• Thanks to my work on Bibliofile, one of my old college friends who majored in Psychology looked me up and enquired about setting up a website to do “virtual therapy” over the Internet. It has been a treat to be in touch with him regularly again and to work through the details of how to create this service which is pretty cutting-edge in psychological circles. Expect more details on this in a few months, and a live site by fall if all goes well.
• Speaking of Bibliofile, I’ve been adding some new features lately, the most significant of which is tagging, which allows you to group your books in all kind of interesting ways. Ruby on Rails continues to impress me — I was able to implement an announcements feature from initial programming to deployment to production in about two hours yesterday night after the younger kiddos went to bed and Emily and I finished watching The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (which was great). You’ll see the new announcements feature if you already have an account and log in today.
• One super-cool Firefox plugin I stumbled over yesterday that everyone doing web development should have in their toolkit: View Rendered Source Chart. It takes the HTML in a page and creates a really nice diagram of its structure. Extraordinarily useful for sorting out HTML.
• Finally, from the QA department, creating acceptance tests for web applications has always been a bit of a trick, especially if you want to make sure everything works across browsers. The inimitable Zach Thomas yesterday turned me on to Selenium, an extremely interesting framework for developing automated acceptance tests that run within web browsers using a clever combination of Javascript and IFRAMES (generally a bane, but actually very useful in this context). Zach got it set up and some basic tests running yesterday, and I’m pretty excited about the help this will give us making sure that the work we produce is the best quality possible. Neat stuff for software engineering geeks.

This morning, as I was getting Abigail and Liam ready for school, I made Abby some mint tea. As is typical, when it was finished steeping, it was too hot for her to drink, so I asked if she would like an ice cube to cool it off. Not being a morning person by nature, I somewhat blindly stumbled to the refrigerator, pushed the ice dispenser lever, and was rewarded by two cold thumps in my hand.

I shambled over to the breakfast table and was about to drop my cargo into Abby’s cup when I looked down and found, to my surprise, that I was holding one ice cube and one Baby Ruth candy bar. My brain raced through several unlikely scenarios — did I somehow pick up a candy bar from somewhere without noticing? is there some kind of modern day alchemist at work in my kitchen, transforming frozen water into confections? did I mistakenly hit the Baby Ruth dispenser bar on the fridge instead of the ice dispenser? — before Abigail started laughing and confessed to having put the candy into the ice dispenser because she thought it would be funny.

So, I ate the ice cube and dropped the candy bar into her tea. That’ll show her. (
Not really. I let her take it to include in her lunch for school.) She’s not quite up to the level of The Heist yet, but shows definite promise in the mischief-making department.

Last night was our church’s Valentine’s Day Banquet. As part of the proceedings, each of the individuals attending wrote a little something to be read aloud to his or her Significant Other. While I was lame and recycled an old poem, Kathy came up with this little chestnut for me:

My Superman
Not many out there know your secret identity
Your body of STEEL — your integrity
The red S on your chest under those clothes
In my eyes, a hero, nobody knows
You are my Clark and Superman
computer geek…my biggest fan
Brain and Brawn, all in one
My man in tights…don’t worry I won’t tell anyone!

Shucks, I’m speechless.

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly web memes
I look around me and I see, it isn’t so. Oh no.
Some people want to fill the net with silly web memes.
What’s wrong with that? I’d like to know. ‘Cause here I go again!

– With apologies to Sir Paul McCartney

Four places I’ve lived:

San Antonio, Texas
Briarcliff Manor, New York
Washington, District of Columbia
Gainesville, Texas

Four Jobs I’ve Had

Ice Cream Cone Maker: Marble Slab
Assistant Dorm Director: The King’s College
Computer Game Programmer: Origin Systems
Corrupter of Middle School Boys (not an official title): Trinity Baptist Church

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

L.A. Story
Tron
Looney Tunes
Glory or The Mission (both as much for the soundtrack as anything)

Four Contemporary Authors I Read Everything They Publish

David Brin
Douglas Adams (stretching a point, I admit)
Corey Doctorow (the open-source pricing helps)
J. K. Rowling (hehe)

Four Current TV Shows I Love

Haven’t really watched TV for over a decade, but still seek these out via rentals/downloads:
The Simpsons
Doctor Who
Lost
Family Guy

