I was the 61st member of PayPerPost when I joined 3 years ago. You can imagine that over the 3 years Ted, myself and PayPerPost (now IZEA) have been through so many interesting experiences. While I’m not nearly as active in IZEA now, I still follow them and am interested in what their doing. Ted’s one of the most creative people I know so it will be interesting to see what Ted does with his blog and if he’ll have the time to do much.

I must admit that I think the best part of the night was hearing Katrina Leshan play a bunch of songs that she wrote herself. My friend from work and I guessed how old she was and just couldn’t believe it when we found out she was 17. She’d written something like 3 songs just this week. One of which she just wrote today and played for us. Talk about some amazing talent. You can check her and her music out on Katrina Leshan’s myspace page. One day when she’s a famous singer you can say you heard about her first here.

My favorite song she sang was the first one she sang that I think she called “Chances.” Once she puts it on YouTube I’ll post it on my blog. I wish that I could have heard it again. I think one of the future Guitar Society of Las Vegas gigs I’ll have to get a babysitter and take my wife to enjoy some nice guitar.

Katrina Leshan also sang a modified version of a song she calls “…you and we should totally go bowling and eat some suuuuuuuper cheesy nachos (AKA See You) (AKA The Song I Wrote For Brandon Walsvick)” Here’s a rather poorly recorded video of the song on YouTube. Much better in person, but still amazing to watch this video and think that she’s only 17.

All in all, a nice way to spend a Saturday evening with good company and good music.

This year, it looks like Justin.tv is going to save us with the EuroSport Live stream of the Tour de France. I love that it also archives the race so that if you aren’t there live you can watch the race after the fact too. Granted, you have to put up with the english commentary, but essentially that’s what Versus has with Phil Ligget too. I actually prefer the english commentary since it’s a quite refreshing perspective.

I am just a little bummed about even watching this year’s Tour de France since they kicked off Levi Leipheimer and Alberto Contador and their entire team. Just doesn’t seem right. However, I’m sure I won’t worry too much once I see a crazy sprint or a tough mountain stage. I’m just a little sad that there are only 4 Americans participating. That’s really unfortunate that there’s so few.

Well, my brother doesn’t need to look any farther. Turns out there is a service that will do this for you. I also love that it has an RSS feed of it too. Might as well get my scripture reading done with my other feed reading. The only challenge there is that I’ve been letting my feed reading go by the way side lately. So, maybe I should stick to email.

The worst part of it all is that MySpace is still going to be around for a long time to come. In fact, last I checked it was still growing quite rapidly. MySpace is to social networking what AOL was to dial up. We’re getting really close to the end of AOL, but I’m afraid that we may not see the end of MySpace. Let’s just hope I can keep my children away from it.

Congratulations Facebook.

Today I started playing with HotPads and I’m really impressed with their interface. Maybe I’m just more interested because I’ve started the job search and associated housing search that goes along with a new job in a new city. Regardless, I found HotPads really nice to use. I can still see a few parts of it that could be improved, but I love how quickly I can go through the map and see how much house I’ll be able to get for the price. I also really love the deep integration with what that size of mortgage will really cost me. There are so many variables involved and I think HotPads does a great job allowing you to change all of the various mortgage costs associated with purchasing a home.

A relatively new part of the site is a Rent vs. Buy heat map. I’m pretty sure this is just a really nice marketing item to get people to use the other parts of their site. Well, it worked for me. However, you can tell that the principle of rent vs. buy is more than just a marketing ploy for the company. This type of analysis is shown throughout the site to allow people to make more informed decisions.

I think that I especially love this part of the site, because when I moved to Las Vegas 3 years ago my in-laws nearly ridiculed my wife and I because we chose to rent and not buy. They said we were just throwing money away. Well, 3 years later that same in-law ended up selling their house at loss after paying much larger mortgage payments than our rent payments. Plus, if we had bought a house in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t be able to switch jobs, because I’d never be able to sell my house.

At the time I had no way of explaining these rather complicated rent vs. buy economic models to my in-laws. Now, I could just show them the nifty chart on HotPads. Sure, it’s based on certain assumptions about the market and inflation, but at least you can navigate best and worst case scenarios and make an informed decision.

I’ll let you know how it all goes once I finally land a new job (yes, I’m searching so if you know of any let me know) and try to find a house on HotPads. Right now it’s great visually. It will be fun to see how accurate and updated it is.

Of course, this all comes a day after Michael Arrington declared on Twitter that Facebook was loading faster than ever. I actually tried it myself when I saw the tweet and he was right. Facebook was zippy last night. Too bad tonight they decided to follow the twitter model and declare that “It should be available again within a few hours.” Nice of Facebook to leave it vague so that it can be down more than a few hours.

Seriously? Did Facebook actually post on their website that I have to wait a few hours for my Facebook addiction? Seems like Facebook might want to recruit a few more Google engineers that can find a way to recover/update in less then a few hours.

Today I found something I want to try called Vyew. It’s an ad supported site with a premium service for those that don’t want the ads. I haven’t tried it yet, but soon I want to give it a whirl. I think that I might do it with the great group of people that have been working on my Spoil On website. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you know of any other sites that are similar or better, then let me know.

While I don’t usually admit this type of thing in public, I’m definitely a crier. My mom’s side of the family is happy to take the blame, but I’ll be completely honest that I’m not afraid to cry when something touches me. No, I wasn’t crying today for this departed VP. I didn’t know her that well, but I did appreciate the great food they had at the party. However, I did cry today reading this incredible sports story.