I’ve been meaning to put up some videos for a while, and now I’ve finally done so.  Sorry there are so many, in the future I’ll make them less six-at-a-time.  Anyway, this should give those of you who haven’t seen her much (and those of you who have but can’t get enough) a chance to see her in movement.

Note: I’ve tested this video player with IE 6, IE 7, FF3, Safari (Windows Beta), Chrome Beta, and Opera 9.  Please let me know if it does not work for you.

First video (below) is from last July (at just under four months old).  Here you’ll see and hear Emma’s shrieking laugh as I kinda growl into her belly.

Next is a video from the same day, wherein you can see Emma paying with her Elerat before dinner.

The next video is also from July.  Here I try to show you Emma’s reaction to Punky.  Also, I hate the way my recorded voice sounds (so does everyone I guess).

Here we have a video of Emma’s first time eating food.  I had forgotten how much better at eating food she has gotten since then.

Next is a video from just last week of Emma sitting up (with some help from a pillow) and playing with a moose (she thinks she’s the next Sarah Palin1).

And to finish off this videostravaganza, we have a video of Emma showing off her rolling skills.  The final roll seems to defy accepted laws of physics.  It reminds me of a wheel that has been weighted at the top so that it will roll uphill.  Also, Punky walks by and says hi.

OK, that’s all for now.

Well, not quite.  But I was mentioned in a post on the Freakonomics site, which is now hosted on NYTimes.com.  I e-mailed them a link last week, which they proceeded to blog about.  But I didn’t expect my full name to show up in bold text or anything.  Kinda cool though I guess.

Preventing spam comments is one of the most annoying things about having a blog.  In the past I’ve tried a few different methods to control spam.  My first attempt involved flagging messages as potentially spam if they had a bad referrer, came from certain IP ranges, contained certain keywords, or contained too many links.  The flagged messages wouldn’t be displayed until I approved them.  This method worked some of the time, but overall it wasn’t very effective and created a lot of work for me.

My next attempt was to implement a captcha system.  This has worked out pretty well, and I was surprised to find that it has been fifteen months since I started this policy.  Basically, any comment containing anything that looks like a link (“http”, “://”, “www.”, “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “@”, “href”, and some others I can’t remember off the top of my head) would be sent to the captcha page.  This allows real humans to post comments with links, but stops most of the spam.  However, there was an occasional spam comment that had no links.  I’m not sure why the spammers would do this, unless they are trying to game systems where an IP is deemed “safe” after a non-spam comment is made.  In any case, I grew annoyed with cleaning up these comments, and I didn’t like that cookies are required if you get to the captcha page.

Over the break, I decided I would implement a type of honeypot.  I noticed that spam comments were always in response to my most recent post, even when comments were still open for other posts.  So I guessed that the spambots are looking for the first form in the HTML.  So I just stuck a comment form at the top of my page, and wrapped it in a hidden div.  No humans see it, but spambots do.

To judge the effectiveness, I logged any comments submitted to the honeypot.  Since I don’t value the privacy of spammers, I’ll let you view the log if you wish.  As of right now, 212 spam comments were submitted in 10 days.  Where it says “honeypot” means that the message was submitted to the honeypot form.  If it were submitted from a valid form but contained links (and hence, was given a captcha), you’d see “contains_links.”  But there aren’t any of those.

So now I have a system that is so far 100% effective, without requiring cookies and without breaking under tabbed browsing.  If this continues to be effective I’ll probably disable the captchas altogether.  Of course, the spammers could pretty easily overcome this obstacle if they tried.

Last Monday marked two years since Stephanie and I got hitched, an event which was well-documented on this site and others.  Those of you who are fans of The Office are no doubt familiar with the Dwight Schrute bobble head.  Well in honor of our second anniversary, my wife had a bobble-head Kip constructed.  You will see the results below, I think it’s pretty cool, although the bobble-head doesn’t have the I-sit-behind-a-computer-all-day physique of yours truly.  But I don’t think I’d want a realistic representation of my waistline sitting on my desk all day anyway.  Other than the eye color, I think it’s pretty spot-on, at least insofar as that is possible on a bobble head.

