I think I have found the Bizarro World version of myself. I set up a Google Alerts feed for “Kip Robinson” some time back, curious to see if I’m being mentioned anywhere. To no one’s surprise, I’m not.1 Most of the new hits are either 1) this blog, 2) random business meeting minutes that somehow involved a “Kip Robinson”, or 3) a blog from a Mormon couple in California. It is the latter, sarahnkip.blogspot.com, where you will find Bizarro Kip Robinson:

If you read the blurb on the sidebar, you will see that I share essentially nothing in common with Bizarro Kip, other than the name:

Anybody that knows Kip knows that he is adventurous. He is into anything outdoorsey and anything that get’s your heart racing. He is currently in the process of applying for many different fire departments. He is also working full time for his dad’s construction company as a project manager. Kip still finds time to hit the gym, ride his dirt bike and spend time with his wife. He is working hard to ensure a comfortable and happy future for our family.

Last week I did something quite significant. I told my DVR to stop recording The Simpsons. Can you believe the show has been running for twenty years? That’s crazy! Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to care about the show lately. My DVR would record it, but I usually wouldn’t watch it until there came one of those rare days when we generally didn’t have anything to do. Then I’d sit down and try to get caught up on Simpsons episodes. I say “try” because only about fifty percent of the time would I actually be able to watch the whole episode. The other half of the time the show was delayed because of some sporting event that I couldn’t care less about, which means at best I could see the beginning of the episode.  In fact, just such a thing happened when I went to watch the 20th anniversary special, which I had heard was very good. This was when I finally decided to give up on the show.

So far in this post, I’ve done a lot of complaining. While complaining a highly popular sport on the internet, I’m going to try to spend the rest of this post reminiscing fondly.

I was exactly eight years and one month old on December 17, 1989. I have no idea what I was doing that Sunday evening, but I know I wasn’t watching the first episode of this new cartoon on Fox called The Simpsons. Before long, everyone knew who Bart Simpson was. I knew that Bart’s show was one of those shows that I wasn’t allowed to watch. It’s actually quite strange, by today’s standards, to think that this show was ever controversial. Especially the first season or two. I mean, the family even went to church and there’s usually some kind of “everybody hugs” moment at the end of the show. What’s even stranger, though, is to consider that there would be no Fox News today if it weren’t for Bart Simpson’s popularity.1

Once when I was in fourth grade I decided to sneak a peek at this forbidden show. It was Homer Defined, the episode where Homer causes a meltdown unrequested fission surplus at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. That episode aired on October 17, 1991, but I could have been watching a rerun of it. I didn’t see what was so great about the show, but I only saw a few minutes of the show before turning it off and going back in the living room for fear of being caught watching this show I wasn’t supposed to watch. The part I saw was where Professor Frink showed a diagram of concentric circles and explained that “These unfortunate people [in the center circle] will be instantly killed.  This circle, which I am sad to say we are in, will experience a slower, considerably more painful death.”

The first episode that I really watched in entirety was The Front, the one where Bart and Lisa write an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon and submit it in their grandfather’s name. In the cartoon, as I recall, Itchy sends Scratchy to heaven, either by killing him or by knocking him upward very far. Itchy arrives through Elvis Presley’s floor, with his head going into the TV. Elvis says something like “this show ain’t no good” and shoots the TV screen (and Scratchy). I’m not sure why, but my brother and I thought that was the funniest thing, and we repeated the line over and over. “This show ain’t no good. BANG!”2 That episode aired April 15, 1993, but we were watching it in syndication. I was in middle school, so it was probably more like 1995 when I watched it.

After that, The Simpsons became a show that we watched regularly. I think it was on twice a day in syndication, so we got caught up on the first five or six seasons pretty quickly. Over the next decade, I watched pretty much every new episode that aired. There were many great episodes and many forgettable episodes. Two that jump to mind are The Cartridge Family (where Homer gets a gun), and Homer’s Phobia (where Homer has a new friend that he finds out is gay). I continued to watch as the quality of the show went downhill for a while, before it seemed to kind of bottom out in the mid 2000s.

