Well it is a new year and, just like the last six years, I am going to kick off the year with a look back on my last year of blogging. But first, a graph! As you will see below, I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I used to. I still haven’t gone an entire calendar month without making a post yet, but I’ve come close. At one point I planned to write something on a regular schedule—either M/W/F or M/Th or something like that. Then I had kids.

But I digress; time to recap my year of blogging. One of my first posts discussed the difficulty of teaching Emma pronouns. (She has mastered them by now). We got a few opportunities to play in the snow. I decided to say goodbye to The Simpsons, and I found a Bizarro Kip out there.

Then some big news came out when we discovered that the baby in my wife’s belly was a boy. Then we had another parenting moment when our adorable little girl entered her terrible twos. (So far they haven’t really been all that terrible.) When Stephanie and I celebrated our fifth anniversary, Stephanie posted a really long post looking back on those five years. I made a personal goal to lose some weight. I’ve pretty much kept to my plan. I quickly lost twenty pounds, but I’ve put ten of them back on. I’m planning to add some new items to the list in the new year. The biggest change, of course, was when Grayson Matthew Robinson arrived on July fifteenth.

I also gave out some random advice along the way: how to evaluate Mexican restaurants, how to better tie your shoe laces, and how to win at hangman, the Cracker Barrel peg game, and tic-tac-toe. I let you guys know what I thought of Metroid: Other M. (It wasn’t that great.) Stephanie and I went to our first high school reunions, where I realized that people lose their accents in my memories. I also discussed how my handwriting has changed since high school.

We also took Emma trick-or-treating as a bumblebee. She had a blast. I played around with my new DSLR camera, sharing pictures of the moon and a bonfire. I also made some pretty cool-looking high-resolution panoramas. The end of the year brought about an election season, and I turned the focus of this blog onto a poorly-worded campaign ad, which single-handedly destroyed a politician’s career. (And you thought blogging was a waste of time.) And of course the year ended with my first white Christmas. Maybe it makes me a racist, but I now think white Christmases are the best kind.

At various points throughout the year I used this site to give away some free code and programming tips. I gave away code to generate a collage thumbnail image, improved code to generate gradient images, a mini webapp to perform powerful search-and-replace operations, and code to update your Twitter status using OAuth in PHP. I also shared
a haiku for web developers.

And I guess that’s most everything that I talked about on this blog this year. Happy New Year everyone!

I just celebrated my thirtieth Christmas1, which turned out to be my first white Christmas. It was quite magical—it started snowing around 9:30 am on Christmas day, while we were in the middle of opening presents, and it didn’t let up until about noon the next day. It snowed continuously and consistently, but never very hard, which created the softest snow I can remember. I’m sure it would make for great skiing.2 With the exception of not getting to see some of my relatives because of the weather, I’d rate this as one of the best Christmases of my life.

I have several pictures from our white Christmas in Newton, which are split into two albums: outdoor pictures and indoor pictures. While I was at it I also uploaded another set of photos from Thanksgiving that I still hadn’t loaded from my camera.

An interesting thing that happened is that my youngest brother, Jake, got the same present for Christmas this year that my other brother and I received for Christmas when he was about four weeks old: an NES. Well, technically, it is an NES-compatible device, that plays all the old NES cartridges.3 We had lots of fun playing the old games—I think we put in a good six hours over two days playing two-player Dr. Mario. We’re a lot more evenly matched in skill now than we were as kids, which makes it a lot more fun. We also broke out Duck Hunt, and Jake taught Emma how to play. Here, watch a video of it (and you might notice the snowfall outside too):

It’s really a testament to how timeless Nintendo’s old games are.

Recently, Randall Munroe of xkcd1 diagrammed a complete map of optimal tic-tac-toe moves. I thought I would see how the high-resolution version looked through the Seadragon scripts I’ve integrated into my blog (seen previously in high-resolution panoramas).

So below I’ve reproduced the original high-res image from xkcd in a zoomable format. I split the map for X and the map for O into two separate graphs. At any given zoom level, the optimal move is in red, then wherever your opponent goes you would zoom in on that space and it would show you the optimal move again. It’s pretty simple. It should be noted that it’s not very hard to ensure you never lose at tic-tac-toe. The only way to win is to play someone who doesn’t realize this and wait for them to make a mistake.

It’s been a few months since I posted some video of the kids, but that’s all about to change! Here’s a video of Emma making Grayson laugh. It reminds me a lot of the video of Emma laughing while playing football, although Emma was three months older in that video that Grayson is in this one. In any case, I think you’d be hard-pressed not to smile during either. You’ll also notice that Emma feels the need to say “jump jump jump jump” while she is jumping. In case you weren’t aware that is what she was doing. :)

Over Thanksgiving weekend I had the opportunity to learn two new parenting tips. First: if kids want you to read them a story and you don’t have a book handy, just make one up. Second: kids have no idea when you’re plagiarizing.