It’s me.  I’m the bobble-head. Yes!

About a year ago my company hired a new Chief Executive Officer (what the kids are calling a C.E.O.).  One of the things he started doing is taking five randomly selected people from the company out to lunch every month.  I was randomly selected for this month, so I get to have lunch with the CEO tomorrow (presumably at his expense, since he probably makes more than my annual salary every month).  I don’t really have any hard-hitting questions.  I suppose I could ask if we plan on hiring any more programmers in not-India.. but I probably won’t.  Or I could ask something completely irrelevant, like what his opinions are on British literature from the early eighteenth century.  But I probably won’t do that either.  I might post an update later this week, if there is anything worth blogging about.  I do think it’s a pretty cool thing for a CEO to do, even if he’s not exactly Bill Gates or Larry Page (we are something like a two billion dollar company though... I think).  He also has a rule that none of the people invited to lunch can be the boss of any of the other people (so I guess it isn’t purely random).  Which is good, I’d say.

So I mentioned quite a while back that I had been reading The Daily WTF.  Well a little over a year ago I sent something in.  Not bad code, but a funny story about an interview experience I had.  Last Friday (on my birthday, ironically), Alex (who runs the site) decided to run my story along with four other interview stories.  He also decided to take a poll of which story was the best, and the submitter of the winning story would win a bean bag chair from Sumo Lounge.  Well my story won (seen here, the one titled “Are You An Astronaut?”).  Be forewarned:  the version of the story shown on the site has been edited a little bit from what I sent in (which will be faithfully reproduced at the end of this post).  I kinda feel bad that I stopped reading the site a few months ago because I got bored with it.. but I got an e-mail this week saying that I won an Omni bean bag chair, I just needed to pick a color (I went with Charcoal Green).  These things are supposed to be pretty nice (and at $150, they’d better be!); I’ll be sure to let you, o faithful reader of my blog, know what I think of it.  Hopefully the blonde comes with it.

As promised, here is the original version of the story that I sent in:

Fresh out of college, I was interviewing for a junior programming job at a company that develops software for aerospace/automotive companies.  So far the day was going well.  I interviewed for about an hour with someone from HR, then interviewed for another hour with the person who might be my manager, and that interview went really well.  Then to close the day I interviewed with the project manager (the previous manager’s manager).  Again, things were going well.  There was a lull in the interview where the guy was looking up something on his computer, so I started looking at the things he had up around his office.  On one wall he had a collage of NASA stuff.  Without thinking, I guess to make conversation or something, I asked him if he was an astronaut!  It was one of those situations where I was regretting it even as it was coming out of my mouth.  He looked at me like I was retarded, then said “no, I was a project manager at NASA.”

As it turns out, I was somehow still offered that job, and it’s where I’m working now (a little over a year later).  I don’t know if the guy remembers me asking that or not, but he’s my manager’s manager so I don’t really see him that often.

Someone at work just came around asking if anyone wanted to be a model for some kind of brochures we’re putting together.  I volunteered. They had me stand in front of a whiteboard, while three other people sat at a desk, and we pretended to be in a meeting.  You know, the important kind of meeting, where proactive synergy leverages best-in-class paradigm solutions.  I’ll try to get ahold of one of the brochures and put a scan up here as soon as I can.

A week ago I set out to Guitar Center to get a very small and portable amp, since my current amp (seen blurrily in the background of this photo) is over two feet wide, weighs about forty pounds, and is a little too loud for the apartment late at night.  What I had in mind was a Marshal Mini Amp (which you may have seen in School Of Rock), or something similar.  However, the amps that size did not have very much oomph to them.  The guy there talked me into playing a Roland Micro Cube.  It was incredible that it could put out that much noise and yet be so small.  It can even run off batteries (six AA’s)!  Don’t get me wrong—you’re not going to worry about losing hearing unless you hold it to your head.  But you can very well drown out any conversation or tv in the room.  It also has a pretty wide set of effects:  chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, delay, and reverb.  In addition to that, it has six different amp modelers, including a very nice acoustic simulator.  The link I mentioned earlier has several pictures of the box and its controls.  But if you’d like to see it in action, check out this shot of yours truly rocking out:

See how awesome it looks?  And I had it turned up so loud that the camera picked up those yellow sound waves (betcha didn’t know that’s what sound waves looked like, didja?).  I’m also rocking out a black “teal” shirt (I wanted to put one on my cafepress store, but it won’t let me put up more than one black shirt).  And for anyone interested, I tried to give myself 1980’s hair band hair, but my attempt at doing so was less than successful.

