After debating for at least 6 months I pulled the trigger on a new dSLR which showed up today.  The Canon Rebel XTi, 10 megapixel; it ships with a 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens.

I take absolutely terrible photos with any camera, and this camera is (among other things) a means to learning how to do it right.  I've been meaning to take more pictures of the kids and various other things and this will be a big help.  Plus, it's cool.  I ran around taking pics of everyone and  everything at Carspot today.  Watch my flickr stream in the coming days.

So, five years ago when my daughter was brand new, I was a runner.  In the time since then I've gotten into the worst shape of my life and keep meaning to do something about that.  By looking at me, you wouldn't necessarily think that I've got a got or anything, but it's there; I also have various pants that don't fit.  The necessary motivation came recently when everyone at CarSpot decided to have an Al's Run team.  Al's Run 2003 was pretty much the last time I intentionally did exercise of any kind.  I have gone jogging a total of One Times so far this year and two miles was unbelievably painful.  Combined with a newborn who's not sleeping very much I am not in a good place to start training, but today I bought some actual running shoes so now I feel committed.  When I quit I was able to do an 8k with an average mile time of around 7:45; that was a long time ago and I didn't like wine and steaks as much as I do now.  I'm going to pick a 5k in July as an intermediate goal.

I've long been a fan of Casey Chestnut, who calls his blog Brains-n-Brawn.  Now that I'm running again maybe I can claim "Smarts and Swiftness" ?

 

Ethan Connor Payne.  Born at 4:47PM CST on April 25th.  7lbs. 60z, 21" long.  We just brought him home.  Mom and baby are doing great.

My wife is 1 week overdue now, so they are inducing her into labor around 7am tomorrow morning.  I will therefore be mostly off the grid for a brief while, though I'll post pictures when everything seems OK.

I have several semi-complete articles, so I should be posting quite a bit in May.

It would appear the new workstation is stable now, after flashing the BIOS and other tomfoolery. 

Despite being "overkill" in terms of hardware, it still takes for freaking ever to install things in Vista, Live Messenger being the worst offender by far.  Now I need to reorganize my office, set up the extra monitors and speakers, and go about intalling my various development tools.  I should have a very productive weekend.

Yesterday when I got home I plugged the new mobo in, and wonder of wonders it would post.

Last night I had birthing classes, had to go get our daughter from Grandma's after than, so at 11pm I sat down to finish building the workstation.  Vista kept treating me to bluescreen/stop errors after copying files.  Doing some research I found that many motherboards + Vista64 have an issue booting with 4gb of ram installed, so I eventually took some RAM out and got windows installed.  There was a hotfix for this issue but I kept having hard lockups in Vista.  Long story short: I flashed the BIOS after about 4 Vista lockups, Vista insisted on using it's "standard VGA driver" instead  of the Vista 64 driver that came with my 8800 GT.  I'll have to see tonight if Vista is happy with the new BIOS and/or the NVIDIA unified drivers when I try that. 

Stupid computers...

It would appear the UPS man has dropped off my replacement, time for attempt #2.

So, I set about to RMA my motherboard on Wedesday.  To make a long story short, they gave me a UPS shipping lable and the transit times plus their RMA processing time put the round trip at something like 3 weeks for me.  This is complete BS since by then my window to return/exchange the other parts will be gone.  I shouldn't have to wait a month for something I bought to be made right.  I called NewEgg's customer support to explain this to them, and lo and behold without the slightest bit of resistance they agree to overnight me a new one without making me wait on the whole RMA Process.  I left them a strongly positive note at Reseller ratings and I should be in Quad Core Heaven Friday night or Saturday.

There's an important item to not here.  A DOA Asus motherboard is not the fault of NewEgg, but I am more directly their customer than a customer of Asus.  A company cannot directly pin their customer's satisfaction on the performance of their own vendors.  A layer of indirection is needed.

My sister had a little boy at 9pm last night, Daniel James Sapp.  I'm an uncle for the 3rd time in a short while.

