This Fortune Intentionally Left Blank

1. I refuse to use any facebook application other than the one that gets my status from twitter.

2. I have an irrational fear that an overhead airplane will crash into my general vicinity.

3. My wife and I have had conversations using nothing but movie quotes.

4. Through the attrition of teammates at work, I am now responsible for 35,000 out of 45,000 lines of code.

5. When I started high school I received a locker magnet that said "Excellence is not in being the best, but in doing your best". This has had a profound impact on my life.

6. I have carried on conversations at work speaking nothing but acronyms.

7. I'm very, very good at Sudoku.

8. I own a shirt with a built-in WiFi detector.

9. The longer I live, the larger my concept of the love of God becomes.

10. My middle name is Chandler. Yes, like on "Friends".

11. I spent 15 months addicted to World of Warcraft.

12. I can count the number of grades I've received (including high school, college, and grad school) that were not A's using only my fingers.

13. I estimate that I've spent 25,000 hours over the last twelve years using a computer. And yet I've never gotten carpal tunnel syndrome.

14. My favorite numbers are prime or powers of two.

15. Computers fear me.

16. I married the first girl I kissed.

17. I'm secure enough in my masculinity to admit that I'm a sucker for any romantic comedy involving Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan.

18. My favorite color is teal.

19. If I had enough money I would buy an island and build a castle on it.

20. You wouldn't call me passive-aggressive if you knew how it made me feel.

21. In my opinion, I'm terrible with human relationships.

22. My favorite place on earth is Acadia National Park.

23. I always get embarrassed when people discuss finances.

24. Despite the fact that the class was named "Applicable Complex Variables", I never learned any applications for complex variables in it.

25. I've had the same hair style my entire life.

I know it's technically only Christmas Eve, but this year Katie and I are doing something new. Something that will actually extend Christmas over two days. That's two days of awesomeness!

In years past Katie and I have done a torturous circuit of all of our relatives to try and see everyone in the area on Christmas. This usually left us exhausted by the end but it was our major opportunity to see people we hadn't seen since last Christmas, so we did it. But in the past your several relatives have moved farther away from each other making for even longer travel times on Christmas.

So this year Katie and I decided that our best bet would be to celebrate Christmas over two days, spending all of Christmas Eve with Katie's family and Christmas Day with mine. Ultimately it will mean less travel time and more family time for both of us. The festivities will begin today around 1:00 PM.

Now if only it would stop snowing.

Man, it's been a while since I last blogged. Work has been ... interesting lately. And not in a good way. January is going to be intense I think.

But for now, I'm on vacation for two and a half weeks. Tomorrow afternoon Katie and I fly back to Seattle to spend Christmas with our families. But for now I'm doing chores.

It's been two and a half weeks since I left World of Warcraft. I find myself missing it every now and then, but in general I feel a lot more productive. My website redesign is going well. Structurally I need to figure out how I want to do the navigation bar and then I need to check the layout in other browsers and make whatever corrections are necessary. Which means I probably need to look and see if any of our computers here still have IE 6 (I've been doing all my development with Firefox). After the structural layout looks good I'll be working on a color scheme.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether or not I want to use javascript. I've been looking at script.aculo.us effects and they are pretty cool, not too mention easy to extend. But I don't know if I want to make my page dependent on people having javascript enabled. These are the tough choices of a web developer.

This morning I woke up to a sad sight: our Betta fish, Mr. Fishy, was laying on his side at the bottom of the fish tank. At first I thought he might have just been pining for the fjords*, but after prodding him a couple of times it was clear that he was dead. We had only had him for a year but he quickly became a part of our lives.

But in keeping with the theme of today, I'm thankful we got to make his last year on earth a pleasant one. He had a good long life. The average life expectancy of a Betta fish is two to three years, and he had already been owned for three years before we got him, so he was at least four when he died. The maximum they live is only five years.

So it'll be a slightly more somber Thanksgiving for us this year. Not that that will keep me from stuffing my face with mashed potatoes mind you.



* Bonus points if you understand what I'm talking about.

Well, hopefully not. But Katie's got the flu, so I'm taking care of her.

So it's been a week now since I officially stopped playing World of Warcraft and it's been going ok. No major withdrawal symptoms yet. I've been grumpy and irritated all week, but that's more because of my job than anything else. Thankfully it's nearly Thanksgiving, and I have some PTO I need to use so I've got a nice long break coming up.

