Fail Whale

Russian Division

Bazinga

Go Away

Recursion

Compiling

First Doctor

Also, they’re now selling xkcd shirts, and I want all of them. Well, most of them. Nope, I just checked, I want all of them. What’s a girl to do with all of this awesome in one place? They have Delorians! And sonic screwdrivers! And Futurama toys! And lots lots more. Just wanted to share some of my favourites with you.

Just as an aside, I’m also quite excited about Futurama coming back next month.

Obviously we have reached the end of days.

One of the things Alan and I did that was crazy for the wedding was Scrabble related. About a year before the wedding, we decided we wanted to do the name tags at the tables with Scrabble tiles. We had our mothers and their team of friends and relatives and acquaintances and really everyone they knew searching for Scrabble boards for us. Our moms found us about 25 Scrabble boards, and we had a friend make us about sixty additional tile holders. When we started doing the table arrangements, we made each person’s name and put them in individual baggies, and then put each table in a big freezer bag, and then when we set up the hall, about a dozen of us spent about half an hour making each person’s name in Scrabble tiles.

We weren’t really sure how this would work, but it looked pretty cool, and it was fairly nerdy. People immediately started renaming people and looking for dirty words. We used the Scrabble tiles as the kissing game instead of people having to clink glasses or sing songs about love or anything else. After dinner, we had people come up with the words they had created. Our best man and maid of honour would determine how good the word was, and that was how good the kiss would be.

It worked better than we had really imagined. It passed the time quickly between dinner and desert, and everyone relaxed and started trading letters between tables and so on. Some of the tables came up with really elaborate stuff, like “were sorry mario but your princess is in another castle” (this was related to our recessional song, which rocked). After a while, people didn’t care if we kissed or not, and we were able to sit down and eat our wedding pie.

Because yes, we had wedding pie. It was the day before pi day. And pie is so much better than cake.

All this to say that Mattel changing the rules of Scrabble hurts me deep down inside. In a way that others just may not understand.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Courtney lived a couple of blocks from the university. We’d known each other for a few years, having been at the same church retreats. We bonded over caffeinated teen antics. I knew she’d played the drums in high school, but I had no idea if she’d want to play with me. After all, I wasn’t very good. Lem always said that I was the dead weight in Paradoxical Overtones, and I know she was right. Over coffee, Courtney and I decided to try and find a couple of other people to make some noise and see if we could make it pretty.

Erin lived an hour away and played the bass, and we know she’d love hanging out with us, since we were cool university students and she was still stuck in high school. She jumped at the chance, and Paul rounded out our band with a second guitar. In my mind, Paul was a guitar god. He took me under his wings and that’s when I really learned how to play. My fingers were so calloused and sore that sometimes I could barely type, but I progressed quickly and caught up to him enough to no longer feel like I was dragging the other three down. To be quite honest, I had a crush on Paul in those early days, but that was before I met Eric. He was a guy in one of my classes, and well, that’s a story for another day…

We practiced for three months before our first gig. It certainly wasn’t glamorous, but to us it was magical. For four people struggling through university and early adulthood, the band allowed us to jump out of our day to day lives and be the party people, one or two nights a week. Erin would come down twice a month, and we’d play cover songs and a few originals at the local bars: Big Dick’s, Spicoli’s, the Pub… the names and places have all sort of blended together at this point. Erin and I took turns singing, and Paul would tell stories between songs. The girls loved Paul…

In the summer after my first year of university, we released our first EP, Leave My Soul Alone. We made 700 copies of it, and sold it at the shows. It had five tracks:

1. In a Moment – this was our attempt at a song like Chick Magnet – a bass driven punk song that was, in all honesty, quite catchy. It made it onto our first full-length album.
2. Through With You – I think this is the song where we rhymed master with plaster
3. Mixed Metaphors – Our attempt at clever lyrics.
4. The Pebble – my personal favourite, stolen from church events Erin, Courtney and I had attended.
5. Punk Rock Boy – a girlie version of Punk Rock Girl. This song should never be covered, and we never should have recorded it.

Puny Express - Leave My Soul Alone

Anyways, the LMSA EP wasn’t very good, but we soldiered on. I’ve talked with Courtney, and she wants to continue the story over at her blog. Maybe after all this, Paul and Erin will give us their takes of what life was like on the Puny Express. I know it was a ride I’ll never forget, and despite the rocky points that came later, I will always look back on those early days fondly.

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So I will give you a double shot of things I love. That means fourteen things I love. Here goes:

1. Sunrises and sunsets. See yesterday for pretty pictures.
2. Fluffly clouds. They totally make me happy. I miss blue skies in the winter months.
3. Big open spaces. I miss the expansiveness of country living. I also miss stars. However, I do love the convenience of city living.
4. Alan. He’s fun. And so much smarter than me I’m ashamed to admit it.
5. Google Reader. It rocks. I’ve mentioned this before
6. Music. Right now, I’m still in the Great Music Sort of 2009, but almost done the letter L.
7. Sci Fi. What’s not to love? (Other than the rampant sexism of classic-era sci-fi. I don’t love that.)
8. My friends and family. They’re pretty great.
9. Making stuff that didn’t exist before. I’m not necessarily interested in optimization or security, but I love bringing ideas to fruition. That’s why I have a secret project.
10. That I’m mostly winning Shan’s Lenten Challenge. I haven’t done well with the weight training and working out parts this week, but the not eating at restaurants is going quite well, and I’m sure I’ve saved a good chunk of money and I’ve lost about 5 lbs.
11. Reading. Maybe I’ll write a post about the people and things I associate books with. I love books.
12. I love that I have no idea what The Hills is about. And that I’ve never watched a single minute of American Idol.
13. This number. It’s great.
14. I’m not sure it’s an “I love…” yet, but I’m really glad that I’m blogging again. I missed it.

