me with my missing tooth holding some ice.  While you’re at it, also visualize that I expertly removed the extraneous “the” from inside the letter O.

See, if I was better at Photoshop (or gimp in my case), then I could’ve done all those changes in the time it took for me to describe the changes to you.

If you’re really good at this whole creativity exercise, go ahead and put in Poppy‘s face for the baby in the picture.

Why?

Well, if you MUST know, she’s the winner from my last post!  I went through and counted twelve (12) valid entries for people wishing us luck on our trip, then put those names in a list in excel numbered 1-12, and used random.org’s widget on the front page to determine a winner (#4).

See how her face would be perfect for that cover?

As for #VegasBB, we had a great time.  I met some fun folks and widened my blogging horizons a little. 

Many super sets of immense thanktitude to the hosts and all the people who helped put it on – Erin (@Queenofspain) & Megan (@undomesticdiva) in particular.  The drinks never ran dry, the @Vdog snorts never stopped, the laughter never died down and most importantly, the blackmail video never stopped rolling. 

Oh yes, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to retire on the digitial arsenal I captured. 

Let the bidding begin.

We both have our birthdays this month, and why not celebrate by going to Vegas?  As I mentioned before, it seems a lot of other people have the same idea.   Our first road trip was TequilaCon 2009, where we actually did a ROAD trip (as in, we drove).  This time, we’re taking a flight.  And, I just realized, we’re not renting a car there.  So actually we’ll have very little going on in terms of roads but I don’t think that matters much in the spirit of things.

The whole “VegasBB” (Vegas Birthday Bash or Vegas Blogger Birthday Bash) thing is doubly cool because we’re all Sagittarius!  Sagittarians are very lucky, of course.  However, I’m not going to hog all the luck to myself.  I’m deciding to share the luck with you.

That’s why I’m giving away something.  TO ONE OF YOU!  For mostly nothing.  All you gotta do is leave a comment for me or Ren on this blog post, wishing us luck, by Monday night, 7pm Central Time (12/14/2009), and you get a chance to win something. 

What can you win?  Well I happen to have an extra copy of BioWare’s Mass Effect for the XBOX 360, brand new & still sealed.

I realize that many of you might not even have an XBOX 360, but hey, it can make for a Christmas gift for someone you know that does.  Or you could sell it on eBay.  I don’t care. 

Rules:

• While you are free to leave multiple comments wishing us luck (we can take all the luck we can get!), each person only gets one entry into the contest.
• You need to leave a valid email address in the comment form (not in the comment itself, of course).
• I’m not selling anything or driving up traffic for any reason, so tweets or subscribing to blogs or other things like that do not get extra entries. 
• I’ll use one of them thar randomizer thingies to determine the winner.
• Only comments received before 7pm central on 12/14/2009 are in the running.

Watch us on Twitter (hashtag #VegasBB) for all our exploits and winnings!

Ren and I are going to Vegas for our birthdays this December. 

If I had the time and inclination, I’d photoshop our faces into this apropos movie poster.  I’m still trying to figure out which of us would be which actor. 

Both of us have birthdays in December, and we were chatting it up during pool league how we need to do another road trip. You know, like our TequilaCon 2009 road trip where we took video but I never made a DITL, er I mean RITL (Roadtrip In The Life) for it?  *THAT* kind of road trip.

Then it hit us that we should go to Vegas. 

Turns out there’s already a big blogger birthday bash going on during my actual birthday (Saturday the 12th), and there are a million or so bloggers going.  So after comparing flights, holiday vacation travel for the Halls (what I like to call Hall-iday travel), vacation time from work and hotel options, we made our plans.

Friday the 11th to Monday the 14th.   Join us!

What makes the accommodations especially cool is my RCI membership – we snagged an entire week at a resort for pretty cheap.  We’re not staying the whole week, but it ended up being cheaper than a hotel would have cost per night during the days we’ll be there, AND we get a full kitchen.

The blogger bash is going on at Planet Hollywood and place we chose to stay at is just a couple blocks from there.  Ren’s not on Facebook, but so far out of the 40+ people confirmed attending, I only recognize two faces, and one of them is mine.

So I will finally be able to meet Adam. 

I wonder.  Is the blogosphere ready for us to meet?

Here’s the official (is it official? it LOOKS official) link and picture that includes the obligatory Elvis, coming from the folks I’ve never heard of at Room 704.  All I know about them is that they are women and drinking is somehow involved.  What more can you ask for?

So, I did that, and here are my comments / questions so far:

• I thought it would give me a simple graphic to host on my blog, but it actually generates a bunch of links and image tags that go to Amazon’s system.  That means that when you go to a blog with a twitter mosaic, it’s actually pulling images from Amazon’s S3 service.  That’s both weird and cool – weird that I need to depend on an outside system to be working for my blog to function; and cool because it reduces the load from my server.
• I couldn’t find out the logic behind the order – is it using the number of @replies?  Does it count how many tweets that person does?  Is it taking into account any “favorites”?  Is it anything but random?  Maybe it’s the order in which you followed people or the other way around… 
• Evidently you can make the mosaic from followers or friends, so I guess you can rate your level of narcisism. 
• This reminded me, but only a little, of the wordles I made from all my tweets.  I feel like doing that again for some reason, but for some other reason I won’t.

Without further ado, here’s my twitter mosaic:

This was fun!

Ok, in case you actually wanted to see my real twitter mosaic, here it is.  I had to delete some of them because they were, how shall I say… too graphic?  One of them was a not-so-flattering snapshot of Britney Spears.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Really?  That’s weird.  And kinda scary.  I mean, for quirkiness, that takes the cake.  You sure you want to be around here?

Ren and I are traveling to TequilaCon 2009 today – driving from Austin, TX to Santa Fe, NM.  It’s been a fun trip so far – you can read a little more about it with some graphic candy over at his post (warning to people who don’t like pictures of feet).  For now, I’ll give you a shot of some random convertible.

You can follow along with us on the trip in the following ways:

• Follow me and/or Ren on Twitter.  You can see progress of our trip in <140 characters at a time.  Each of us also keep our latest tweets in our blog sidebars.
• Follow me on utterli.  We may or may not be uttering our progress with audio clips that are sure to be unique.  Just like all my other utterz.  Utterz is another thing you can see in my sidebar.
• Follow my blackberry’s location on the earth with Google Latitude.  I’ll call you big brother and give you a big hug, which will be captured on camera, analyzed, sorted, catalogued, reviewed for terrorism and then promptly forgotten.  My google address is the letter j plus wayne at gmail.com.

So on to the etiquette question.

Do you wear your own blog shirt to a blogger meet-up?

I know.  A little creepy, isn’t it?   I’ll tell you right now, that’s my intention.

Follow-up question

How about wearing someone ELSE’S blog shirt to a blogger meet-up?

If you could answer by tomorrow at 8pm Mountain time, that’d be great.  ”Yeah, I’m gonna need you to answer that by Saturday, mkay?”