If I had to pick one moment in the show where I might say the show jumped the shark, for me anyway, it would be Million Dollar Abie, which aired on April 2, 2006.3 That was the episode that featured the “diePod.” I remember thinking to myself, “this is the kind of writing I can expect from this show. Who thought this was funny?” It just epitomized every corny joke that I hadn’t laughed at over the last few years.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been any good episodes since then. The funniest episode in years was That 90’s Show, which aired in 2008. The episode featured a flashback to the 90s, hilariously and intentionally shattering the show’s continuity. I mean, the show technically started in the 80s, so a flashback to the 90s should just be a flashback to the first ten seasons of the show! This was combined with many many references to the decade I became a teenager in, so I guess it was designed to appeal to me. I mean, Homer was in a Seattle grunge rock band named “Sadgasm.” The song “Closing Time” was used throughout the episode to represent the entire decade. Weird Al makes a guest appearance. They watch an episode of Seinfeld. I was laughing the whole episode.

Unfortunately, since that time I haven’t kept up with the show. When the show moved to HD, it started requiring a lot more space to have eight episodes of the show sitting on my DVR going unwatched. Maybe the writing isn’t really at fault; maybe I’ve actually grown into and out of the target demographic over the past twenty years. Whatever the reasons may be, I’m now saying goodbye to the show.

For those of you who don’t follow us on Facebook, I have added two new photo albums. First are pictures from Christmas/New Year’s in Newton.

And second, we have pictures of me pushing Emma around in a sled in the three inches of snow that we got here in Concord last night.  I also have a short video of me pushing Emma around in her sled. Enjoy!

I’ve never thought deeply about this topic before I had a child in the process of acquiring this mangled mess of words we call The English Language... but pronouns are hard you guys!

We sometimes ask Emma who different people in pictures are, so that she can remember the names of those family members she doesn’t see every day. When we get to a picture of Emma, we’ll say “Emma, who’s that?”

“Baby,” she’ll reply.

Then we will say “Emma, that’s you!”

At least, that’s what used to happen. After doing that for some time, if we ask Emma who is in a picture of Emma, she’ll now respond “you!!” And really, that’s our own fault. We told her that it was a picture of You, and so she learned who You was. Apparently You is a baby who looks suspiciously like Emma.

We could try to correct her by telling her it’s “me,” but won’t that get confusing when she actually does learn pronouns? She’ll wonder, “Why did mommy and daddy say that picture of me was a picture of them?” So I guess for now we’ll have to teach her “that’s Emma.” We’re also working on the whole you/me thing with finger pointing, but I’m not sure if it’s too advanced for a twenty-two month old.

Or maybe I could just try explaining that my “you” is your “me” and your “you” is my “me.” There’s nothing confusing about that, right?

Just like the last four years, the beginning of a new year on Vacant Nebula is marked by a look back at the posts of the previous year. I’m not sure if anyone else gets anything out of these posts, but I enjoy making them because there are so many things that I forget about. So let’s see what all we have been posting about.

Early in the year I made several small changes to this site. Then we got some snow. On Valentine’s Day I left Stephanie at home and went to Mexico. While I was gone Emma walked for the first time. Emma continued to get older, eventually celebrating her first birthday.

Two days before Emma’s birthday, though, I was laid off from my job at Dassault Systemés. Which meant I had to do some job hunting, and I had to figure out what to do with my old business cards. Fortunately I found a new job and started after only five weeks of unemployment.

During those five weeks, I started tweeting and went to the beach. I am very thankful that things worked out so well, especially as the unemployment rate continued to rise all year.

As spring turned to summer, I commented on pickup-truck-bed meat dealers and wrote a program to resize desktop wallpapers. I posted a conversation I had with someone at Sprint, who may or may not be a terminator. I also read the best book I’ve ever read.

As autumn arrived, I poked fun at a lady I heard on the radio. (She actually e-mailed me to defend herself, but what she said really reinforced my point.) I told you where to hide your cash, but I guess I should have come up with a place to hide ideas because Coca-Cola stole my idea.

The last few months of the year have been very busy at work, and as a result this blog wasn’t very busy. I did manage to post about Emma’s first Halloween outing, as well as my own aging. To finish out the year I posted some good bad writing and a high-quality video from my new digital camera.

Throughout the year, I reviewed a few things: Prince of Persia, Shadow of the Colossus, Netflix/Blockbuster (part 2), Anathem, and a SumoLounge bean bag chair.  I also gave out some free code: PHP code to create a gradient PNG, Java code to handle arbitrarily large fractions, and (if you don’t mind extracting it from a JAR file) Java code to resize images.