One thing I'm attempting to do with my new free time is to blog more. To that end I've joined the ranks of those who twitter. Katie is slightly disgusted at the level of social minutiae that is twitter, but she is at least supporting me in my desire to try and communicate more with other people. I did have to promise to not let it end up as this (warning: profanity).

I've also decided that I want to renovate my web site. I really like the boxes with rounded corners and drop shadows (probably because I invested a lot of tears, sweat, and blood to make them work in Firefox and IE) but I'm not sure I'm happy with the layout. I know I'm not happy with the background. I've always admired my friend Eric's color schemes so I can always stare at his site until I get some inspiration. So I'll be doing an overhaul of the color scheme, possibly the layout (such as adding a twitter feed) and probably the underlying architecture of the site.

I have a lot of project ideas floating around in my head. I hope to bring some of them to life in the near future. I don't want to talk about them yet as they are all in the conceptual stage at the moment.

My life is a mess right now.


Ok that's not true. I'm not sick. I'm still married after five years and the relationship is still improving. I'm financially better off than a lot of people right now (one advantage to renting over owning a home: no mortgage). I have a Betta fish (surely a sign that I am a successful person).

But I don't do anything.

If you were to ask what my interests were I'd say: computers, the Internet, programming, cool technology, learning about cool technology, getting technology to do cool things, reading, video games, etc.

If you were to ask what I actually do in my free time I'd say: reading, video games.

Now, you could argue that my interests don't necessarily involve doing stuff,but I've never claimed to be a very active person. The point is not that my interests don't lend themselves to doing things, but that even though I'm interested in a variety of (technical) things, my actual activities don't involve anything of that sort. I never blog, it's been a couple of years since I programmed for fun, and despite a preponderance of technology I rarely use it for anything more than its basic functionality. It's like I've reverted to being a college kid who does nothing but classes and Halo. Actually that's exactly what I've become, although my drug of choice isn't Halo. It's something far more insidious.

True confession time: I play World of Warcraft. And it's taking over my life.

Now I'm not blaming my problems on WoW. It's certainly my fault for not balancing my life. Although if the game weren't really fun then it probably wouldn't be much of an issue. I have friends who play WoW. Possibly they do a better job of not getting sucked into it. But I, alas, have failed. Rather than spend time on my other interests I find myself logged in to WoW. There's so many things I'd like to explore but I don't.

Therefore, effective immediately, I've canceled my subscription to World of Warcraft. This is no guarantee that I'll get back into blogging or programming or anything else, but I can guarantee that as long as I play WoW I won't be getting back into those things.

And so I direct the words of the bravest little hobbit of them all to my friends in World of Warcraft: "I regret to announce — this is The End. I am going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell."

And humble too.

Ok, that's not strictly true. I mean, it's true that it's a Friday. It's not strictly true that I didn't talk to anyone. I talked to three people. I don't work with any of them, but I did talk to three people.

My Fridays tend to be like that. And I kind of like it.

So I rode to and from work today. Here is the route I used:



It wasn't bad. Not a ton of traffic and in the morning it was cool so I didn't sweat very much. It took me 45 minutes on the way in and 50 minutes on the way home. That's an average speed of 12 mph, which I'm pretty pleased with.

In other news, I fixed a bug in the CSS style sheet for my website. It was causing an annoying glitch in the boxes around my blog posts. The weird thing was it only showed up in Firefox, and not IE (I didn't look at it in Opera). I don't know if it was a standards issue or just something weird. But it's gone now, so I'm happy.

So, it's the day after Memorial Day, and incidentally the last day of my five day weekend. I hadn't used any vacation time at all this year so I decided to take some time off to keep from going insane (well, to keep from going more insane). And since its the day after Memorial Day (I keep wanting to write Labor Day for some reason, I have no clue why) it means that summer is in full force in New England.

That of course means that it is ∞ degrees out and (∞ - 1)% humidity.

I used to think that winter was the worst season in Massachusetts, but it turns out I hate summer even more. At least during winter you can always put more clothes on. There's only so naked you can get in the summer time. Which means you have to resort to some sort of external cooling system. Fans sort of work, until you leave the direct path of the wind. I suppose you could turn your entire house into a giant wind tunnel, depending on your zoning laws.

"But wait Ian," you say. "Why not just use an air conditioner?" There are three good reasons why not:
1. It costs money
2. It's not environmentally friendly
3. Man was not meant to live in a climate that requires AC

Regardless of how rich and/or uncaring towards the earth you are, I don't think that you can argue with me on that last one.