So there you are! Fourteen things I love. And possibly one of the most shallow lists I’ve ever produced. Maybe I should have included kittens and bunnies. They’re pretty great as well.

Threadless T-Shirt: Books Are Good For You. Love it!

Well, I spent most of this week sick with a head cold that knocked me down for a few days. Regardless, here goes my list for the week. One of these entries is sarcastic. Try to guess which one.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Death by Black Hole.
An incredibly interesting and funny interview with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He talks about the process of dying in a black hole, defines one of my new favourite words, “spaghettification”, and tells the audience about the asteroid that may destroy the Pacific Coast. A fascinating discussion about some terrible things that may happen to the Earth.
“Ninety nine percent of all species that ever existed are now extinct. That is not the signature of a planet that is in love with life.”

Learning that none of my JavaScript works in Internet Explorer 6.
My boss went to Cambodia for two weeks after Christmas. The day she returns, we are to present her with a full, bug-free copy of our latest project. On Wednesday, we discovered that next to none of our Javascript works in Internet Explorer 6. I know it was rather remiss of us not to test, but we’re not the best at browser-compatibility testing.
Anyways, IE6 is a mystifying piece of badness. There are lots of things in it that make no sense at all, like how select boxes are drawn by the operating system, and not the browser. What this means is that modal dialog boxes, as well as mouseover-style menus, don’t draw themselves on top of those elements. Web 2.0 style applications use these sorts of elements quite often. The solution? Something called an iframe shim, which makes no sense at all. I have so far wasted a number of days attempting to make these elements play well together. We need to find a new way to draw modal dialog boxes, drop down style menus and a calendar widget. Before tomorrow morning at 830 am. I’m not expecting that to go well.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl
I loved watching Billie Piper as Rose Tyler in Doctor Who, so I decided to download the show Secret Diary of a Call Girl to see if she could really act or not, and I learned that she can. It is an odd cross between a comedy, a drama, and a softcore porn. I have now seen far too much of Billie Piper’s body, but I still found the show excellent. Her character is quite compelling and I enjoyed watching the two parts of her personality conflicting with each other. I would recommend this show to a couple of friends, though I’m not sure if it would be my friends who are obsessed with Doctor Who or not.

Getting our spare room set up.
Alan and I recently housed a friend of ours for about four or five months. In that time, he stayed in our spare room, which had formerly been our computer room. Since our computers were nice and cozy in their new home, and we wanted to hide our TV a bit more, we turned our spare room into a TV room. We put the TV and our gaming systems in the closet so we can hide it when we have guests, and the spare room now has our DVD shelf, our plastic shelving units, and our futon. The living room is fantastically empty, and will make a great space for dance contests and Twister. Or our cozy chair can go there for our new reading corner.

2009 Goals / Resolutions

Sort and tag my music collection. This acutally started about two weeks ago now. I have around 5,000 songs on my computer that comprises my music collection, which isn’t really a lot. Unfortunately, the files have become woefully neglected. My preference for file names is the format %artist% – %album% – %track number% – %song name% and I want that data to be in the ID3 tag accurately as well. Most of my files have the artist name and song name accurately, but most do not have the remaining data. The task at hand can be broken down into these subtasks:

• Get rid of songs I no longer like. It’s normal that tastes change over time, and mine certainly have.
• Ensure file names are as complete as possible. Wikipedia is really good at telling me what albums my songs come from.
• Ensure ID3 tags have the correct artist, album, track number and song name. Extra data [genre, year, etc] is good as well, but not required.
• Maintain a good directory structure.

Because I’m a Linux nerd, I use rhythmbox for my media player. For this project, however, I have been using mplayer from the command line, because I love the command line. Maybe I’ll write a super boring post about my sorting procedures. Maybe I’ll draw a flowchart for it. I like flowcharts.

Blog more. Because I’m pretty sure you all need to know about the minutiae of my life, like my music sorting procedures or how I make a super awesome lasagna or what I think about The Doctor this week [still love him]. I have a wedding to plan. I’m sure you’re interested in that, right? No? Too bad. But seriously, I don’t do a lot of writing that isn’t comma-delimited in my day to day life, and it’s an important skill to craft. A couple of weeks ago I sat down to write a couple of paragraphs about an event I had attended, and it was like pulling teeth. Seems like writing is one of those ‘use it or lose it’ sort of entities.

Finish that damn quilt. In the summer of 2007, I started a quilt. An easy beginner quilt. By September, I had the four big pieces that made up most of the quilt completed. By November, I had those pieces sewn together. I haven’t touched it since. All I have left to do on it is make a border of some sort and a back. My mom, the quilter in my life, says it should take three or four hours to add the border, tops. Maybe I should just sit down and finish it, then it would be done and I could move on with other projects.

Get Zend Certified. It’s probably important to stay up to date with what’s happening in my field. With that in mind, I am going to get my Zend PHP 5 Certification, and then maybe after that my Zend Framework Certification. I’m not sure about the ZF Certification, though, as I use Symfony on a daily basis and am not sure how good it would be to have those two things in my head at the same time. Also in this goal are sub-goals of improve my server administration and database administration skills.

Plan a Wedding. Mine, to be exact. We have a date set, and that’s about it really. I’m sure there are other details that are probably important. I should really look into that. Sub-goals: get in shape

Write A Wordpress Theme / Customize My Wordpress. This design is ugly and I want to make something prettier. With a better sidebar. And better photo integration. I love io9’s website (and content) and want to steal at least some of the elements from their page layout.

So that’s it. We’re going to call these goals, not resolutions, but they are what they are. I’m not sure the overflow of months into the years columns really requires such traditions as these, but taking the time to reflect and consider is always good.