I hope everyone has had a great year and looks forward to twenty-ten!

I got a fancy new DSLR camera for Christmas, and got a chance to try it out while spending Christmas at Myrtle Beach with Stephanie’s family. I got a ton of pictures, but I have only put up 113 of them.

The camera also records video in HD (720p 30fps or 1080p 20fps). The video below is one I recorded at 720p, though here it’s displayed at only 360p (which I think is equivalent to YouTube’s “HQ” setting). I would have trimmed the video more, but my recent upgrade to Windows 7 left me very surprised to find that Windows Movie Maker has been removed. Supposedly it has been replaced by Windows Live Movie Maker, a completely different program that lacks a lot of features that were in the Vista version of Movie Maker. I guess I need to install Premiere or something. I haven’t needed it in the past for what little video editing I do for this site, and I’ve been doing pretty well at using only legally-acquired software for a while. Oh well.

Today I ran across what might possibly be the only cool Facebook app I’ve ever seen. It takes random Facebook status messages from 2009 and makes a collage of them. I thought mine was very interesting:

A week or two ago I discovered the blog How To Write Badly Well. Anyone can write badly badly, but it takes real skill to write badly well, and that is what the blog tries to explore. (The blog only has twenty entries so far, so it’s possible to read from the start if you’re so inclined. Some of my favorite entries are here, here, and here.)

One post asked for badly-well-written 300-word stories, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I made an attempt to ham-fistedly combine fantasy and sci-fi, while also abusing the character map. I wasn’t the winner, so I figured I’d post it here. Enjoy.

Aõgÿne could do this. He knew the dragon had a weak point near her upper rectum, if only he could trick her into exposing it. He tossed an antimatter grenade to the dragon’s left. The implosion would tear a tiny rift though the space-time continuum, which he hoped would frighten the beast. When the grenade detonated the dragon turned with a screeching hiss. At once he activated a laser-tipped spear and hurled it with all his might. It was a direct hit, and the creature cried out in pain as the laser burned through her bowels. Aõgÿne now unsheathed his sword, approached the writhing dragon from behind, and slit her throat in one swift motion. This Wævian moon would be terrorized no more.

But he knew the victory was bittersweet.

After six months on Fa£aña, he would now have to leave. It was all part of the job for an intergalactic dragon slayer like Aõgÿne, and leaving had never been a problem before. But falling in love was never part of the plan. His heart ached as he thought of leaving Eröå behind.

He paused before entering the building to watch her through the window. The sight of her beautiful elvish features was too much for his heart to bear. He scribbled a message on an electronic tablet and placed it in front of her door.  With a heavy heart, he flew away from the moon at three hundred times the speed of light. But he knew there was no speed so fast that the memory of Eröå wouldn’t catch up to him.

In years past I have mentioned my birthday on this blog, in one way or another.  Since I haven’t posted anything since Halloween, I figured why break the tradition.

Over the weekend Stephanie and Emma headed out of town for my sister-in-law’s final wedding shower, which meant I had the house to myself Friday evening and almost all day Saturday.  So what did I do with the time?  I played BioShock until just after midnight, went to bed, then got up at 8:45.  Now, compare this to the Kip of six years ago, when I would play Smash Bros. until 3am, go to bed, and maybe set an alarm clock if I would need to get up by eleven the next day.  So the following has changed: I go to bed earlier and get up earlier.  The following has remained the same: I love video games.  So I can only conclude that decades from now, when I get some time to myself, I will play video games till seven or maybe even eight, go to bed, wake up at five, have a glass of prune juice, and fire up whatever latest and greatest murder simulator the world has to offer.

Tonight Emma went trick-or-treating for the first time. (Technically this is her second Halloween, but last year she couldn’t even walk yet, so we didn’t dress her up.)  She had a blast!  You can see her duck costume here.  She didn’t have any problem with wearing it, and even got lots of extra candy from everyone who thought she was so cute.  She walked quite a long ways too, all the way down our street and back!  And she was good about knocking on the door, saying “trick or treat!”, and saying “thank you” after they gave her candy.

Of course, these things don’t come naturally.  We had to practice saying “trick or treat” first!  The video below shows a little bit of that process.  (We were practicing with toys instead of candy.)