Category: Life

I just thought I’d mention that today is my birthday. I’m 29 today. If you forgot all about it and you’re feeling guilty for not getting my anything, there’s a link to my Amazon wishlist in the bar on the right side of this page. Actually, even if you’re a complete stranger and don’t care whether it’s my birthday or not, the link is still there…

Cory Doctrow, who also runs the Boing Boing weblog, has just released his second book – Eastern Standard Tribe. I haven’t finished reading his first book (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) yet, but I will say that I like what I’ve read so far.

Not only are Cory’s books available to buy in stores, he has also released them for free download from his website. Although this seems like it would be economic suicide for an author, he has in fact been selling books “hand over fist”.

Cory has also written a page called What’s this site?, where he explains his reasons for releasing his books for free. This page and the discussion that follows provide a great insight into the mind of an author who really “gets it” when it comes to modern distribution of artistic work.

As always, here’s a nice quote to convince you that you really should go read this now:

There are 70 million Americans engaged in file-sharing today, violating a copyright law that hasn’t kept pace with technology… No author is going to turn those downloaders into customers by calling them thieves. By contrast, the author who figures out how to capitalize on that activity will find himself sitting pretty

It will be interesting to see how that quote holds up 5-10 years from now…

All of the picture galleries are working again. It took a little longer than I would’ve liked to get everything moved over, but it’s finally done. While I was moving files around, I found some great pictures that somehow never got posted.

Here’s Sam playing with some ribbons:

And here he is napping on the back of our old couch:

That should give you an idea of how old these pictures are, we got rid of that couch months ago.

I also have a few more good pictures of me and Max that I’ll post in the next few days.

Today is what most of us call “Chinese New Year”, even though I think several other Asian countries celebrate it as well. The year is now 4701, the year of the monkey, according to the Chinese calendar. In honor of the new year I’m going to prepare a Chinese feast for us this evening.

According to the stats on our webserver, people still come to our site looking for War Wonton Soup. I’ve even had a few people leave comments asking for the recipe. So, as my new years gift to everyone, I’ll post the recipe sometime tomorrow. In addition to the soup, we’re going to have home-made egg rolls and at least one kind of stir fry depending on what looks good at the store.

If you’re reading this, then you’re looking at our site at DreamHost. I still don’t have all of the other pages working yet, but they’ll be back soon.

I thought I’d share a few interesting sites that I stumbled across today.

First, Jeffrey Zeldman mentioned a site called Fontifier. Basically, it turns your handwriting into a font that you can use on your computer. You’ll be able to print something from a word proccessing program that looks like it was written by hand. Very cool.

Metafilter had a link for Steal it Back – police auctions on line. They describe it as eBay meets an episode of “Cops”. I think that’s pretty close. I’m still looking for my bike that got stolen back in elementary school…

If you have anything to do in 2003, you’d better hurry up and get it done. I thought I’d make one more post to finish off this year.

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. Unless you don’t celebrate Christmas, in which case I hope you had a Merry whatever it is you celebrate, or at least a happy Thursday…

We had a great time this year visiting everyone and exchanging gifts. And I’m really looking forward to the new year. I know lots of great things are coming up for us in 2004.

I’ll wrap this up with an interesting story I saw over at Boing Boing. There’s an article in the San Francisco Gate titled – FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs. That’s right, appearantly the Old Farmer’s Almanac is the latest tool of terror.

This just reminds me of some kind of crazy Jeff Foxworthy joke: “If you carry the Farmer’s Almanac… You might be a terrorist”. I guess this just shows how paranoid we’ve become. But who knows, that might be a good thing.

My last statement from Citibank included a credit thanks to some lawsuit that I’ve never heard of. Apparenty, Citibank’s customers won the suit and we are now all being rewarded. My share of the settlement was $0.22. Yes, twenty-two cents.

Others have said that they received checks in the mail with their share. That’s right, Citibank is actually sending out checks with amounts less than the cost of a stamp.

I wonder how much the lawyers got paid in this case?

In a discussion on Slashdot about the SCO v. IBM case over Linux, someone posted this wonderful analogy for our current legal system:

Two farmers are fighting over a cow. One grabs the cow’s tail and pulls while the other farmer grabs the cow’s head and pulls. This last for a long time. While all this pulling is going on, the two farmers’ lawyers sit in the middle and milk it.

I couldn’t agree more…

Christmas vacation is finally here. I’m finished with school and things are going pretty well at work. I think we’re even done with all of our shopping. It’s been so long since I’ve really felt caught up. I do still find myself worrying about things. Occasionally, I get this feeling that I’m forgetting something, but when I stop and think about it I realize that everything is done.

We saw The Return of the King this morning at 11:00. Our local theater went up on the price of matinee tickets from $2.00 to $2.25. I’m sure all of our “big city” friends will find that pretty funny. It was an amazing movie. I won’t spoil it here for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but I will say that it was well worth the extra twenty-five cents each for admission…

I finally graduated today. It was freezing cold and misting rain at 9:00am this morning in Commerce, but I was still happy to be there. Here’s a picture of Paula, Ben, me, and Paige after the ceremony.

In case anyone’s curious, the medal around my neck says “Cum Laude”…

Over the weekend Paige and I drove to Dallas and did a little shopping. I finally picked up a copy of Designing with Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman. I was trying to decide between two different books and asked Paige for advice. She said “I have a good feeling about the orange one.” She was right, as usual. This is a wonderful book for anyone who makes web sites. In it, Mr. Zeldman clearly describes the problems with the way most websites are built today and presents solutions to them using current web standards.

I lost track of time as I was reading yesterday evening, and I read well into the night. As I was reading I wanted to try a few things on our website, so I connected to the internet (we still have dial-up at home). Finally, around midnight, I went to bed. I saw Paige set the alarm earlier, so I didn’t even check it.

Unfortunately, the alarm never went off this morning. A little after 8:00am, someone from Paige’s office tried to call our house. I was still connected to the Internet, so all they got was a busy signal. Then, they called my office to see if I knew where Paige was. Neither of us were at work and there was no way to contact us – hysteria ensued.

Between my office and Paige’s, I think most people had decided we had carbon monoxide poisoning and couldn’t reach the phone. Around 8:45am Paige woke up in a panic. A few seconds later, someone from her office pulled up in our driveway. We were both ready for work and out the door a little after 9:00am. Just as I was leaving, Ben pulled up in the driveway and told me to call my office since they were just about to start calling the hospitals to look for us.

I guess the moral of this story is – never give anyone at work your real address if you want to be more than an hour late on Monday mornings…