I pulled the trigger on a new desktop setup which is out for delivery according to the internets.  Because of my recent research I went ahead and went the quad core route, and after reading Scott Hanselman's blog post about going x64 being a complete non issue I'll be giving Vista x64 a try.  I also got a 1080p monitor and a Blu-Ray drive; probably slightly overkill but why not.  It's difficult to explain to non-programmers, but an appropriate setup with the right desk space, music, multiple monitors, and a repsonsive machine can make developing software a joy.  It can be a joy without a Raptor drive and a 24" display but these things help. 

I got a decent enough video card to check out some of the recent games, Bioshock being at the top of the list.

I have never been more ready for spring than I am this year.

It was a whopping 40degrees here yesterday and I took advantage of it.  I spent hours chopping ice out of my driveway, I can't type so well today due to the blisters on my fingertips.  The huge piles of snow on either side of my driveway make surprisingly good reach-level beer holding areas, and I pulled out the bbq pit and made some brats.

I also wrote a Mapping tool this weekend.  When you're first getting started it's interesting to note the similarities in flat file, XML, object-to-object, and SQL to Object mapping: at least in terms of the initial abstractions that present themselves.  I specifically wanted to solve a flat-file to complex object problem and write a tool that previews the mapping in real time and realized I couldd do quite a bit more if I weren't lazy.  The main place I could see using this in my own efforts are class-to-class mapping.  For example: if you are consuming a web service the proxy generated will return to you class instances using whatever naming conventions and object structure the designers of said service wanted to give you.  Even if another team in your organization is the maintainer of this service, Directly using these proxy types within your code is probably a mistake; mapping ProxyObject.PrimaryKey to MyDomainObject.Id quickly becomes tedious.  A mapping tool that does the annoying work for you and saves the mapping as an easy XML file or better yet generates transformation code might be helpful. 

I downloaded the update package and installed from that, no luck.  I started searching for other people with the same problem and found that it is quite common.  I passed over some of the insane "fixes" in favor of trying some of the easier approaches.  Apparently, the Zune installer requires that the Windows Firewall service be running during installation.  What a bizarre dependency.  I'm all Zuned up now and liking it.  Now my wife wants one.

At some point recently I noticed the tremendous stack of CDs I continually burn to stay on top of Dot Net Rocks, Hanselminutes, and AVRant.  I have to admit (maybe I'm old?) I completely did not get the whole iPod/Mp3 player thing for the longest time; I'm a dinosaur who likes owning physical media and my ancient car does not have a line-in.   I do my serious music listening on a two-channel system if that tells you anything. For music and podcasts, though, I've been wanting a portable media device.  An evaluation of the reviews of the 2nd Generation Zune and the GDC2008 announcement that some form of XNA would be coming to all the Zune editions and I decided I needed to have a Zune. I had originally decided on the 80gb zune since it looked cool online and it would hold the entire history of .NET rocks and my entire digital music collection, but seeing them in person, the 8gb is so much sleeker and smaller and portable feeling I ordered that one instead.  The 80gb Zune would be like carrying a second Tilt.

It would appear that I did not blog my 2007 goals, the meeting of which were a mixed bag.  I do have some solid 2008 goals.

1. Debt:  Jen and I have never very agressively went after paying off the student loans and credit cards but carrying debt has started to bother me a bit more in light of the current state of the economy, and I'd just like to have that $$ to spend and save every month.  An aggressive but attainable 2008 goal is to reduce the debt by 33%.
2. MVP: I'd like to keep my Microsoft MVP - Solution Architecture status.  I need to seriously get my arse in gear on this one, but since my wife starts on days next week I can get back into speaking engagements and such.
3. Total home organization: This one is hard to explain without making me sound like an OCD nutjob.  There are various things all over the house that are just sitting on the floor of the closet, etc. because there was no other place to put them.  I spent a rather large amount of time this past fall setting up shelving, getting rid of moving boxes, and buying storage bins but there's honestly not a single room in the house I could call "done" except maybe for my kitchen.  I'm hoping to get this task to 90% before Kid #2 is born.
4. Save: I save a fair bit every month and I usually drain the accounts 1x per year in order to purchase some kind of toy, usually audio/home theater related.  In 2008 I want to save enough to take advantage of this poor real estate market and buy some land.
5. Let it go: This one is a bit personal, but I'll vaguely phrase it as "I don't have time for people who don't have time for me", no matter how much history there might be.

