Gresham and his wife, Merrie, now live in a big house in Ireland, where they run a Christian ministry that specialises in healing the trauma caused by abortion, which they believe is infanticide inspired by Satan.

...

So, just one last question. Is it true that he stands to make an enormous amount of money from the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

The microscopically trimmed moustache stretches into a smile. "Mind your own business," he says.

So, basically, going to see the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe puts money into the pockets of someone who believes abortions are inspired by Satan. Yeah, I'll pass.

Today, I rode 50.3 miles in 3 hours and 10 minutes, for an average speed of 15.8 mph. And still, I'm afraid it's not enough. In two weeks I think I'm doing a very hilly 60 some odd miles at Summit to Surf X. The week after that I'm doing a metric century at the Blackberry Bramble, and then two weeks after that I'll be trying an honest to goodness century at the Vine Ride. I've been slacking in my training rides, and now I'm a little worried. Today's 50 was relatively reassuring though, I really didn't have any trouble except for maybe the last 5 miles, and 15.8 mph is faster than we'll probably ride the century, so....here's hoping!

Let's not point out that the song is available on at least one Rhino Dr. Demento compilation. The fact of the matter is, how fucking cool is it that you can do what I just did, and that I do it on an almost a daily basis for equally obscure facts so much so that I take it for granted. So today, I say, God Bless You Internet.

In any event, I left for San Diego Wednesday morning at 5am when the election still hadn't been decided. Right as we arrived at the hotel at around 10:30, I saw Kerry come out to give his concession speech. Finally back home now, and I checked out our mutual funds for the first time since the election. We're up almost $2000 in 3 days. Oh my ill-gotten gains. This is when the idea hit me, why not start a mutual fund that accepts donations. Or rather, start a PAC that accepts donations, and have them invested in a mutual fund, one that targets stocks in industries likely to benefit from four more years of Bush. Halliburton! Defense Contractors! You get the idea anyway. Then, in 2008, donate everything to the DNC, or if that goes over limits, some to the DNC, spread the rest out among specific candidates and PACs. Someone set that up, ok? I'm just the idea guy.

"Do we really need to?" we asked.

"I'd highly recommend it. There is a high incidence of identity theft in the area." was his reply.

Well...we didn't want our identities stolen. Without our identities what do we have left! So, it was photo time, and oh what spectacularly bad photos they were. Mine especially. I had the stupid, "I'm trying to smile but I haven't the slightest idea how" smile on my face. My hair was a mess, I had like 3 weeks of unkempt beard. Not at all pretty. The only saving grace was that when our cards finally arrived in the mail a week to ten days later, our pictures weren't on them. We always meant to inquire about what had happened, but I wasn't in much of a hurry to have that picture shown to every grocery clerk and Target cashier.

All was well for many months, until we decided to upgrade our check cards to ones that gave us air miles with every purchase. Who can complain about free plane tickets just for spending your own money, interest free. Well, when the cards arrive with your horrible, mishapen features displayed prominently in the upper left hand corner, just about anyone can!

In any event, this is all preamble to today's story. I went out for lunch with some people from work yesterday to a cute little diner in Eugene called Braille's. It was a really good meal, I had pigs in blankets and some hash browns. The waitress was really fun, joking around with us, everyone's a friend! After we eat I go up to the counter to pay my part of the bill and hand the woman working the register my Check Card of Slovenliness (-1 CHA, +1 Air Miles, blackout date s apply). Now, most people are polite enough not to comment on how bad the picture, but not this time.

"Ooh, that picture's no good"

A little surprised, but not angry at all, I reply, "Yeah, we had just moved out here and weren't at all prepared to be photographed to open a bank account. The picture on my driver's license is much better." At which point I show her the photo on my license.

"Ugh." she says.

Ugh!! Gee thanks lady!

Until the day the consumer base makes more educated decisions regarding what games to buy, we will continue to see vastly overhyped games that almost always wind up disappointing. Of course, waiting for consumers at large to make informed decisions is a losing proposition. So, unless there truly is a backlash against Lionhead for Fable (which I don't see happening, sure the hardcore gamer who reads gaming news sites on a daily basis might be wary of claims coming from Molyneux for awhile, most gamers probably don't even know their was an issue to begin with) we can continue to see more of the same, overblown promises and stripped down deliverables.

