Brian Alvey

Spamalot is amazing. Niki and I saw it a few nights ago and it was a mix of Monty Python lines everyone knows by heart and some crazy new musical stuff just for Broadway.

Afterwards we met Hank Azaria and David Hyde Pierce. Everyone else was all like “I loved you on Frasier”, but I played it cool and told him “you were awesome as Slim in A Bug’s Life.” That must have really impressed him because he gave me his email address. He’s my new best friend now. Sorry, Darby!

Ten years ago today, my aunt Nanette suggested that her friend Niki send me an email and flirt with me. We were both in dead-end relationships and she thought we’d get along great. We had the same birthday. We had similar senses of humor. We both loved Nanette.

It was a great idea. We’ve been married seven and a half years. We’re moving to our second house together. We’re on our third car. We’ve survived a world of pregnancy problems. We’ve lost one dog and gained two more. We have two fantastic sons. We’re closer than ever.

And we still love Nanette.

Thanks, Nanette!

This is a great week. Every month our growing Weblogs, Inc. and Blogsmith teams converge at a hotel in New York for a few days and we work together around the clock to advance the platform, eat sushi, whiteboard, eat Candlelight, code, code, eat sushi and write more code. These trips have been described as “like prison, but without all that crazy sunlight, exercise and human interaction”, “an endurance test that leaves me broken and passed out for a full day when I get home” and “the last nail in the coffin of my relationship with my girlfriend.”

It’s magical.

It’s great news for our bloggers. Next week they’ll have a bunch of new features and many old ones will be working more smoothly.

The interesting thing is that it’s not much different from how we work when we’re not together. Everyone has iPod headphones in their ears. Everyone is staring at their own laptop. Almost all conversation is over IM.

Did I mention that it’s magical?

We went to Florida for Thanksgiving and Niki visited relatives with the boys while I worked with Gavin on Blogsmith, getting it ready for Weblogs, Inc. It was a pretty good trip at the beginning. I got Gavin a PowerBook and he immediately fixed a bunch of things that didn’t work in Safari. The last two days of the trip everyone was sick with fevers except for me and we didn’t know if we’d be heading for home on our scheduled flight.

We came home to LaGuardia as planned, got our bags and headed to the parking lot where our car was waiting for us. The side of the driver’s headlight had some rubber hanging down and there were dents in the side panel like it had been hit, but the angle was strange. It was hard to imagine someone pulling out of the space next to us and messing up our car like that. Niki walked around the front of the car to the other side and informed me that our entire passenger-side headlight was gone.

These aren’t small headlights. They also aren’t expensive. Someone thought they were these hi-intensity expensive bulbs. It must have been a two-man job and when one got the first headlight off, he must have let the other guy know that they had screwed up. So they cut some wires and left a giant hole in our car. You could see down into the engine and watch the fans spin while Niki and the boys huddled in the car to escape the New York chill we had returned to.

I filled out reports. LaGuardia was kind enough to give us a break on our parking bill since they let our car get vandalized. The whole ride home I had that Wallflowers song running through my mind and that song always takes me back to a roadtrip my sister and I made in North Carolina a lifetime ago.

Come on try a little. Nothing is forever.
There’s got to be something better than in the middle.
But me & Cinderella, we put it all together.
We can drive it home with one headlight.

Yesterday morning I called Jack to let him know that his little brother Victor was no longer inside mommy. At 9 pounds, he was nearly 50% larger than Jack and his delivery took only half the time. I think they call that Moore’s Law of Birthing. If we have another child, I am expecting that he or she will be a 12 pound baby delivered after only 2 hours of labor and 20 minutes of intense pushing.

Niki was amazing.

When Niki gave birth to Jack, I helped coach her breathing and held one of her legs. After they took Jack away, I took a step back (out of striking distance) and told her, “I don’t know if I could go through that again. That was rough!”

So this time, after they took Victor away, I leaned over and said, “Do you remember how last time I said I didn’t think I could do this again? Well, I did it!”

I’m sure she’s proud of me too.

Two days after Live8, there are a few songs I can’t get out of my head. Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor”, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and The Black Eyed Peas covering “Get Up, Stand Up” with a couple special guests. When they announced who was joining them, I missed the woman’s name and only heard them say Stephen Marley (son of Bob) was joining them. The performance was fantastic and is still ringing in my ears.

Today when I was looking over some of the coverage of Live8 Philly, I found out that the woman was Rita Marley, Bob Marley’s wife. Wow. She converted to Rastafari before he did and was a backup singer in The Wailers. She was also shot in the head in the famous pre-election attack on their home that kept them from playing a free concert to support the Jamaican prime minister. I wish I had heard them more clearly two days ago. What an incredible person to have join you on stage for a Bob Marley song!

This post originally appeared on Weblogs, Inc.’s Live8 Insider blog.

When we were walking back to our camp from the back of the library, we spied Don Cheadle heading to the back of the stage. Maybe he’s announcing some artist or making a short speech.

As I was getting my picture taken with him, I told him that my wife gets tired of hearing me talk about how talented I think he is. “Hey, that movie has Don Cheadle. He’s such a great actor. Have you ever seen a better performance on television than Don Cheadle on ER? Hey, this other movie has Don Cheadle. He’s amazing. Let’s go see that one too. Have I told you what a great actor Don Cheadle is?”

Somebody owes me big time for taking this picture on the worst possible resolution. I could draw a better picture of Don and me. I might have to track him down again…

This post originally appeared on Weblogs, Inc.’s Live8 Insider blog.

I was lucky enough to see them do Survivor in Denver at the NBA all-star game and this was even more amazing. They did Survivor today. Then they did Say My Name and during that song the big screen behind them was showing the names of all of the people who signed up for Live8’s online petition. They closed with Girl from 2004’s Destiny Fulfilled.

This post originally appeared on Weblogs, Inc.’s Live8 Insider blog.

Over on Engadget Spanish, I noticed that our bloggers were letting their audience know that we’re still in beta and we’re working out some language-related kinks. Specifically, I’m making some changes to the platform so characters with accents don’t get eaten in title fields. One quick fix I made for the Spanish team broke the form for the Chinese team. Fun stuff.

One of our commenters thought that we were using some kind of automated translation software instead of humans — primarily because of the missing accented characters. So I thought I’d ask Altavista’s Babel Fish Translation to tell me what our Spanish blogger wrote:

Without tildes nor enies?
Before nothing, thousand excuses by that so horrible title. But indeed that is what we want to clarify… Why the titles of the new Engadget in Spanish do not have tíldes nor eñes? Then good, as they can see, this is the beta version of Engadget, so we are working hard to obtain a final version next. Our thousands of programmers (thousands, hehe) is adapting software so that it has supported other languages to the 100%, but that taking time. Other whatever still exist “bugs” in the system, and also many thousands translations that are not of manjares, but the equipment of Engadget in Spanish is working strongly so that our site is of the same quality that the original Engadget. We appreciated its commentaries and suggestions, so they do not let write to us.