As I sit here at my desk I realize that I might never have another hug from Shaler. This makes me sad as I feel safest in his arms. No other person seems to understand me the way he does. I don’t want to go all brokeback on ya’ll, but I just don’t know how to quit Shaler.

The wedding will be hard to attend. I’m afraid to let people see me cry, but I don’t think I’ll be able to hold in my tears. Shaler, I’ll try to be strong for you, but I can’t make any promises. Perhaps I can find comfort in the arms of another.

Jham, will you hold me?

The funny thing about this is that if you tap on my face it looks like I am punching my self. Also this was not my idea.

UPDATE
Engadget now has some pictures of Lily too.

UPDATE 2.0
Another picture of Lily.

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a book. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve written a book report since 10th grade. This should be interesting.

When I was thinking of how to write this post I kept thinking that I need to describe the book as a mash-up of two other iconic books or movies. For some reason I have it in my head, which I must admit deviates from reality from time to time, that this is how most professional reviewers review books and movies. Now that I have that notion in my head I, of course, couldn’t write this review any other way.

The problem is what two pieces of pop culture do I pick that will fully sum up this book? You see I really liked this book. It was by far the best book I’ve read in a long, long time. I generally read books that I like the story but the writing isn’t going to make the book a classical piece of literature. Not only was Android’s Dream a clever and fast paced story, but the writing was also very good. I liked it so much that I am actually keeping the book. Normally I like to give away the books that I like so that someone else can enjoy the story too.

What are the two iconic pieces of pop culture that sum up this book? I can only think of two movies that could describe this book, it’s The Bourne Identity meets The Fifth Element.

If you don’t like either of those movies don’t let this hack of a review sway you away from reading this book. The fact that I am writing this post should contest to how much I really liked the book.

[I wrote this months ago but forgot to hit publish. Oops!]

See this post to find out why we are drugging our cat.

If calling and seeing if they had the book was not enough to prove her love for me, she actually went and purchased it! Again you are probably thinking this isn’t a big deal, but apparently the booksellers at Barnes and Noble, which she used to be, look down upon and criticize the people that buy dork books. For her to brave the scrutiny of her peers was most definitely a testament of her love. Whether this was for me or her secret love of D&D, I do not know;-)

So how did the class go? She was better at it than I was. That is up until the point where she started trash talking and told me that she was going to show me how it was done. After losing control of her bounce, she managed to knee herself in the head and fling herself half way across the trampoline to hit hard into the springs around the edge. If it wasn’t for two big padded things sitting on the edge of the trampoline she would have flung herself straight over the edge.

For anyone keeping score, here are the injuries so far:

Regan:

• Landed in the net wrong and hurt her neck, which resulted in five hours in Urgent Care.
• Bad take off from the trapeze platform, which resulted in an injured shoulder.
• Got cocky on the trampoline, which resulted in hurt pride and most likely bruised forehead.

Jason:

• No injuries to date despite the fact that he got dropped on his head from the trapeze.

While Spring officially doesn’t come until the end of March, this hasn’t stopped Regan from asking “Is it Spring yet?” A few weeks ago when she asked is it Spring yet, I told her that we would know when Spring was going to be on Groundhog Day. I made an error here. I thought the legend said that if the groundhog didn’t see his shadow that winter would be extended longer than it normally is. While in reality, which sometimes I don’t pay attention to, if the groundhog did see his shadow then Spring would come early. I have to start paying attention to things!

Right now the following groundhogs have seen their shadow, Punxsutawney Phil, Staten Island Chuck, Wiarton Willie, Shubenacadie Sam and General Beauregard Lee. Which means that I will be shaving my Winter coat soon;-(

I had a very productive first class. The only thing I had to try twice was a back flip. I was a little confused on what I was suppose to do and forgot to let go of the bar when I finally got into position. I was able to do three catches of the first trick. I hope I do as well on the second trick next week.

I’ve started a photoset, both on Picasa and Flickr, of our trapeze classes. I also have video of Regan attempting the second trick.

What is the IFL? That’s the question that most people ask when we tell them that we went and saw the IFL on Friday Night. It stands for International Fight League, which as their site puts it, is the world’s first team-based professional mixed martial arts league.