Invasion of the KILLER ANTS

Once in a small village in India a flock of geese were devoured by a swarm of ants. These ants are dangerous! They could eat an elephant in one gulp! All people in India were on alert to watch for the ants, but that didn't do much. In a matter of days India's population was wiped out. These ants devoured almost every country except for two; America and Rusia. American president Ronald Reagan JR. took action. He launched nuclear missles. Nothing happened. Finnaly the congres called on Commando. They gave him two weapons: a fighter craft and a high tuned electric guitar. Commando tried to stop the ants with the fighters weapons. That killed two ants. He killed the rest by playing them a tune.

Life as an M-16

I'm an M-16. My name is Blitzeen the M-16. I enjoy being an M-16 because I get front row seats at a lot of murders. I live in a cosy shed in back of Arnold Shwartzenegur's house. He is my owner. I'm all black. I shoot only the best quality gold bullets. I'm proud of my shot record. It is 2,000,000,000 and 0. I never miss a target. My favorite targets are cars, people and windows. I dont enjoy being in war because I get dropped. Once I got dropped and I chipped my black metallic paint. I was in the bod shop for a whole day. 24 hours!! My favorite murder was in 1981 I killed the president of Germany. I fight for gun's rights. I think if someone used me and killed a person and they get arrested for the kill I'd get very mad. I did the murder and the person gets arrested. We guns would like a day off the battlefield.

The first couple of sessions gave me modest gains ($2-$5 or so), I was clearly the greatest poker player to ever live. I was amazed with the low quality of play at the tables. There I was proudly folding low-suited-aces only to watch people win hands with 10 high. I kid you not. 10 high. I loosened up a little and soon I was revelling in the fishiness of it all, although I was hardly proud of myself when I won my first pot with nothing but A high.

After about 5 hours of play spread out over 3 days I had finally played enough raked hands to get my bonus. Eager to try out something other than the micro limit tables I bought into my first $5 SNG. I had a game plan. Play solid. Play tight. Let everyone else drop and when it's down to 4 or 5 players then make your move. First hand comes along, J2o, yay for rags, makes it easy to fold. Second hand, T8s. I'm one off the button, three people in front of me call, I don't exactly calculate my pot odds, but I do like to play suited connectors and suited one gaps when it's cheap enough so I call. The button folds giving me position, the small blind calls and the big blind checks. The flop is 5d Ad Ts. Hmmm, middle pair and four to a flush. I almost wish I hadn't gotten a piece of it. This is quite often my reaction when I get a small chunk of the flop with a mediocre hand and a mediocre draw. Someone bets 90, I have no read on anyone yet, but he just limped in, so I'm thinking he's either got a mediocre flush draw like me or a pair of Aces with a weak kicker. A couple of people fold, one call in front of me, and I call. The turn is the 2d, I'm already counting the chips I'm going to win when the guy who called the 90 chip raise on the flop goes all in. Uh oh. He could easily have my out kicked, but I just don't think he does. Could I lay down a flush here? Probably. Should I? I don't really know. Did I? Absolutely not. The raiser on the flop folds to get out of our way (at least I read him right!) The other guy flips over JdKc and I'm feeling pretty good. I can see why he made that bet, he was drawing to a straight and a flush, and unfortunately it paid off for him when the river comes up 4d. My first SNG and I'm bounced in 10th place on the second hand. How sad, I was almost a 6:1 favorite in that hand.

Oh well, bad beats happen right? Well that was only the start of my bad night at the SNGs. I won't get into any more detail now, but to give you an idea, the next SNG I played I accidentally sat down at a limit Omaha Hi/Lo table and didn't realize until the first hand was dealt. I don't even know exactly how to play Omaha Hi/Lo. I couldn't figure out what made a qualifying low. Suffice it to say that didn't go well either. So yeah, there are fish at Party Poker, lots of them, and right now I'm afraid I'm one of them.

