There exist two traditions here at Ye Olde Vacant Nebula: a long, introspective blog post on my birthday, and a long, retrospective blog post at the beginning of the new year. What you are reading is the latter. As I noted at the begenning of twenty-leven, my blogging frequency has dropped precipitously. (I only wrote twenty posts this year.) As such, this long, retrospective blog post may be merely a retrospective blog post.

My blogging has tended more toward the technical and geeky this year. I detailed the code I wrote to generate gradient images, shared my thoughts on how to write SQL queries, wrote not
once but twice on HTML5 video, provided password tips for non-geeks, compared online backup services, and closed the year by sharing my process to creat photo mosaics.

For the more family-oriented content on this blog, I posted pictures from our trip to Disney World, Emma’s third birthday, a trip to the beach, Grayson’s first birthday, Emma’s first day of preschool, our trip to Dollywood, and Halloween. I also posted a ton of videos all at once.

Some other odds and ends: my thoughts on Donkey Kong Country Returns, some comments on what it’s like living near a race track, the obligitory birthday blog post, and a follow-up review of Anathem.

All in all a pretty good year. Too bad a Mayan version of the Y2K bug is going to somehow tear the world apart in twenty-twelve. Or so they say. Happy New Year!

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!

Last week I came across Ian’s Shoelace Site, which describes several ways of tying your shoes. It turns that there are several more ways of doing it than they teach you as a kid. The “Ian Knot” is a much faster and easier way of tying the standard shoelace knot.  And the “Ian’s Secure Knot” produces a secure knot (it won’t easily come undone through the day), but it’s better than the traditional double knot because you can still easily untie it by pulling the loose ends. I’ve been using these for a week now and it’s a pretty nice timesaver that I thought I’d share with everyone else.

I thought I’d point you guys to Geronimo Jack’s Beard. It’s a podcast about Lost from Jorge Garcia (Hurley) and some girl named Beth (I think she’s Jorge’s significant other, or maybe she’s just a friend; she’s not one of the actors though). They recorded these podcasts after initially reading the scripts, but they are only releasing them as each episode airs (for obvious reasons). It’s interesting because Jorge is just as confused as the rest of us, even though he is on the show. They are only doing it for this season, so there’s only three episodes out right now if you want to listen to them all.

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.

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!

Last week I saw this post on Raymond Chen’s blog, which linked to two interviews with a former burglar.  The first covered the best places to hide money, the latter covered the worst places to hide money.  Which leads me to ask: are there actually people who have money in their house?  If you broke into my house, best case you’d find a hundred dollars, and it would all be in my wallet and Stephanie’s purse.  Usually we have even less cash than that on hand.  I don’t know why you would need cash these days.  I guess drug dealers only take cash, if you’re into that sort of thing.  But even then, couldn’t you stop by the ATM on the way to the drug deal?  Is there any other reason to keep large quantities of cash in your home?

P.S. I know that what is discussed here could apply to other small valuables (like jewelery), but in both interviews they are specifically talking about money.

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a long time:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/hot_new_video_game_consists

It’s a satirical news story from The Onion, about a video game called “Close Range.”  I would summarize it more, but I think it’ll be funnier for you if I don’t.

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!

I recently discovered Pandora.com.  Basically, it’s internet radio.  You put in some bands or songs that you like as seeds to your “stations”, then it plays stuff it thinks you’ll like based on those seeds.  As it plays songs, you can give them a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to let it know further what your tastes are.  And it’s all free and legal and the only ads are on-screen ads (i.e. no audio ads that you have to listen to).

I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been using it for a while and I’ve been surprised at the number of times it has presented me with a song from a band I’ve never heard of but which I actually liked.  For someone who hasn’t purchased a CD (or acquired new music in any form, really) in something like three years, this is a pretty great way to find something new to listen to.  And it’s much better than real radio.

(I’m going to start ranting now.)

I really don’t understand why radio stations insist on playing the same twenty or thirty songs over and over again.  With the internet being around, music distribution is so much different than it was even ten years ago.  The industry can support so many more bands, because music can be recorded, produced, and distributed digitally at a fraction of what it used to cost.  It seems like a radio station could easily fill a 5-hour rotation with only music recorded in the last year that is decent that fits the station’s genre, without repeating any songs.  Not that I have anything against music that is more than a year old; I’m just saying there is lots of music being made all the time which is at least decent, so I don’t see why I have to hear crappy Nickelback or Papa Roach songs every time I turn on the radio in my car.

Seriously, who really wants to listen to Chad Kroeger sing about his sex life?