I have some other minor goals that are not official Resolutions.  There are some home improvement projects I'd like to get done, I'd like to build a great team at work (unfortunately largely out of my control), I'd like to build my cellar up to about 50 bottles of wine, and exercise a little bit. 

Hmm, it's been a while since I've posted anything worth reading to anyone but my Mom!  I shall soon remedy this.

I'm in the process of securing the approval of Klipsch for my final edited version of the Podcast I did this week, so that should be up on KlipschCorner.com soon.  During this endeavor, I thought of an excellent idea for code/architecture podcasts, which I will not share until I have an example.

I've had the good fortune to actually interview some people lately.  Yesterday I thought up my favorite new interview question

"If you were interviewing me and wanted to stump me with a reasonable .NET question, what would it be?"

I need to qualify what "reasonable" means or come up with a better way of stating the challenge to avoid lame questions.  Yesterday the question I was asked was "What is the default file size limit for the FileUpload control in ASP.Net?".  Legitimate question to ask a senior .NET person or too specific to know unless you just used it this morning?  I'll let you be the judge.

The word on the street is that the .NET User Group install fest has been rescheduled for next week Tuesday the 18th.  If this turns out to be the case I will not be able to make this, and you will miss my riveting grok talks on Client Application Services, Extension Methods, and Compact Framework 3.5.

I will be in Indianapolis on invitation from a little company called Klipsch Audio Technologies, where I will be doing some listening of upcoming products and a Podcast with an acoustic engineer or two. 

So I'm driving home today, nearly to my daughter's daycare, waiting to turn left in the small town where I live.  The light just turned green and before any cars moved I get completely crashed into by one of those enormous dodge trucks.  I haven't been in a 2-car accident before (I'll have to blog the story of the amazing rollover Festiva some day) so I was a bit stunned but we pulled over to the side of the road.  The guy who hit me was very apologetic, said it was totally his fault (he did completely nail me going 30mph or better while I was at a stop), we called the cops to file the accident report and as soon as the officer showed I up I said "Listen, I need to pick my daughter up from daycare, it's $1/minute if I'm late."  He asked if it was such and such daycare on such and such street and I responded in the affirmative.  He said to go on and he'd get the other guy's statement and meet me at the daycare.  Such is the benefit of living in a very small town I suppose.  I had called my wife, who is a 2nd shift nurse, and she cannot leave work even for a few minutes unless it's the most severe emergency; google "patient abandonment" for fun.  The standards our health care providers are held to is absolutely insane.  When people say doctors and nurses are overpaid I shake my head in utter disbelief.

At any rate, I have some back and neck pain: perhaps from whiplash and perhaps from shoveling snow all morning but I'm getting checked out by my doc tomorrow to make sure nothing is amiss. 

I posted about my AIM6/vista issue, which soon escalated to "your hard drive seems to have gone bad at the exact time you were reinstalling windows" according to Dell and leaving me stranded for 3 days total.  Things like this make me so angry I can't see straight sometimes, I lose a lot of time when I have hardware issues and the person on the other end of the connection who is not particularly fluent in English often does not seem to care too much.  The guy who hit me was so apologetic and forthcoming with his insurance information that I walked away with my car bashed up, back pain, and the prospect of inconvienient car-in-the-shop, but overall far less disturbed than a simple electronic failure had made me.  Principles are important.

The damage is not as bad as I originally thought.  The guy's tank truck was barely scratched.

Definative evidence was presented today, it's going to be a boy.  The picture below is not a picture of the male evidence, as such a thing might get me into trouble in this day and age.  I confess I was seriously hoping for a boy, not that another little girl would have been bad.  I joke that Brooke (she's a bit of a tomboy) is "boy-enough for me" if we had another girl, but this is great.  No name choices yet, I'm researching things are a little different but not too weird. 