I shared a story with Emma and her cousins that went something like this:

Once upon a time there were three astronauts who wanted to go to the moon. But when they went to the doctor, he told one of them “you can’t go to the moon because you’re getting sick!” And he said “no way!” but it didn’t matter, so they had to get another guy to go to the moon with them. Then when they got halfway to the moon part of their ship blew up and they were like “oh no!” and they got on the phone and said “Houston we have a problem.”

I’ve uploaded three new photo albums: Halloween photos I only just got around to taking off my camera, playing in the leaves on Thanksgiving afternoon, and a backyard bonfire on Thanksgiving night (Black Friday’s eve?).

I assume those of you particularly interested in family photos are more likely to be viewing them on Facebook nowadays, so I’m going to use this space to talk about some of my cooler photography experiments. I did a lot of playing around with my camera, and found ten seconds to be a very nice exposure length for recording sparklers in the dark. I didn’t use a tripod at all; I just hung the camera around my neck, with the camera resting against my stomach, and held my breath during the exposures. It took us a few tries, but we finally got the timing right so that Stephanie could “write” something on the exposure:

She was trying to write “I love you” but only got to the “I love” (and part of the “Y”). I think it still looks pretty cool.

Next, I serendipitously discovered an interesting method for photographing fire. I intended to take a still exposure of the fire, zoomed all the way in, to see what would happen. But when I hit the shutter button I shook the camera a little bit, and figured the shot was ruined, so I waved the camera up and down and back and forth, figuring that if I was going to ruin the shot I should really ruin the shot. But what I got as a result actually looked very cool:

The last four images in the backyard bonfire photo album are all done in this manner.

You may recall that one month ago I devoted some space on this blog to making fun of a political ad. Now that the elections are over, it turns out that the candidate I was belittling lost the election. He was also the only republican candidate on the ballot that didn’t win in an election marked by lots of republican turnout in an already conservative-leaning county. (But how much difference could party affiliation really make when it comes to sheriffing?)

I’d like to think that this blog has enough influence among Cabarrus county voters to have single-handedly cost him the election. He lost by 6965 votes, meaning that I would have to have convinced 3483 people to change their vote in order to cost him the election. (Neglecting of course the possibility that I changed someone’s decision whether or not to vote.) So... I guess I probably didn’t have anything to do with it.

_{(Incidentally, I actually voted for him myself. Oh well.)}

If you are viewing this blog post on my website (as opposed to an RSS aggregator), you will notice that the title of the post is written in a hand-written font. This is all through the magic of CSS3 web fonts. And in fact, the font that is being used is “Kip the Great”, which represents my handwriting as of early 1999. I’m limiting use to the title because the font is pretty hard to read. That’s only partly due to my bad handwriting—the font is also not well balanced (lowercase e and o, in particular, are too large), the characters don’t all align on the same baseline, and it is weighted so that it always looks bold (except for lower-case t, which I think I shrunk because it was originally too large).

Looking back at the font, I can see some subtle ways my handwriting has changed over the last 1.2 decades:

• I use an actual ampersand instead of that stupid backwards 3 thing

• I write capital D and F with two motions instead of one

• I write capital H with three motions instead of one

• I loop the tail of my lower-case G, like in cursive writing

• I put a line through my upper- and lower-case Z. (A habit I picked up in Calculus 2, where it became a real problem that my Zs were indistinguishable from my 2s. I also started adding a tail to my lower-case t around the same time, to distinguish it from a plus sign, but I only do that when I’m writing equations.)

That being said, there’s only about a 1% chance I’ll ever update it. Designing a font was one of the most tedious things I’ve ever done.

A few days ago I found the following campaign ad attached to my mailbox. I’ve highlighted the “Personal Accomplishments” section I am about to discuss.

Now, let’s go through these.

Married to wife, Becky, for 30 years. Maybe it’s a sign of the times that this is listed as a personal accomplishment. But I can’t help but read it as an insult to his wife—like the accomplishment is putting up with her for 30 years.

Three children. Okay so your kids don’t sound like hoodlums. I hope my own kids don’t grow up to be hoodlums. Probably the most accomplishmental thing here.

Member of Rocky River Presbyterian Church. I don’t know too very much about Presbyterianism. Maybe I need to consult with my uncle the Presbyterian minister, or my cousin the aspiring Presbyterian minister. But I don’t think it is all that difficult to get in.

Harrisburg resident. Harrisburg isn’t exactly Beverly Hills. I think living there is even easier than joining a Presbyterian church.

Hey for those of you interested, there’s a new set of photos covering July through (early) October, 2010. They are on Facebook too, but they are in higher resolution here.

That is all.