2009 Year End Update

Well, 2009 is almost at an end, and I can't say that I'm too sorry to see it go.  The second half of the year has been particularly rough, but new adventures await just around the corner.  Since I haven't been horribly active over the last few months I thought I'd finish up the year with a mini-update and a few of the pictures I did manage to take.

Here's a quick snapshot of the Birthday Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting I made for my friend Swain in mid-November.  Nothing fancy, but I think the colored coconut is a nice touch.

Next we have a snapshot of the massive feast that Kathy, my Mom, Step-Dad, and I had for Thanksgiving this year.  0_0  Might need a bigger table next year....

 This is a set of before-and-after Xmas Loot pictures.  As always Kathy managed to find me some really nifty toys to unwrap even on our pretty tight budget.  I particularly like the MP3 player upgrade to an 8GB Sansa Clip.  I've really gotten addicted to audio books over the last half-year.

And finally, for an extra dose of uber-cute we have a picture of our pet ferrets Floozie and Mozilla.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

DragonCon 2009

Adventure: 20090904









Another DragonCon has come and gone, and unfortunately I think this will probably be the last one I attend.  Frankly, I think DragonCon has just grown too large for my tastes and admittedly rather hermit-like tolerances.  Luckily I did manage to get to see Pete Abrams (Sluggy Freelance), Jennie Breeden (The Devil's Panties), Ryan Sohmer and Lar Desouza (Least I Could Do and Looking For Group) as well as attend the live recording for Sword and Laser with Veronica Belmont (This WEEK in TECH).  I unfortunately made it to nothing else I wanted to see because of the ridiculous crowds and lines.  (I think the most annoying failure was my attempt to see Randal Schwartz (FLOSS Weekly) which involved getting a cab to drive back to the con from the hotel, showing up a half hour early, and finding that although there were still seats they were all "saved"....  I nearly blew a gasket.)  Kathy did manage to get some pretty decent pictures and I think this collage pretty much conveys the DragonCon experience.

I think I did pretty well for loot though.  My favorite is the 2d20 damage flail.  ^_^

Gaming table UPGRADE

Experiment: 20090715

Under the heading of "better late than never" we have the entry of a much delayed blog post about the new downstairs gaming table. Over the winter it became very obvious that the old gaming table with it's covering of five year old shelf-paper needed a major over-haul so after the removal of the two middle legs (much hated and always in the way) all of the old shelf paper was painfully striped off first by hand, then by razor blade, and then finally (because I was about to take a hatchet to the whole thing and start over) by use of a wire paint-stripper cup brush. Once the basic structure of the table had been laid bare I slowly built the finish back up with three layers of latex base, a massive amount of sanding, four layers of white board paint, and three layers of very nice green semi-gloss latex. I think the final product turned out rather well.

G-FORCE

Adventure 20090711

Kathy and I were lucky enough to be invited to an advance screening of Disney's new movie G-FORCE 3-D, and I have to say that I was quite impressed. I'm not a movie critic, and frankly would never want to be one, but what I look for in any movie is a sense of immersion. It seems to me that too often the gimmicks available to the movie industry distract and subtract from the experience rather than draw the audience further in. I generally gauge a movie by how often my attention wanders from the screen and using that measure G-FORCE did surprisingly well. Now don't get me wrong, this is definitely another movie targeted at the family audience with the intention of making large profits off of toy sales, but is that really a bad thing? Frankly, my life is complicated enough right now, and a little break for some mindless entertainment was greatly appreciated. My suggestion is that you see this one in the theater, pay the extra for the 3-D, and let yourself revel in the ability to take your mind off of the hook for two hours.

What I learned at CodeStock 2009

Adventure 20090626

One of my recent long term projects has been an attempt to upgrade my programming skills to "Developer" level, and during one of my research session for that goal I stumbled across a development conference being held here in Knoxville less than a half mile from where I work. I really enjoyed CodeStock and thought that I would share which of the sessions I attended and the links to the nifty tools everyone provided

Friday Sessions:

• Mindstorming 101 by Nathan Blevins. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 is definitely under the "Cool Tools" category and is what I will be using during the design phase of creating my robotic minions.

• A Developers Guide to SQL Server Integration Services by Robert C. Cain

• Open Spaces track facilitated by Alan Stevens and the Friday lunch discussion of "Job advancement that doesn't suck"

• 5 Classic Patterns in Everyday Code by Brian H. Prince

• Back to the Basics: A Programmer's Primer Programming in C# by Keith Elder

• The Basics of ASP.NET by Jeff Blankenburg

Saturday Sessions:

• Getting started with WPF by John Kellar

• Regular Expressions Revisited by Colin Neller. Regulazy by Roy Osherove is an excellent free mini-tool for working with and testing Regular Expressions. The Added Bytes Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet is very nicely formatted and is now hanging on my cubicle wall.

• Be a Better Developer by Michael Wood. Mike Wood was by far the best speaker of the convention, and during his session I ended up taking dozens of little TODOs for books I need to read or re-read, lectures I need to watch, and better habits I am going to try and develop going forward. Some of the highlights are re-reading Getting Things Done and making a habit of re-reading it again every year, reading How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, reading Code Complete, watching the Last Lecture series by Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, making a habit of finding and using one new keyboard shortcut combo each week, and making a habit to do a "Better than" Google search review of all tools every half year or so.
  