 

Thanksgiving has come and gone and I had an absolutely smashing time with my family, especially my dad.  The apple (me) fell perhaps a bit further from the tree (dad) than he would sometimes prefer: I'm a college guy and mostly a software nerd, he got electronics training in the Navy and is more of a hard core electronics nerd.  I write software and he fixes GE's MRIs.  MRI is just insane to read about: Magnets who's strength is measured in Teslas, titanium/niobium coils, and superconductive circuits that lose less than .001% of a charge in 1000 years.  Dad and I completely rebuilt my center channel since I had just ordered a new sqauker (mid-range horn) diaphragm, and he was very disappointed in my soldering job so all the solder points were re-done and the internal wiring was cleaned up with zip ties and such.  If I ever sell the thing I'll take a picture of the internals to show what a top-notch job was done.  As part of this whole effort, he diagnosed some possible issues with a free osciliscope I inherited: someone smart enough to fix insane superconductive electronics is pretty handy to have around.

Another place where the apple was flung far is metaphysics: I'm an atheist and my father was raised (and raised us) in variants of the Babtist religion.  A lot of red wine into the second night of the visit we had covered:

• Religion and why it has no bearing on my life and why that doesn't make me a bad human being
• Technology
• Wealth
• Relativity (space time, the train and some of Einstein's gedenken experiments)
• Health care: dad had a great (if depressingly Orwellian) observation about health care.  As the goverment gets more involved in our health care decisions, how long will it be before a helecopter flies through my neighborhood with a diffration horn  screaming "Time to wake up and exercise!!  Keep health care costs low, citizens!"   My solution: health insurance does not "work" using the current popular definitions of "work" without an army of healthy people bearing the costs for those who are not healthy.  Get the goverment out of the health care industry alltogether and you won't find yourself doing pushups at the point of a gun.

"You're not as far into la-la land as I thought" was my father's final judgement on my night of philosophy and politics.  I meet incredibly few Objectivists in day-to-day life, but the more scientific and rational someone's job is the more I find them coming around to my way of thinking.  The world is not populated by John Galts, we wouldn't recognize it if it were.  There are great masses of "Eddie Willers" who can be reached.  Recall Eddie Willers from Atlas Shrugged: 3rd in command, not a Prime Mover, always playing the supporting role to Dangy Taggart.  Eddie is rightfully counted by Rand as one of the heros of the book though.  He rides on the rails made of Rearden metal and he could never have created the metal, the bridge design, or the engines propelling the train, but he also does not seek to enslave the minds who did create these things.  My dad perhaps could not have invented the superconductor system in one of GE's MRIs, but he's smart enough to know what it took to make the thing and can fix the thing when it goes down.  He's smarter than 99.999% of the people out picketing for "universal healthcare." 

Inside a piece of technology like an MRI is a glimpse of the astounding effort, resources, and intelligence that it takes to make our standard of living possible.  I hope the scientists and engineers who work on them gain astounding wealth, and I hope GE makes hundreds of millions of dollars on MRI technology: it's the only reason this life-saving technology exists.

This story on CNN is a fun read if nothing else.

So these guys are going to meet to determine if the satirical Flying Spaghetti Monster is in fact a real religion.  What makes a "real" religion and how people who think there's more to our interaction with reality than rational epistemology are going to make this determination is anyone's guess.  Oh to be a fly on the wall...

On the surface this is a joke, but there may be something more sinister going on.  One of the favorite weapons of religious apologists these days is Equivocation.  I have observed and participated in debates where the apologist all too quickly abandons any attempt to defend the actual veracity of their supernatural beliefs but instead takes one of two approaches: one is to instead focus on all the good that has come from the faith of believers, the other is to claim that rejecting religion is just another form of faith, being an atheist is just a different cult, that aruing for religion to be kept out of our schools and goverment makes one "just another kind of fundamentalist.  In a small way, the religious declaring the following of the FSM to be a "real" religion seems to me an under the radar attempt at equivocation yet again, an attempt to rob the Flying Spaghetti Monster of it's satirical value.  An attempt, in other words, to furthur the view that there is no difference between believers and non believers.

