Summer is here. It’s not quite as exciting when you’re not in college anymore. Unless you become a teacher or professor, you can say goodbye to three month summer vacations after you graduate. Once you get into the real world, summer just means the sun is still out when you leave work, and you can wear shorts if your workplace is casual.

There is one thing that doesn’t change after college though. In fact, no matter what stage of life you’re in, the sun seems to put everyone in a better mood.

The sunny weather finally got to me last week. I bought a grill and threw a barbecue over the weekend. The sun must have gotten to my friends too, because a bunch of them showed up. We enjoyed lots of food, music, drinks, and fun.

We were having so much fun that a couple of our neighbors came over to see what was going on. They’re both college students and just moved into one of the units in our complex. Talking to them about their summer jobs and internships made me feel like a young lad again and, of course, reminded me of what it was like when summer still meant vacation.

Because this first barbecue turned out to be such a success, a few of my friends mentioned making it a weekly event. The crazy thing is that it sounded like a good idea to me, and it still does now. I think my new goal for this summer is to throw as many barbecues as possible.

What are you doing this summer?

A few days ago, I attended my second tweetup, and it was awesome. I got to meet some fellow Gen Y bloggers and entrepreneurs who live around (or happened to be visiting) the Bay Area. With Jenny Blake and Jamie Varon organizing the meetup, it was a given that there would be cupcakes involved, and there were plenty.

The cupcakes were great, but my favorite part was getting to meet some of the people that I’ve only talked to online. As a member of the 20 Something Bloggers and Brazen Careerist communities, I got to meet a few people that I’ve only interacted with through email, blog comments, Twitter, etc. In return, they got to see proof that Broke Grad really does exist even though he blogs anonymously.

Here’s a roundup of some of the cool people I met at the tweetup, complete with links to their sites. If you were there but aren’t on the list, please don’t be offended. It doesn’t mean that you’re not cool. It means that I either didn’t talk to you, never got your name, forgot your name, or know your name but can’t any traces of you on the internet.

• @jenny_blake | Life After College
• @jamievaron | Intersected
• @junloayza | Jun Loayza
• @yukai_chou | Yu-kai Chou
• @irinai | Nine to Done
• @katerishka | The Social Petri Dish
• @charlesju | Charles Ju
• @smj10j | Another Johnson
• @Ashleymittman and @jennysf | The Mad Grad
• @spychresearch | Spych Research
• @morganives | The Wrong End of a Telescope

I had a great time meeting everyone and look forward to the next tweetup. If these tweetups keep growing at this rate, I think we might need name tags next time or maybe cupcakes with our names of them.

The 100 Things About Me meme has been around the blogosphere for years, but I’ve never done it. Why? I’m not convinced there are 100 things that you’d want to know about me or that I’d want you to know about me. Instead, I’m shortening it to something more reasonable — 10 Things About Me.

1. I’m a huge fan of the weird and unusual.

2. I usually get 5 or 6 hours of sleep and have a habit of staying up late to get work done.

3. I start things I never finish.

4. I’ve compared money to sex.

5. I really hate cash.

6. Everything I need to know I learned after college.

7. I got laser eye surgery.

8. I never give money to homeless people.

9. I’ve done a midnight hike to the top of Half Dome.

10. I got over 100 people to share their deepest, darkest financial secrets for a chance to win a notebook PC.

Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend. Even though I’m (slightly) too old to hunt for Easter eggs these days, I didn’t let that stop me from finding other fun activities for the weekend. In fact, I managed to do something I had never done before. I went to a (mini) tweetup.

Thanks to the power of Twitter, I met up with @jenny_blake, @jamievaron, and @smj10j for some cupcakes on Saturday afternoon. The cupcakes were awesome, but the people were even more awesome.

With over 2000 comments on this blog and the seemingly countless number of blogs I read on a daily basis, I’ve become friends with a lot of people in the online world, which is cool, but occasionally, it’s still nice to meet people in real life. Guess what? Now I’ve met approximately 0.001% of the people that have visited this blog.

In case you didn’t know, Jenny Blake and Jamie Varon have blogs of their own, and they rock. Jenny Blake writes all about Life After College and provides great tips and advice for handling the challenges of entering the real world after college. Jamie Varon has been all over the news lately for her brilliant idea — Twitter Should Hire Me. If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely check it out.

Finally, here are some of my favorite articles from the past few weeks.

• College Money Tip: Get Saving at Poorer Than You
• Student Discounts: Finding Good Deals at Green Panda Treehouse
• Schools Should Teach Personal Finance at This Writer’s Wallet
• 3 Things I Learned From My 2009 Tax Refund at Financial Nut
• The Pursuit of Free e-Filing: Doing Taxes Last Minute! at Spilling Buckets
• Motivated by Achievement: a Blessing and a Curse at Life After College
• Why I Followed My Passion and Why You Should Too at Shatterboxx

Follow me on Twitter and maybe I’ll see you at a tweetup someday.

Attention readers: Today we’ll be taking a small detour from the world of personal finance to talk about stuff that has nothing to do with it at all. Why? Because I feel like it. Also, because I think you’ll find it interesting.

Wordle

After discovering a cool site called Wordle through Life After College, I decided to try it out for myself. Wordle is an online application that generates “word clouds” from text that you provide. Words that appear more frequently are displayed more prominently in the cloud, which is cool, but what really makes Wordle awesome is the ability to tweak and customize the font, layout, and color scheme of your artwork until you get something that you like.

Once you’re finished creating your masterpiece, the image is yours to do whatever you please with it. You can save it, print it out, delete it, share it with your friends, throw it away, or post it on your blog for all of your readers to see. Here’s one that I made using my blog feed for the text.

GenderAnalyzer

Have you ever wondered whether the blogger behind a blog is a man or a woman? Well, there’s a tool to help you figure it out. GenderAnalyzer uses artificial intelligence to make an educated guess on whether a web page is written by a woman or a man. Since I blog anonymously, new readers occasionally ask whether they should refer to me as a he or a she. I already know the answer, but let’s put GenderAnalyzer to the test.

Oh, so close! They were only one gender away from the correct answer. To be fair, I tried a few other pages from my site, and it got some of them correct. I guess my writing really is “quite gender neutral.” Try it out for yourself and share your results.