I had very low expectations of this event and was going mostly to see what it was about. The girls, Regan, Whitney, and Mary-Lynn, were more excited than I was. How excited were they? When Regan sent me an email about the event the subject line read: “ASSWHUPPIN”. I wasn’t so sure why they were so excited, but after going I can see why they got pump up. For that matter, I can see why people like boxing so much. There’s nothing like watching a guy get put in a choke hold and pass out to get your blood going.

I traded in my MINI Cooper S in for a Volvo S40. Why? After moving back out here, I was quickly reminded of one of the major reasons I hate living in the Bay Area: traffic. Traffic here sucks! It sucks even more when you are driving a standard. It really sucks when you are the only person in your household who can drive a standard. So if we did take my car out I would always be the driver. That also meant that I was always the designated driver. That sucked ass.

After Regan got her new car (a kick ass Volvo C70) I thought that we would just take her car every where and I would only use the MINI for going to and from work. That didn’t work out so great since we decided to lease her car so she can get a wagon in a few years when we decide to have kids. With the lease we could only put 12,000 miles a year on her car. In the Bay Area you can put that on in a few months. After the miles started racking up really fast, it was back to me driving the MINI if we wanted to go any where. That sucked ass.

Just over a month and a half of when Regan got her car, I went and traded Danni in for Donna. I never pictured myself driving anything other than the fastest, smallest, semi-luxury car I could find. But I have to admit that I am rather enjoying driving my “adult” car.

I sort of went on a mini-rant to Regan and Whitney earlier today about how New Year’s Resolutions don’t count until unless they are presented in a bullet pointed list, here are my New Year’s resolutions, in no particular order:

• Publish at least 52 posts this year and attempt to participate in this year’s NaBloPoMo (that is if they have it again).

  I pretty sure I can do the first part but the second part may be bit ambitious. But I figured I would at least attempt it.

• Go on a diet, get buffed, and take fencing lessons.

  After my plan of beating my brother senseless with a foam sword back fired on me, I figured it was time that I get in shape. I need the fencing lessons because my punk brother works construction and I have a desk job; there is no way I will be able to get stronger than him. Hopefully better swordsmanship will be able to defeat his berzerker rage.

• Acquire a Wii.

  I missed out on acquiring this past Christmas. It was my fault that I didn’t get one. Initially I thought I would build up some serious good karma by letting all the little kids that wanted one for Christmas get one before I did. What, surprised by my selfless act? Don’t worry it didn’t last long, my stance on the matter changed as soon as I played one. I think my exact statement was, “Screw the kids! I have to have one!” Plus the more I thought about it, it wasn’t me that would prevent some kid from getting one, it is those damn eBayers. All I had to do then was not buy one from eBay and I would not incur any bad karma. Since then I’ve been hunting for a Wii.

• Sort my Warlord collection

  It’s gotten out of control.

• Start cooking again

  Google has totally spoiled me when it comes to food. Since I’ve started working there I haven’t really been motivated to cook my own meals. Why would I when I have chefs that are better cooks than me, cooking three meals a day? But it turns out, I don’t actually eat three meals a day at Google. And the money that I thought I was saving was actually being spent on dining out at night and on the week-ends.

• Take more pictures

  Regan has taken control over all the camera’s in the house, which has led me to take less pictures in 2006. Not this year!

• Turn off the bathroom light

  Warning, this was put on my list by Regan and I might not get it accomplished;-) The fan in the bathroom comes on when you turn on the light. For some reason, that little fan is the only thing that can wake her up from her coma like sleep.

I can’t help but tease her about it because she grunted when she headbutted me.

I would say let the nerd jokes start, but it might be too easy for everyone. Jokes are always better when it’s a challenge to make them. Things that are easy are boring. Insert a “your mom” joke here.

For anyone who doesn’t read Regan’s blog, we went to Austin this weekend for Jeff and Aim’s wedding. Everything was great except for the trip home. I keep saying this, but this was the absolutely last time that I fly through Dallas DFW. No really, I mean it this time. Our plane was 30 minutes late in arriving to the gate and took off 40 minutes later that it was suppose to. After landing and being delayed for 10+ minutes because of lighting strikes, 1 lighting strike within 5 miles of the airport == 10 minutes of waiting in the queue to de-board, we were left 10 minutes to make it to our next flight. Long story short we made it but our bags didn’t.

There will be pictures on Flickr soon and more of a story on Regan’s blog.

Dan has already taken note of this on flickr.