The idea that being an atheist or rejecting specific religious claims makes one "just another kind of fundamentalist" seems absurd to me.  What dogma have we all embraced to assume that lightning in the night sky is not Thor throwing his hammer at Giants?  To quote Sam Harris "What dogma have we all embraced to not take the wishes of Zeus into account during our daily affairs?"  Usully, when arguing semantics, I start with the Dictionary. So, when consulting Merriam-Webster I learn the following:

fundamentalism

One entry found.

fundamentalism

So, looking at #2 put me into a conumdrum.  I am indeed a strict adherant to the basic principles that indicte if I try to walk out of the 3rd story window of my office here, I will accellerate towards the ground due to the force of attraction between my body and the earth.  Does this make me a "gravity fundamentalist", and my views on gravity deserve no more or less consideration than those of the "Intelligent Falling" movement?  Am I by denfinition a "Science Fundamentalist" or "Rational Fundamentalist"?  Religious fundamentalists make the claim that the words in their sacred texts are true in the most literal sense; these words do not change with the times, they are not metaphors to be interpreted and they are unchanging.    I make the claim that through rational observation of reality we can predict and describe the behaviors of the natural universe.  That, to me, is a difficult claim to argue with, and it it turns out to be incorrect, what are the alternatives? 

We may some day discover some "Unified Theory" that ties together relativity and quantum mechanics.  Rational people will welcome this as another leap in human knowledge.  Sure, there will be some people who cling to their old pet theories.  I don't see the words of the old testament being re-written to include equal rights for women, or the words of Isaiah prescribing the murder of children "toned down" to be better aligned with what we now know about morality.  That's why I don't like being called a fundamentalist.

{Edit: I should have gotten the rest of the way through my RSS reader this morning.  The same topic on Richard Dawkins's site: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1881,n,n}

I'm sitting at my kitchen table tonight burning about a dozen podcasts for my commute.  For a while I stuck to Dot Net Rocks but I've been throwing in the occasional Hanselminutes and Audioholics into the mix as well.  Tonight is the first time in a while I donn't truly have to do anything right now.  I still can't make any public announcements on the work situation but suffice to say my typical day is go to work --> pick up daughter --> put kiddo to bed at 8pm --> work till 12pm; throw in some required travel and marathon meetings and I'm more than a little tired.  I have two solid, relevant articles I need to complete and just haven't had the time.  In the next two weeks I'll be getting our new WPF based product into a demoable state and preparing for a talk in front of 600 people in Atlanta.

Tonight shall be spent catching up on Netflix night with my friend M. Chateauneuf du Pape and little else. 

Some people I know personally got an invitation to see Bram Stoker's Dracula on BD this weekend as one of my two Halloween movie nights this month.  I would encourage Milwaukee area nerds to try to make this one, in addition to the screening of one of my favorite films someone has promised to bring over a Halo edition 360 for some 106" front projection large and loud H3 action. 

I just received my copy of "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a new world" by Alan Greenspan.  In college I didn't follow politics with the interest that I do now, but one of my best friends was studying finance and is now a major analyst for Bank One (or whoever bought them) in Chicago.  Despite having a bit of a bleeding heart sometimes, he always spoke highly of Mr. Greenspan, commenting on his clarity of analysis and his cold, appropriate focus on facts combined with his incredible vision.  When I learned that Greenspan had become a member of Ayn Rand's inner circle many years ago, I thought it likely that solid moral principles (as well as a great mind) had been guiding his intelligent decisions throughout his career.  I consider Greenspan a rare example in today's political climate, and he may be one of the most well known confirmed Objectivists still alive.  I wonder if the anti-life religoius zealots in the then-growing Republican Right knew what principles Greenspan really stood for; despite being callled a "Republican lacky" for many years, I don't think Greenspan thinks much of the current neocon nonsense.  Read the book to see.

using(Damon)
{
   Wife.Oven.Add(Damon, new Bun() );
}

Yes, things are far enough along now to safely announce that my wife is knocked up with our second child, due in April of 2008.  We are pretty excited of course.  I am hoping for a son to play first person shooters on the Playstation 6 when he is old enough of course, but really I'm just excited to be bringing a child into our home.  Brooke is very excited to be an older sister, she has repeatedly volunteered to be a Teacher for the new youngster.  Topics she professes teaching ability in include: "I will teach it how to play, and eat candy, and watch TV,  and sleep".  You go Brooke.

Hopefully the ultrasound information will be detailed enough for a WPF 3d "baby flyby" application I can deploy over ClickOnce.

 

I'm 30 today.  Yay me.