For any who want to hear what this thing sounds like, I recorded a few short sound clips below.  If the audio quality is sub-par, blame it on the free-with-a-gateway-computer-six-years-ago-ness of my recording equipment.

Acoustic simulation
It’s amazing that it was able to get such a bright sound out of my Stratocaster.  Usually without distortion an electric guitar just sounds so flat.  I recorded two samples, both are also using a little bit of the Chorus effect...  I mean, why would you not use that effect with an acoustic-like sound?

• Galapogos (sic) - 0:14 - This song shows off the acoustic simulator with a song that picks one string at a time, rather than chords.

• Shine On - 0:14 - This song uses the acoustic simulation with chords.  Ain’t it purdy?

JC Clean
This is supposed to sound like the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amplifier.  I’m not sure how successful it is, but it does sound very nice with certain sounds (although obviously not as bright as the acoustic simulation).

• Shine On - 0:12 - I played the same song on the clean channel so that the difference would be quite obvious.  This one sounds much flatter to me, which is not my personal preference.

• Hummer - 0:29 - This song will show off an example of when the clean channel would be much better than the acoustic channel.  I’m also using the delay effect on this song.

Black panel
This is supposed to simulate the Fender Twin Reverb sound.  I don’t like it very much, because all it seems to do is overdrive the low end and make it sound like my speaker cone is torn.

• Zero - 0:10 - You can hear how only the low-end is distorted.  I’m not too very fond of this setting.

Brit Combo
According to the manual, “this is modeled on the Vox AC-30TB, the rock amplifier that created the Liverpool sound of the ‘60s.”  I don’t particularly care for this sound, it’s kind of like the “fuzz” distortion that Jimi Hendrix used a lot.  Just sounds to me like the clean signal mixed with a lot of static.

• Welcome To Paradise - 0:53 - This is a rather long clip.  I guess it kinda speaks for itself.  I boosted the low-end on the recording because my microphone didn’t pick it up very well..

Rectifier
This is really the only distorted channel I use on this thing.  It is modeled after the Mesa/Boogie Rectifier.  Much closer to the sounds of the mid-to-late nineties that I liked so much.  Unfortunately, the sound recorded does not match what was actually played very well at all.  In fact, the sound that was recorded is extremely obnoxious—I don’t know where the low end went!  In reality, the distortion is much creamier (that’s the best word I could think of to describe it).

• Welcome To Paradise - 0:52 - Once again, I’ll present the same song on two different channels for you to compare and contrast.  But really, I like the recording of this much less, but in person I liked it much more.  Stupid cheap microphone.

• I Caught Fire (In Your Eyes) - 0:09 - I wanted something that used the flanger/phaser (I can’t remember which I’m using in this song).  This was as close as I could come to the sound in the actual song, but I definitely fell short of what The Used recorded.

Well that’s all.  I know that was a lot of files, but it’s only three minutes of audio.  I wanted to embed the sounds in the page so that you could play them right there, but (from what I could find) there’s not a good way to do so that is standards-compliant and works across most platforms and browsers without requiring a plug-in, Flash, and/or javascript.

PS:  I do know that there is an audio output on the back of the thing.  In the past I have found those outputs to be noisier than placing a mic in front of the amp.  I haven’t tried with this amp though.  But as far as I know, pretty much all professionally recorded music uses a mic’ed amp, rather than the output from the amp.

Yesterday Stephanie and I got a black 2006 Toyota Camry Solara!  We love it so much.  It’s a used car, but not very used at all—only 1210 miles on it.  We got it from CarMax, and I’d highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used car go there.  They have “no haggle” pricing, which is good for me because I think I’d be pretty lousy at haggling (I think Saturn dealerships also do no-haggle pricing.. I’ve never been to one so I’m not sure).  They’re not paid on commission either, so they aren’t super pushy.  Our salesman was an Irish guy, which was kinda neat.  The whole process was about as easy as we could’ve asked for.