Shaler moved in with Marija and I decided to become a bum again. I drove to Austin to watch a pre-screening of Serenity and bartered for Jayne Hats. Took a vacation in the Outer Bank and learned how toss a boomerang. Regan and I pissed off a band member of some jam band. As Shaler and I were packing our apartment we found some volatile booze and a letter declaring me his bitch. Decided not to become a bum and move in with Regan instead. Took a vacation to Vegas and asked Regan to marry me. Got my head shaved. I finally got a landline only to have the hurricane destroy it. Got displaced to Austin and gained two new family members. Open sourced the binder. Took a vacation to Europe. Got a new job and moved to the Bay Area.

Too bad they weren’t fond of my suggestion for dinner: rabbit.

• Make a shot of expresso
• Place two sugar cubes(three if you want it extra sweet) into the frothing cup
• Add the expresso to the frothing cup
• Add half-and-half to the frothing cup
• Froth

This seems pretty simple right? Not! I didn’t realize that there are so many variables to making a cappuccino. How much coffee grinds do you put in the grind holder? How hard should you compact the grinds? How much half-and-half do you use? How long should you froth it for?

My daily experimentation and results so far.

April 11, 2006

• 2 clicks of coffee grinds
• Double shot of expresso
• 1/3 carton of half-and-half
• Two sugar packets

Results: Less half-and-half and more sugar.

April 12, 2006

• 3 click of coffee grinds
• Double shot of expresso
• Cup filled up to the “g” with half-and-half
• Two sugar packets and 1 splenda

Results: Right amount of half-and-half but the coffee was too strong.

April 13, 2006

• 2 clicks of coffee grinds
• Double shot of expresso
• Froth cup filled to the first line with low fat milk.
• Two splenda packets

Results: Last time I try a diet Tex.

We are about to sedate the cats and head to the airport. This should be a very interesting flight.

04/03/2006

• Read Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9 of Statistics for Dummies
• Perform a trial run of sedating the cats
• Call old Landlord…Make Regan call old Landlord
• Call to see if a hotel stay will be paid for our last two nights in Austin
• Finish sorting Warlord cards
• Start working on state taxes
• Start packing clothes
• Walk Lily ^1.
• Make hotel reservations
• Take out the trash

04/04/2006

• Read Chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Statistics for Dummies
• Finish Taxes
• Pack more clothes

04/05/2006

• Read Chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17 of Statistics for Dummies
• Pack more stuff that isn’t going to be shipped
• Walk Lily

04/06/2006

• Read Chapters 18, 19, 20, and 21 of Statistics for Dummies
• Laundry
• Pack three weeks worth of books to read
• Pack anything I don’t want the packers to pack
• Clean out cars and prepare for them to be shipped

^1. Lily’s walk turned into her walking us. I had to carry her most of the way because she was tired after getting a rabies shot and a thermometer stuck up her butt.

I’ve personally been playing since the beginning of 2002 and love it! Unfortunately I haven’t been able to play in a while because my regular gaming group was disbanded when the storm spread us out across the country. Hopefully I will be able to revive Warlord in the Bay Area when we move back out there.

Download

• Official release: 0.1
• Current development version: bookshelf.php

Installation

1. Extract the bookshelf plugin into your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Enable the plugin in the WordPress administration interface.

Entering books

The interface for entering books for Bookshelf is located under the Manage tab under the submenu Bookshelf

Currently the plugins stores the following information per book:

• ISBN
• Title
• Author
• Date Started
• Date Finished

The image for a book is keyed off of the ISBN.

Templates

The Bookshelf plugin exports two functions to be used in templates:

• bookshelf_display_library() This functions displays all books in the library
• bookshelf_display_recent_reading() This functions displays the current most reading.

To have the current readind displayed on the sidebar place the following code in sidebar.php

Note: I’m not very good at CSS and the only way for me to get the sidebar to layout correctly was adding the <li style="height: 125px;">. Otherwise everything but the current reading was shifted to the bottom of the sidebar.

The following template can be used to create a page that will display all books in a library.

CSS

Each image is of the class reflect. If you download reflection.js and add it to you site css all book images will be reflected.

• British Library
• Harry Potter Attractions
• Changing of the Guards
• Tate Modern
• Lunch and Dinner at an Indian Restaurant
• Rick Steves’ Oxford Circus to Piccadilly walk
• Walked around trendy Islington
• Original Bus Tour
• Harrods
• London Eye
• H&M
• Apple Store
• Got lost in Knights Bridge
• British Museum
• Contributed to over seas opening week-end gross for V for Vendetta
• Walked across the Millennium Bridge
• National Portrait Gallery

–Regan

That one cup, I got a regular when I should have gotten a large, makes me miss the good coffee of New Orleans.