I haven't been able to try my lighting technique yet, so for now you'll have to put up with more bad photography.  Here is a shot of the seating I mentioned:

My car stranded me on the side of the freeway this morning, the alternator belt dropped off.  My Subaru dealer suggested that 'rocks or animals' might be responsible.  Yeah, the gophers in my yard must have it in for me.  Anyway add 'car' to the list of things I've broken recently.   I got my projector back today at least, and chilled in the home theater for several hours tonight while I wrote some code.  I should be back in action on nearly all fronts tomorrow, my productivity has been abysmal of late.

• I've been enjoying the HBO Series "Rome" via Netflix.  I could never comit the time to actually keep up with a miniseries while it's on, but HBO's original programming is interesting.
• On Thursday the home theater recliners Jen and I bought come in.  They are very nice Palliser leather home theater chairs.  I've also made some cosmetic changes to the home theater, so I will experiment with lighting and try to take some decent pictures; I think this is going to involve me carrying lamps down there.
• I often post about audio/video related gatherings, often as part of the Klipsch Forums group.  This week people from Indianapolis, Maryland, Chicago, and California are coming up for a Lake Country gathering taking place at my house and two others.  Friday at my place is the first event and we are watching "300" on BluRay, this will be sandwiched between what is usually hours of system tweaking, scene demoing, watching trailers, playing HD games, equipment auditioning, and audio geek stuff like that.  Lots of jazz and beer, and I should be fully recharged by sunday afternoon.

That's all for now.  I have WORKING HARDWARE so I can resume my technical articles.  I need to get some sleep now so I can perform my scrum master duties tomorrow.

Milton Friedman, not strictly an objectivist, has some great quotes in Capitalism and Freedom.  Today, musing over my issues with UPS (didn't deliver my projector), Dell, Subaru (the local dealer not the car company that I still admire), and others, one idea from his book came back to me.  I'm going to slightly mis-quote this admirable thinker rather than dig through his book for the exact words of this quote, forgive my laziness:

"You can coerce people to be at a certain place at a certain time, and to perform a task in that place for a certain number of hours, but you cannot coerce people to do their best."

You cannot use force on people to get them to give up the best products of their minds. 

My beloved HD projector started exhibiting some issues, mostly during Blu-Ray playback over the HDMI port.  Cruising some forums it seems that this huge purple line or white flash I sometimes see could be fixed by either firmware (not user upgradable) or a stuck dynamic Iris.  My projector (PT-AX100U) uses a dynamic iris to increase the contrast significantly.  My home theater and gaming depends on this device, I'm incredibly spoiled by always playing games on a 106" screen in a huge room in 5.1 so I'm not going to bother with any games until I get it back.  This would be the 4th piece of technology I've broken in a very short period of time.

Movies at Damon's, which I know some readers are on the mailing list for, will resume when my projector comes back.  300 will most likely be the next title, as it is supposed to be stunning in HD.  Anyone in the metro Milwaukee area who wants to be on the mailing list, leave or send me your address.

Mr. and Mrs. Payne are back in town after our honeymoon in St. Lucia.  It was too much fun for me to describe here.  Check out the Flickr link at the top of the page to see a few of my favorite pictures of our time in Castries and Soufrieres.  It was hard to get up toay.

Although I'm nearly as skinny as ever I am only about 2 months on my way back up from the rock bottom of "Worst shape of my adult life".  This climb was inspired by my pending beach vacation to St. Lucia and accomplished mostly by doing a few pushups and yard work.  Last week I got a love note from our neighborhood association stating that a $5/day fine was on its way to me if I didn't stop ruining the neighborhood and plant my two required street trees.  On one hand I suppose I did agree to all 800 pages of restrictions when I bought this land and on the other: busybodies, have you nothing better to do than shake your fingers at delinquent neighbors?  We are getting married and subsequently leaving the country in 7 days, not the best time for items requiring surpise time and expense.