My 1995 Camry was starting to have a few things go wrong with it lately (which is to be expected for a car with 180,000 miles on it).  Most of them were pretty minor issues, but we decided we were approaching the point where it’d be more economical for us in the long run to buy another car than to keep putting money into this one (an economist might call that an effect of the Law of Diminishing Returns).  The latest thing was that the car was leaking engine coolant, which meant I had to put antifreeze in it every morning before work for the last two weeks, and by the next morning it’d be almost all gone.  It could have turned out to be a simple thing to fix, or it could have been expensive.  We decided we’d start looking for a new car and see what kind of trade-in value we could get.  Since we now have another source of income (and we’ve been capable of living off of just mine), we figured out how much money we could afford to spend on a car.  CarMax ended up giving more than Kelley Blue Book valued our car at, so we took it.  Although I have to say that it was kind of sad to see my old car sitting on the back lot to be cleaned up.  I mean, we were leaving it for a younger and sexier car, and it didn’t even put up a fight. :)

So far, we are really happy with the car (of course it’s been less than twenty-four hours).  We both love driving it, and it still has that new car smell.  The ride is incredibly smooth and quiet.  We’ve been taking turns driving it, which is different from normal (where neither one of us would want to drive).

I took some pictures of the car, be sure to check them out!

Sometimes at work I am at a meeting and the topic of conversation doesn’t really involve me in any way.  And sometimes this happens when I have a pencil and a piece of paper handy.  And sometimes I doodle.  Usually, I am doodling The Ninjas.  The other day I scanned some of these drawings from the past fourteen months.  Now, you too can enjoy them.

Who are The Ninjas?
Who aren’t The Ninjas!  They are a totally rocking awesome hard rock band comprised solely of ninjas who are dedicated to rocking hard.  They’re so awesome that they don’t even care if they have fans.  That’s what makes their fans love them so hard.  Their music rocks so hard that you’d stab yourself in the ear with a rusty screwdriver, just because you’re psyched so hard.

Here is a drawing of the whole band.  Notice how the lead guitarist is totally rocking hard!  And the lead singer is totally getting into it.  And check it out- there are people crowd surfing to show just how much The Ninjas rock!  And check out the bass player over there, he’s totally all “whatever man, I’m just too cool for you”.  And the drummer--check out the drum!  It’s got The Ninjas’ logo on it!  That rocks so hard.  These guys are so cool.  I’d totally do them all if I were gay.  Twice.

Here’s a drawing from The Ninjas’ latest music video.  That’s no special effect- the lead guitarist actually set himself on fire for the video!  He was recovering in the hospital for nine months!  That’s how much he rocks!  But it doesn’t stop there--dude totally brought his guitar and amp into the hospital and rocked the nurses’ pants off.  They all totally wanted him, even though he was covered in third degree burns.  That’s how hard he rocks.

Here’s a shot of the lead guitarist rocking so hard that he had to be airborne to do it.  You can’t tell from the picture, but he’s actually jumping off of a fifteen story building without a rope or parachute or anything!  Dude’s totally crazy!  He landed on his feet and kept right on rocking!  And that rocks hard.

Finally, here is a video of the lead guitarist rocking hard, then smashing his guitar in the middle of the song.  That rocks.  That guy rocks so hard.  (fyi- there are only ten quick drawings in that.. I didn’t waste as much time on it as you might think)

Click here to download my The Ninjas wallpaper!  It is not a typical desktop size, but it is in the correct aspect ratio (4:3), so just set the position to “stretch” and it will look right.  That’s the actual size it was scanned at (600 dpi), but I’ve adjusted the color balance a little so that it is darker.

Run away, go ahead and try
  run away, before I stab you in the eye
Because you’ll never know (you’ll never know)
  how far to go (how far to go)

--The Ninjas - Hands Off My Girl (Nozomi’s Song)