The phone is plugged into a box that has two RJ-45 jacks, colored red and green, and the RJ-11 jack. The red RJ-45 jack has a cable leading to the box that is plugged into the TV. I’m assuming the box is used for the paid on-demand programming. So I plug my computer into the green RJ-45 jack. Nothing happens. I look around for anything I can use as a screw driver to remove the faceplate. Next to the coffee pot I find a spoon. I remove to faceplate with the spoon to find that the green RJ-45 jack is not connected. At this point I figure what the hell and unplugged the cable in the red RJ-45 jack and plugged my laptop into the red jack. Success! Not really. I get an IP address but I can’t route anything. It appears that the hotels DNS server doesn’t allow for external name lookup. If I had only memorized the IP address of jparks.net… Not to be foiled, I open up my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file and get the IP address of jparks.net. Can I ping that IP address? Yes! Can I ssh to that address? Yes! Do I now have the IP address of google.com? Yes! Does a Google search turn up an IP address for a public DNS server for the UK? Yes! Do I now have Internet! YES! Am I going to get sprayed with CS gas and then arrested for “acquiring” the Internet? Probably;-)

On the upside, I did manage to navigate us from CDG to the hotel with out getting us lost.

Here’s a funny start to the trip. Regan woke up this morning asking me if we were fighting yet because she couldn’t remember. I guess that is better than her waking up and telling me that she is a mad at me because I was an ass in her dreams.

I seem to remember after we found out that it was city hall that we planned to get some hookers and show up at Hôtel de Ville asking for a room. Then we made a rap song about it. I wish I could remember the lyrics…

The morale of this story? The new crack cocaine could cost you your clothes.

If you would like to see what I have been working on for the last four and a half years check out openbinder.org. That is for those of you that don’t already know.

dsandler already stole my thunder

Update: Digg has picked up the story. Go and digg it so it will get to the main page!

If anyone has been to London before and can give me hotel advice on where to stay that would be great. As it is I have to turn to my arch nemesis for advice and I’m none to happy about it.

Regan usually as quite a few stories about what some moron said or did while she was at work. She always has a funny or witty response for the idiots when they do or say something retarded. I always ask her if she actually told them that or not, but her response is always a disappointing “no”. I lecture her all the time on how she should actually say what she is thinking because that’s what I would have done. Which her response has always been something like, “I’m glad you don’t work retail because you would get slapped, kicked, hit, fired, maimed, shot, trampled, etc..” Yesterday she was extremely exhausted and actually told me to go and get a part time job. She explained that it would solve my boredom by getting me out of the house and interacting with people. Plus I would be aggravating and telling off all the idiots and I wouldn’t have to annoy her when she got home. Appealing to the inner scientist in me, she suggested that it would be a grand experiment to see what it would take to get me fired from a part time job. Oh she fights dirty sometimes;-) I think might actually try this because it sounds fun. Plus I finally watched Jackass for the first time over the weekend and I feel like doing something retarded.

So what should I go apply at first? Regan suggested Borders but I think she just wants me to put the competition out of business;-)

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon looks back on 2005, he can take comfort in knowing that his film-directing debut, the sci-fi Western Serenity, resurrected his canceled-too-soon cult classic TV series Firefly, and was also one of the year’s best-reviewed movies. ”I should say I’m above reading reviews,” he says. ”But I would be lying.” Alas, Whedon’s fond memories are also tainted by Serenity’s status as a franchise nonstarter; despite Universal’s best marketing efforts, the film only mustered $25 million. ”In the end, it was what it was: a tough sell,” says Whedon, adding that it appears the Firefly saga has reached its conclusion. He has no regrets — and he’s moving on.

Overlap Protection gives you additional options for dealing with recording conflicts. Normally, when two programs overlap by a few minutes, the lower priority recording is cancelled. (For example, one program ends at 8:33, while the next program begins at 8:30) When you turn Overlap Protection on, the DVR automatically clips the lower priority recording by just enough minutes to allow both programs to record.

When scheduling new recordings, the DVR notifies you of any recording conflict and gives you options for resolving it. If the Overlap Protection feature is on, your options include clipping the lower priority program.

Maybe now