Four Places I’ve Visited/Vacationed

Budapest
London
Chicago
Santa Fe

Four of my Favorite Dishes

Jambalaya
Salsa
Pad Thai
Fajitas

Four Sites I Visit Daily

See my sidebar. It’s actually closer to 60. 🙂

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

The Texas Coast
Hiking through a piney forest
In the hammock in my backyard with a book and an assortment of kids piled in
On a couch with my lovely bride

I’m a sucker for projects that merge the physical world and the digital ones in interesting and unusual ways, so of course I love the I/O Brush, a paintbrush that can suck up images and textures from real objects and use them in a digital painting. Be sure to check out the Videos! (via Giles)

The kids and I have been enjoying a few new things lately:

• I created a simple shape-based cipher system over this past weekend and taped the key to our kitchen table. I then distributed a note encoded with the cipher to each of the kids without any explanation. It was great fun to watch them discover the key, work out their messages, and then go chasing through the house to find the candy canes I’d hidden as a reward. Liam got especially excited about the process, and we’ve exchanged several more encoded messages since. Abigail wants a copy of the key so that she can write her friends at school secret messages as well. Fun stuff.
• At bedtime, we usually give the kids the option “carry or tuck” — they can be carried to their beds, or be tucked in once they’re there. Last week I changed up the formula: “carry, tuck, or a song.” If they choose the latter, I’ll swing by the kids’ room with my guitar and sing a song for them. (This is, admittedly, partially in response to a “patriarchal tearjerker” that Barry wrote called “My Daddy Sang to Me.” It makes Kathy cry every time it comes around on the MP3 player.) So far, we’ve covered “Down in the Valley”, “Little Bunny Foo-Foo”, “Puff the Magic Dragon”, and “Irish Rover” (which Liam inexplicably refers to as “The Pirate Song”). Further suggestions for good bedtime music are welcome!

When I was young, the companion toy to Sit & Spin and Twister was the Hippity Hop Ball. For us kids, nothing beat sitting on one of these things and bouncing around like cocoa-puff fueled loons, inevitably tipping over repeatedly, upending furniture, knocking out a few teeth, and having a grand time. For our parents, nothing beat the sweet, uninterrupted slumber that we kids enjoyed after spending 30 minutes on the Hippity Hop Ball.

One of the Christmas toys that Maggie received this year was an update to this classic toy. This one is a trifle smaller, and instead of a sphere, is shaped like a friendly animal, its four legs providing more stability than the ball had. The air valve is configured toward the aft of the critter, and the stopper in the valve sits in such a way that one can’t establish a seal with an air pump.

Thus, I found myself the other morning blowing vigorously into the bottom of a blue rubber donkey. Yep, I’m a straight man, but had a blue rubber farm animal sitting on my face while I hyperventilated.

Once again, I’m reminded that if you have any desire to retain any sense of gravitas whatsoever, don’t become a parent — your dignity will be stripped from you with a speed and thoroughness that would impress a school of piranha.

Kudos to my long-time buddy Ross for his latest accolade: his comic book publishing venture, Boom! Studios, has received Wizard Magazine’s Best New Publisher Award for 2005.

And check out his website! Not bad for someone who was learning how to use GoLive from me over the phone 6 months ago!

I’ve just popped the first open-to-the-public version of Bibliofile, my free reading log program, up at http://www.myreadinglog.net

From the welcome page:

Bibliofile is a tool for keeping track of books: those you’ve read, those you’d like to read, and those you’re reading. You can use it to:

• Put a “What I’m Reading” list on your web page or blog. (All the cool kids are doing it!)
• Compile statistics on what and how much you’re reading. (What was the book you rated lowest last year? Something by William Shatner would be our guess.)
• Consult your “books to read” list when you’re at the library or book store. (Assuming they have wireless Internet or you’re willing to drag a really long network cable behind you.)
• Share your reading wishlist with your well-heeled friends and loved ones.

I’m using Bibliofile to power the “What I’m Reading” sidebar on this site. If you like to read, I hope you’ll stop by, take a look, and see if Bibliofile might be a useful tool for you.

My friend Duane, with whom I shared a summer a dozen years ago chasing a passel of wily middle school boys for our church’s youth program, posted an excellent essay over the weekend on American evangelicism and its blind spots. It’s well worth a read for those of us who are prone to lover’s quarrels with the church. (Part one of the series is here.) Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Duane.