went to go eat lunch with geoff today at the tasty Thai Smile 4, and not only did he pick me up — he gave me a copy of Creative Computing‘s Best of, Volume 3 (yes, the link points to volume 1) signed by David Ahl (of Hunt the Wumpus fame).

The articles within predate my being by about a year or so, and foretell with sometimes great accuracy the future of many things we take for granted (electronic funds transfer, video-discs). Really cool stuff :)

Anyway — thanks a bunch Geoff, I owes ya.

so, jackson gave me a copy of Ken Layne‘s dot.con for Christmas (he caught me off guard with his charity!). Anyway… I started reading it last night. It’s pretty good so far. It reads quickly, and though I’m hardly one to judge good writing, as the books I’ve read could easily fit into a printer-paper box, and the writing is fast-paced if a bit overladen with odd detail.

This is just crazy, really. Me. Reading. Yes, yes! Crazy indeed. Thank you, Jackson. Thank you, Tolkein. Thank you, words.

well, i had a great christmas day — for the first time in a long time, Kelly and I stayed home on Christmas day. I cooked a my “summery melange” of a vegetable soup, a turkey — something I will probably not do again — and Kelly cooked a rice salad, stuffing, and baked a pie. Our parents and friends dropped by and stayed a while.

Ronen and Jackson stopped by — and actually gave me gifts! Ronen gave me the “Jump the Shark” book, and Jackson gave me Ken Layne’s dot.con, both of which I am excited to read-through. Truly, I didn’t expect either of them to come bearing gifts, and I truly appreciate the gesture.

I also got my Hebron t-shirt back from one of Kelly’s friends, whose house she had left it at years ago (almost 4, i think). It’s a terribly comfy shirt, and now it smells all purdy thanks to the women-folk who wore it :).

Sara was over as well, as well as Matt (Chanda), and Sara gave Ronen a remote-control rock climber, which we marvelled and struggled with with great aplomb. Chanda brought along some Shiner Bock and Hefeweizen beer from Texas, which was smooth and tasty!

Joe showed up for a little bit, though his Christmas was less pleasant that others for reasons I won’t discuss here. Our thoughts are with you, Joe.

So to all that came, thanks!

i received an email from Sara Alcorn from the Boyd County GSA (or at least I assume that she is from the GSA) saying thanks to me for a post I did about a month ago (“boyd county is queer“). Here it is in its entirety (sans headers):

Hello,

Sarah Alcorn, Junior co-starter of the (currently disbanded) Boyd County HS
GSA

For those of you who DON’T recognize Fred Phelp’s name — I think his website spells it out pretty quickly. Oh, as it turns out god hates fred phelps.

Hmm… makes me wonder what I’m doing on the 12th and 13th of January. Now where the hell IS Boyd County?

Anyway — to the now-defunct Boyd County GSA — an un-precedented THREE punk-rocks and a HELL YEAH!

almost a week and nothing new — well, suffice it to say that work has been pretty busy for me this week, but i’m sure that is little recompense to my throngs of adoring public. for this, i offer you pictures of our cats around christmas. also included are pictures of our house around christmas. not to be forgotten are the pictures of our friends at the annual christmas party.

i’ve added an “icy” color theme, which you may select by choosing your “theme” down on the right-nav panel. check it out. i like it a lot.

i learned today during a whole-company meeting that our receptionist, Michael, had succumbed to cancer. He had been undergoing chemotherapy for quite some time, and was even at work on Friday (the 13th). He passed away early Saturday or Sunday morning. Michael was one of the nicest, most-hardworking (as his stint on Friday showed) people that I’d ever met. Now, he and I probably had no more than a couple of sentences worth of conversation in my 2.5 years here, but he still remembered my name, and we greeted each other by name.

Michael, even though you were a small part of my life, your absence has made an indelible mark.

I just finished the page and documentation for snow2.js, a little javascript toy that makes explosive snow rain down upon your page!

translation: “the blinkenlights have returned to the little white box”. after being told Monday i had an appointment with Insight on Saturday morning, Kelly and I returned from the gym on Tuesday to be informed that they’d been to the house, and no one was home. So I called — exasperated — and told them that I’d take off work just to get them out there when they’d said they would be to fix my problem. Well, that day was today — and what pray-tell did they fix? Well, they took the trap off the line that they had installed to untrap HBO. Now HBO works great, the digital cable guide works great, and my cable modem is purring away like a little robotic kitten. Oh — the trap is in a user-accessible part of the NIU (Netowrk Interface Unit), and I could very well have done this myself. Oh well. Happy days.

note well the “snow” control on the nav bar up top. much like a CD player, or tape player of-old, you can hit “pause” to pause the snow, or the “>” (play) button to start/stop the snow all together (stopping the snow removes it from view).

And in other news, the big-ol project I had a good hand in developing went live yesterday – yay!

also, kelly got out of bed last night and came tromping down the stairs looking for some of her old tapes. “tapes of what?” you may ask. tapes of Yanni. yes, THAT Yanni. The mustachioed Yanni. You see, at one time, Kelly was a promising young pianist at YPAS, and enjoyed the soothing melodies of Yanni. Yawni. Yaaaaawni. Oh well, somethings can’t be helped. She’s still pretty to look at, but her cool factor is in a bit of a recession :)