Holiday cheer has come to my beloved Interactive Department here at work in the form of a $16 Christmas tree from Walmart. Mix with left-over lights and a bevy of plushie animals, and you have the makings of mirth in tree form.

In other news, I made beer yesterday evening. I have had this
Brewer’s Best Steam-Style beer kit since last fall, and just now got around to making it with a little help from Winemakers & Beermakers Supply on Westport Road. Nice, helpful folks they are!

On a side note, Thanksgiving was also very nice. We house-hopped between Indiana and Kentucky and had a good time all around. The holidays are starting off well this year.

Behold! They grilled out at lunch-time and it was good

Also, behold the lunch-time grillout gallery.

Charlie, Geoff and I did a little geocaching today at lunch with much better results than yesterday.

We hit 3 for 3 today. First up was Turn Where ? Was: Sams Club — the first in a Louisville-themed collection of caches where you are guided by the age-old method of “Do you remember where (some long-gone landmark USED to be) was?”. For example, the old White Castle on Bardstown Road, Shillito’s, The Sams Club… etc. The second was Camo 826 in the heart of the industrial park. The last was Charley the Cat, next to J-Town’s Little League park, Skyview. Down by the train track where the cache was, I think we may have interrupted a pair of locals in some sort of naughty business as when we approached they high-tailed it out of there blanket in hand. Charlie took some very nice photos indeed, and you can check them out in my geocaching gallery

Charlie and I hit some geocaches today during our lunch break! Turns out there are quite a few within walking distance from our workplace, and two of them were right across the street on Papa John’s beautiful coroporate campus. We didn’t find the first (titled “Better Pizza 2”), but we did find the second (titled “Papa’s Paradise”). A nice little jaunt on a not-so-hot day.

Geocaching is a pseudo-sport where people hide little treasures called “caches”, record their longitude and latitude with the help of GPS receiver, and then using the Geocaching website, they list their new cache for all to see. Prospective geocachers go to the site, search for local caches, get the longitude and latitude and then commence to searching. Some caches are tiny film canisters (like the ones we found today) some are coffee cans, some are for swapping old ties. Write your name in the log and move on!

Brand new, just for you. I have been working on this redesign for longer than I care to mention (most of that time being me fiddling with the portfolio section.

The new design is intended to be very clean, and very easy to redesign, as it is completely controlled via CSS. Long explanation short, Cascading Style Sheets are a way to “style” HTML from a central point, and you can control a LOT of stuff, including font size, line spacing, block positioning, colors, overlapping, nerd nerd, nerd nerd nerd, nerd. In any case, to give you an idea of the “power of CSS”, I suggest you take a look at CSS Zen Garden, which is a showcase of a single HTML page, but with different style sheets submitted by different people. Each stylesheet radically redesigns the HTML, but keeps the content the same.

In any case, I hope you enjoy the new design, and let me know what you think!

i just realized that we moved into this house one year ago last week (or so). so far, this home ownership thing isn’t too bad. it’s quite liberating, as you might imagine. no upstairs or downstairs neighbors, and more room. i enjoy room. not just room for stuff, but room to move.

whilst on the home-ownership note, i’ll note that kelly and i just sealed the driveway. it was ridiculously easy, and quite fun. the driveway sealer is like this liquid rubbering stuff that makes amusing noises when you push it around the driveway. it was fun. thpppbt! now our driveway is black black.

Many of you may not know about the band Ween, but I think that there song “Where’d the Cheese Go?” might either sum them up, or perhaps give you a good introduction. You see, it was created for Pizza Hut‘s “The Insider” ad campaign, but rejected.

Ween was introduced to me by David Gruneisen, and after listening to the varied tracks he had on his MP3 share at Corvus, I came to appreciate their oddity.

Hey mister, won’t you please help my pony?

special thanks to Geoff for pointing this out!

The Andy Gallery has been updated with a few before-birth photos, and a bunch of post-birth photos (you thought I was going to say afterbirth, but I didn’t).

I’ve also uploaded a shot of my new desk and surroundings.

Well, as many of you know, I’m leaving my job here at Corvus at the end of the week. That also means that the server on which thelocust[dot]org rests is also leaving Corvus! But never fear, I have entrusted in RackShack.net to provide me a dedicated rack server and have already started moving over content! Anywho, more later…