FYI:  We got some new games for Christmas, and here are the friend codes for those games:

Animal Crossing City Folk:  5112-7902-0335
Guitar Hero World Tour:  0302-3894-4530

Also, lots of Christmas pictures are coming soon.  Stay tuned.

As promised, more pictures of Emma have been put online.  I added a few new pictures to the “Autumn 2008” album, starting with this photo.  There is also a Christmas 2008 photo album, with subalbums for each of the times we celebrated Christmas.

In longstanding Vacant Nebula tradition, I am kicking off the new year with a look back at what happened here over the last year.1

We came into the year in the midst of a writer’s strike, which allowed us to experience new reality shows.  Then, we decided to formally provide a Vacant Nebula Statement Of (dis)Integrity.  (I’m still waiting on free stuff to start flowing in.)  We also came into the year with a pregnant Stephanie, and we went on a final just-the-two-of-us vacation in Atlanta. Then, I had a few months to kill until Emma arrived, so I tried my hand at drawing maps from memory, which didn’t go so well.  I broke a delivery at work, which led to a few less-than-awesome meetings before everything was sorted out.  I studied eclipses, and now I have plans for August 21, 2017.  Mark your calendars!  I also got my name mentioned by (a blog hosted by) The New York Times, and made a few observations about the upcoming Firefox 3. (Wow, it feels like I have always had Firefox 3, but it was only nine months ago!)

And then life changed when Stephanie decided she was tired of being pregnant and ready to be a mom, something that comes with its own holiday.  I wrote some words and posted some pictures concerning the momentous arrival of our very own Emma Leigh.  Over the year, Stephanie would make a few posts about the experiences of motherhood.  Of course, life must go on and eventually we got some more uneventful posts, like when someone I’m almost kind of related to was briefly on national television, or that time I tried out Facebook and learned that I actually don’t hate it.  Then I said something controversial and soon after retracted it (the first and thus far only time anything posted here has been retracted).

We went on our annual beach trip, and took some photos while we were there.  Over the summer I delighted you with some awesome stuff, and then to get everyone ready for international athletics I posted a schedule of the Beijing Olympics.  True story: if I look at the statistics for number of visitors to this site, and August 8 or August 9 are included in the graph, the rest of the graph is a flat line rounded to zero.  Apparently having a page titled “2008 Beijing Summer Olympics TV Schedule” posted the day the Olympics started will nab you quite a few hits from search engines.

As the summer cooled down, so did the economy.  I found out I won’t have my job much longer, and gas prices soared to new heights, leading to awkward conversations about gas.  Then it was time for an election which later inspired some reflection.  Then to finish out the year, I commented on my long-overdue completion of the Narnia books and took a long Christmas vacation.

Along the way, I also reviewed a few games, and posted way more pictures and videos of Emma than would be practical to list here.  And I guess that’s all that’s worth mentioning from this most recent trip around the sun.  May you all have a happy new year!

This post is to let you know about several small tweaks to this site that I’ve been working on lately, even though you probably don’t care at all. :)

One of the cooler things is that I’ve written some PHP code to programmatically generate gradient images.  If you’ve looked around the web you know that gradients are essential to modern web design, and I figure there’s no need to fire up Photoshop everytime I need one.  (Now if I can just write a glossy floor generator I’ll be totally web 2.0 compliant.)  You can view the gradient generator source code, if you’d like.  Of course, this kind of thing is so easy to do with PHP and a bit of 7th grade math that it’s almost not worth posting.  But I figured I’d share anyway.

Thus far I have put these gradients into action in two places on this site: as sexy new comment headers (as seen here, for example); and in the background of any picture in our photo album.

I can’t remember if I ever posted about this, but I wrote some Javascript a while back which is currently in use on the photos page, which scales the photo to fill your browser.  jQuery is awesome.  (And every modern browser1 can scale images without making them look grainy.)

I’ve also fixed the bug with the stored name/e-mail from adding a comment.  I have to apologize for the accidental breach of privacy, which would have exposed your e-mail address to other visitors to the site for up to an hour after your visit.  Now the name/e-mail fields are filled in by Javascript, so they are not cached server-side.

Another small change is that timestamps on posts and comments are now converted to your local timezone.  You can still hover over the timestamp to see an ISO-8601 timestamp, part of the datetime microformat I adopted when I added hAtom support.  Speaking of which, I finally found a way to validate hAtom: there is a site, transformr.co.uk, which will take a URL to a page supporting hAtom, and it will generate a true atom feed for it.  Here is mine.  I’m still not sure who would benefit from that though.  If you know enough to use the hAtom feed, then you probably know enough to click the little feed icon in the address bar too.  Oh well, it’s there if you want it.

If anyone decided to make use of the gradient generator code I posted yesterday, be advised that I just added alpha channel (i.e. transparency) support.  I’ve updated the source code to include these new changes.

Something strange I found out is that PHP only supports a 7-bit alpha channel, even though PNG (and really any image format supporting transparency) uses the same number of bits for the alpha channel as for the red, green, and blue1.  I’m assuming this is because PHP uses 32-bit signed integers, and if they let the alpha channel use all 8 remaining bits they would use the sign bit.  And heaven forbid people need to know a little bit about twos-complement.  Oh well.

And of course, if you use transparent PNGs, you should know they are not supported by IE6.  But I’m guessing any IE6 users out there are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that a lot of sites look strange for them.

We woke up this morning to find our yard blanketed with an inch or two of snow!  Of course, this meant we needed to take Emma out for her first sledding experience.

I’ve put up a new album of snow photos, which you should certainly check out.  We also took some video of the experience, which I am posting below.  Enjoy!