This weekend I bought the two largest autumn blaze maple trees I could find, which apparently only barely meet the necessary restrictions and set about digging holes.  The wonderful Kettle Moraine soil is mostly clay, sand, and rocks.  Lots of rocks.  My back is well-worked, I can barely sit up to write this post.  Despite planting one tree each day and doing a ton of other preparation work I still managed to clean my garage and cook two pretty good meals.  Saturday was steak au poivre with gorganzola sauce, using the Cook's Illustrated skillet to oven method and my own worsteshire and butter skillet technique and addition of chives to the gorgonzola.  Ate this with the pan-roasted asparagus that has become a staple of our diet and roasted red potato.  Today I mequite smoked a ginormous rack of ribs on the grill with a sweet dry rub and took half of them to Jen at work.  That woman will never know how good she has it unless she divorces me and subsequently lives entirely on mac 'n cheese.  I need to take some more pictures of some of this stuff but I'm working on my photographic technique.

I'm going to try to get a very long article out tonight, June will likely end up being a light month for writing due to the goings on.

In less than two weeks now, Jen and I are getting married.  Five years, a wonderful daughter, building a house, and a whole buch of other stuff have gone by but I'm surprised to be saying that getting married is steal a big deal.  We are "very secular" as anyone who's met me or read this blog for very long can attest but despite the lack of moral pressure to get hitched it seemed to make more and more sense as time went on for reasons that should be obvious.  Also, Jen likes diamonds.  I am currently recovering from my bachelor party about which I will say nothing but that while I consider myself Young still I cannot shrug off an event such as this without at least two days of healthy food and a lot of I am never drinking agains.  I suppose that phrase is the Hail Mary of the repentant imbiber.  Despite his odd notions about "sins" and other strange ethical constructs my brother and best man did a good job of throwing me my last party as an unmarried man.  I am currently developing grass roots support for the notion that the bachelor party should be a yearly occurance similar to celebrating the wedding anniversery.  The debate and voting on this bill seems to predictably fall along party lines but bi-partisan support can surely be gained in the usual political ways: bribes and favor trading or pork legislation burried in a must pass budget bill.  More information on the Payne-Payne Bachelor Reform initiative as it develops.

It looks like all of my long lost friends and respected colleagues that I had room to invite have responded in the affirmative so none of the "You are dead to me!" cards I created will have to go out.  We've got to squeeze in some dancing practice and a lot of final details but at this point my main concern is just making it through the day without some idiotic disastor like dropping the cake or spilling coffee on The Dress or something.  There's also the final Packing to consider.  My folks have some sort of worldwide timeshare thing that led to us getting a week in St. Lucia immediately after the wedding reception.  By immediately I mean we might have time for a 1 hour cat nap before heading down to O'Hare.  This will be the longest vacation I've ever taken and my first time out of the country (Mexicali does not count) so I'm sure there are any number of things that could go wrong but I'm not going to let anything get to me.  As long as we're not demolished by an early hurricane and our daughter can handle a week without Mom and Dad I'll call it good.  The sure-to-be ridiculous spoiling that awaits her with my parents will probably have her forgetting boring old Mom and Dad in no time.

In all seriousness, Jen is fantastic, she's freaking awesome.  What higher praise could a woman want from a nerd such as myself?  I'm lucky to be with someone who is happy to do the laundry (folding clothes is the one domestic skill I never gained competancy in) in exchange for my often experimental cooking.  I brag to my friends that she's almost beaten Zelda on the Wii for the second time.  She does her best to tolerate my Capitalist rantings at 1am after I've just finished a new economics book.  She loves it that I slowly absorb medical terminology such that she can complain about sepsis or a sub-dural hemotoma without also having to serve as a dictionary (it really ruines the flow of a story).  Are these the most important things in a mate? Maybe or maybe not, but its hard to offer examples to outsiders when you just have a rythm that works.  Also, Jen is hot.  We've been through a lot together and the future looks pretty good.

Oh, have I been busy.  This was the last weekend Jen has off before our wedding on June 9th so we were wisely utilizing it to goof off.  I cooked pancakes, Grilled shrimp skewers (sooo good), and homade chocolate mousse with strawberries.  Still, I have several articles in various stages of completion that I should be able to publish in the coming weeks:

• A further discussion of ProjectEuler problems along with a Big Integer implementation
• The next stage of the Designer Host discussion (Designer[1]) for .Net 2
• Thoughts on the moral principles involved with advocating, using, and creating Open Source Software