In the parking lot things were much calmer. There were ambulances treating the injured, and Michael Douglas was walking around trying to adjust his tuxedo. I think he was playing John Kerry. Around that time Rush Limbaugh got on the store's PA system and started talking about how he was there for the victims of the disaster, while John Kerry went off to his fancy tuxedo party. Apparently John Kerry was running for election against Limbaugh, not Bush. We didn't stick around to hear where Kerry nee Douglas was heading in his tux, but it seemed perfectly logical to want to get the hell out of that store to me. The trees really were flying all the hell over the place.

We made our way back to my car where we saw more random destruction including someone riding a bicycle where the front wheel was bent in half. He didn't seem to notice. As we got into the car my cell phone rang.

I told Robin I had figured out the password, "cc3332, easy as pie."

She was clearly impressed, she's a sucker for the bad boys. "How did you figure out cc3332?!" she asked, almost desperate with desire (to know my secrets or just for me, we may never know).

I couldn't resist her charms so I caved and told her. "There was a little question mark next to the password box that said, 'Having trouble remembering your password? Click here to see your hint.'"

"So...what was the hint?" she asked, eager to see how I had crushed their feeble security with my massive intelect.

"cc3332."

A little bit of a geek noir thriller for your "enjoyment." In any event, I ended up getting the same laptop bag that Robin has, a very swank Targus backpack with more pockets than I know what to do with. One for the GBA, one for the iPod, one for my cell phone, after that I'm stumped! Now I just need to actually get my flight, hotel and car booked and figure out what GBA game to buy for the trip. I'm thinking either Astro Boy: Omega Factor or Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.

So I spent the long weekend working on a re-port of our intranet site to .NET. I had originally done a port about 6 months ago and it wasn't that well organized. This time I picked up a couple of new books, to go along with the classic Design Patterns I already had, to help me better plan out the OO architecture.

The second book, Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture was particularly helpful. I made heavy use of the Data Mapper, Table Data Gateway, and Lazy Load (particularly the Ghost variant of Lazy Load) patterns for the Business and Data layers. I'm pretty happy with the work so far, although I was reminded of how much I dislike the PostBack functionality in ASP.NET. It's nice for events on things like the built in Calendar control (which was a huge timesaver on the rewrite of the TimeSheet page), but for submitting forms it's just annoying. I'm still trying to work out a good way to prevent a TimeSheet entry from being added to the database twice if a user hits reload after the submit postback.

I also put alot of effort into bringing the markup up to date. It's semantically meaningful and entirely CSS driven. I tried to minimize the use of tables as much as possible, however for some things like a list of TimeSheet entries a table is still clearly the most valid way of displaying the data. For positioning different page elements though...that's what floating divs are for.

All in all, I think it's was a pretty successful effort. I'm quite fond of the middle tier architecture I've created. The presentation layer still needs work (inasmuch as I didn't implement an overarching architecture there) I'm sure as I port more pages from the first .NET version I'll be able to refactor some of the reappearing features out to a base class.

I've had this picture sitting around since I went to NJ in June. I was using it today to test an app I was mucking around with as an excuse to play with the flickr API. The more I looked at the photo the more it grew on me. It just screams indie rock album cover.

The app I was toying with building was going to try and automatically generate photo mosaics given a source image by breaking it down into small squares, calculating the average color of that square and then searching flickr for photos tagged with a given color. Of course it would probably only work for images with a few basic colors. Most people don't tag their images at flickr with things like burntsienna and perrywinkle, for most of the colors in the spectrum (I'm talking roy g biv here) there are a few hundred images to choose from though. I got sidetracked while working on calculating the average color though and spent most of my time using delegates from the worker thread to update the UI, so now I have an app that can, um, calculate the average color of a photo!

I actually found someone who had worked on a similar app to generate mosaics of a video by using frames from other videos as the tiles. After reading over his work it became clear that I'd have to do more than just calculate the average color of a tile, which also made it clear that I'd likely never get the app really working. On the bright side I finally set up a flickr account. It seems like really nice technology, and pretty close to the cutting edge as far as features go (I love services that provide an API).