• jQuery 101 by Rod Paddock

• How to make your application awesome with JSON, REST and WCF by James Bender

Greg's Birthday and Thermite Experiment Part Two

Experiment: 20090515

When I asked my friend Greg what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday this year he said "You make great Red Velvet Cakes with the White icing... (yeah, I'm in a predictable rut...). As for shape, well feel free to think Steampunk." And thus, as foretold in the prophecy, his doom was sealed.... Err.... I mean, so then I made him a perfectly nice and normal cake with lots of Steampunk-ish flourishes.



After the cake had been devoured we headed out into the backyard for a second try at the Thermite Experiment. This time we increased the quantity, mixed the ignition mixture in with the thermite, wrapped a full coil of magnesium ribbon around the two iron bars, and used plastic army men to show the extent of the heat.







Here's a quick video clip showing just how much more energetic this attempt was than the last one.



And finally, just to add a finale to our geek extravaganza we finished the day with a Diet Coke and Mentos fountain.

Hank's Graduation

Adventure: 20090509

This Saturday Kathy, Carrie, and I went to watch Hank graduate with his second Associates Degree from Pellissippi State Technical Community College. Luckily they have professional photographers for these sorts of things because out of just over a hundred shots I got two that didn't end up completely a waste and a brief segment of fuzzy video footage....

Sam's Thermite Birthday Experiment

Experiment: 20090501

This year was my 40th birthday and I asked for just two simple birthday wishes:

1. A home-made carrot cake with cream cheese icing.
2. Some thermite to play with. ^_^

$40 for 20 seconds of concentrated awesome. Seems like a deal to me. Plus I only used about half the bottle so I think the rest will be going into a small casting experiment.

Carrie's Choco cake o' DOOM!!!

Experiment 090227

My friend Carrie had some pretty definite ideas on what she wanted for her birthday cake:

I have considered my impending birfyday cake...and I want...
*drumroll*
A cake that is so chocolate-y it oozes chocolate-y goodness.
I want a chocolate cake so chocolate-y that there's no possible way we can accuse Sam of ruining chocolate.
I want to see through time *bwahahahahahaha!!!* (and throw all the diabetics into coma's of dark brown delight!)

And hence the "Choco cake o' DOOM!!!" was born in a ritual involving four pounds of chocolate, a perfectly innocent double-layer Dream Whip chocolate cake frosted with a double batch of chocolate butter-cream, and about an hour and a half of careful candy-bar and chocolate chip placement.

Liz's World of Swirl Birthday Cake

Experiment: 090220

My friend Liz requested a yellow cake with chocolate butter-cream frosting for her birthday this year and left the theme and design entirely up to me. Since I had free reign I decided to go for something a little "prettier" than normal and made a Wilton method World of Swirl cake. For future reference I would like to note that this cake took most of four batches of chocolate butter-cream and ended up with so much frosting on it that the cake layers inside actually fell and ended up looking like half layers when we cut it. Another item to note is that the "Bakery Crafts" brand Sparkler Candles I used have a very clear warning on the back instructing that "TO EXTINGUISH, PUT CANDLES IN WATER".... It would have helped a lot if I had read that in advance. On the plus side I got a pretty amusing video sequence out of it.

Jungle Love at the Knoxville Zoo

Adventure 090214

This year I was lucky enough to be able to take Kathy to the "Jungle Love" event at the Knoxville Zoo for Valentines Day. This was a wonderful adults only evening which included a cocktail hour with the Red Pandas at The Boyd Family Red Panda Village, several close-up animal encounters, heavy hors d’oeuvres, delectable desserts, and a hilarious special presentation about the animal kingdom’s "Mating Game" by Kevin Hils, the Director of Education at the Knoxville Zoo. I got extra husband points for this one and Kathy said she "had the BEST VALENTINE'S DAY EVER!!!!" We are already planning to attend again next year! ^_^

King Tut's Grill

Adventure 090131

My wife, four of our friends, and I went to King Tut's Grill last night and it was delicious smothered in awesome with a side order of surprisingly cheap! This little place is tucked away in a corner of the South Knoxville community of Vestal in an ANCIENT ramshackle building with parking you have to get to through a narrow ally. Don't bring an SUV, you might not fit.

We called ahead for reservations and showed up real early to grab seats at one of the five tiny booths and tables and were still the second large group there. Once we were seated the owner Mo took our drink orders and brought them back in huge glass vases. My friend Carrie had been there before and strongly advised we share, so at Mo's suggestion we requested two orders of "the best Greek salad in Knoxville", two Egyptian platters, and two of the "Three Chicken" platters. Everything was fantastic and the servings were huge! Mo is a nut and did several slight of hand tricks for us while our food was being prepared. Once we had gotten most of the way through the meal Mo started up all the funky lights hanging from the ceiling, picked victims from the crowd for Karaoke target practice, started handing out masks and props and otherwise went into full fledged hosting mode. It was corny, it was hokey, and yet I couldn't stop smiling! For desert we shared orders of the baklava, basboosa, and the tiramisu. All of which were great. When we finally needed to head out the bill for six over-stuffed big eaters was only $101.

King Tut's Grill
4132 Martin Mill Pike
Knoxville, TN 37920
(865) 573-6021

Hank's Blue Flamey Birthday Cake

Experiment: 090116

My friend Hank provided three guidelines for his birthday cake request this year:

1. Blue Cake
2. Flames either real or fondant
3. It must be eatable and tasty

Six shot-glasses, a bottle of Everclear, and a lot of blue dye later I presented him this.

Best DVD of 2008

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

What can I say? If you haven't bought a copy of this yet you need to go do so right now. This is my personal recommendation for the best DVD of 2008. Dr. Horrible has it all, comedy, romance, catchy songs, super villains, and ray guns. What more do you need to know?

Happy New Year

We survived another year!
Be amazed, be very, very amazed....