I know, I know, it has been way too long since I last posted anything on the site.  I’m sorry to all those who are just waiting to hear what is happening in my life lately.  Well, here’s the scoop...

Kip and I are officially an uncle and aunt respectfully!!  My older sister, Emily, gave birth to a bright-eyed baby girl on August 2nd!! Riley Paige was welcomed into the world by a very loving and happy family to meet her.  Though I haven’t seen her yet in person, and I can’t wait to do so at Thanksgiving, there are pictures of her online for those of you curious to see what she looks like.  She definitely looks like Emily as far as her hair goes (Emily was born with a full head of dark black hair, who’d have thought that she would be a total blonde).  Riley does have Dustin’s very distinct forehead though.  I think she is just so precious and I love her to pieces already!!!

I’m now officially the Nursery Coordinator at church.  I find it ironic that the only married lady without children in the church should be in charge of the ministry that takes care of all the babies in the church.  My duties (go ahead, laugh, I know you want to) include: organizing the schedule of who works in the nursery when, making sure there are enough snacks and diapers and whatnot in supply, and creating a working list of nursery policies to be followed while working in the nursery.  That last one I actually took on myself simply because to my knowledge there wasn’t one, and we weren’t exactly following the recommended policies to the full extent to which they covered.  The first job was the schedule, which I know you are thinking sounds really easy.  Well, it isn’t as easy as one might think.  You have to take into account who teaches Sunday school, who is scheduled to play the piano and organ during the church services, who teaches AWANA on Wednesdays, who has a preferred time slot that they like to work, who doesn’t want to serve a whole lot, and who loves to serve and wishes they were always in there.  I have to also make sure that people are getting into the services regularly to hear some good preaching.  It was kind of complicated to begin with, but I got the hang of it.  So I think as far as that goes I’m doing ok.  I do know that I have the full support of my husband, the pastor is behind the changes I’ve made (though he doesn’t want me to offend people with creating too many changes suddenly as people are often resistant to change), and the police officer and his family that attend our church.

Another big development at church is this years Christmas play.  I have been asked to direct the acting portion of the performance.  I am very excited about this, but also extremely nervous, as I have never actually directed before.  Those of you who know me already know that I am extremely dramatic, so it isn’t that much of a stretch to see me teaching other people how to be dramatic.  But still, it is a little different when you are acting in the performance as well.  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen.  I’m also acting in the play.  The lady I had cast as Mom, decided that she had too much to do this fall, which I respect as she is a school teacher with tests and papers to grade.  So the task fell to me to portray Mom in this year’s performance of “A Peanut Butter Christmas”.  We will be performing on December 17th, in the evening service, if you are interested in coming and watching.

I guess that gets everybody caught up on my life.  If you didn’t want to know all the cool things happening, well, then why did you read my post??  If you did want to know all the cool things happening, now you know, and knowing is half the battle!! :)

If you’ve not heard about Nintendo’s press event from a few weeks ago, they unveiled lots of details on one of the features of the Wii:  the Mii channel.  Check out this video if you want to see an example of what I’m talking about.  Stephanie was much more excited about this feature than I was, but it does seem kind of neat.  You’ll be able to store your Mii avatars in your Wiimote, and use them in some games (noticeably the launch title, Wii Sports).

Someone has gone out and put together a Flash application to simulate the Mii channel, based on the footage of the menus that have been seen so far (source article).  So Stephanie and I played around with it tonight.  You can see Kiip over on the right, and Stephanii just to your left.  Pretty cool huh?  Make your own Mii and post a link, we’ll see how close we can get.  It’s not quite as robust as the real one I’m sure (for example, it’s really tricky to position hair anywhere but the default location, and you almost indefinitely have to lower all the facial features).  But still fun to play around with.

FYI:  These were the reference photos we were kinda going off of: Kip, Stephanie.  You be the judge.

For Labor Day weekend, Stephanie and I went to Lake Lure, NC with her parents.  We took a bunch of pictures while we were there, mostly of Chimney Rock.  Check them out!

You may notice when viewing my photos that it looks a little different.  I tried to make the text small enough that you see very little header before the photo, hopefully reducing the amount of scrolling you have to do if you aren’t running at a high resolution.  I also moved the timestamp down below the image, since most people probably don’t care about it.  It was a bit tricky to come up with an algorithm for determining the color of the header based on the color of the background, but I think I’ve come up with one that works fairly well.

If you have any comments about the new photos view, feel free to let me know.

For today’s installment I figured I’d give you guys an idea of where I work.  And if you’re someone from work, don’t worry—I have blurred out anything that might possibly be confidential.

Above you can see a pretty wide shot of my desk.

• Airplane:  This is a promotional poster that they gave us, one of a set of four, showing something that a customer has actually designed using our software.

• Rubik’s Tetrahedron:  I think this is actually a knock-off, not made by Rubik’s.  I picked it up at Stephanie’s family’s yard sale for a quarter.  It is pretty simple to solve, I can do it in like five minutes and I never had to look up any “strategy” to figure it out.

• Decoy pen:  I am very protective of my pens.  It seems that whatever pen is located on the edge of my desk is always the one that is borrowed “for just a second” and never returned.  So I keep a cheap pen there as a decoy.  Even though both types of pen are available in the supply room.. they might stop stocking the good ones right when I need one.

• Post-it notes:  Post-it notes with Unix commands I use frequently enough that I need to keep them handy, but infrequently enough that I haven’t memorized them.

• vi cheat sheets:  The vi cheat sheets that I have mentioned before.

• Chair:  My chair.  Not much to it.

• Three boxen:  Three out of four computers I manage.  The fourth is actually in the corner, under the desk.  You can see it behind the chair but I didn’t label it.  One is my main workstation, two are only used to run test scripts overnight, and one is used for collection and overnight builds of our team’s code.

Here you have the other side of my cube.

• Trash can:  I think that is self-explanatory.

• Good pens:  This is where I keep the non-decoy pens.

• Chess board:  The chessboard I mentioned in my second blog post.

• Simpsons quotes:  These quotes from a Simpsons calendar were once on my dorm room door.  Some of them are very politically incorrect, but no one has said anything in two years.

• White board:  I have blurred out the only information that could get me into trouble for putting on the web, the rest is just notes from two different conversations.  Oh, it is sitting sideways because I have nothing to hang it from the wall with.

Last but not least, we have a closer view of what I am looking at for eight hours a day.

• Watch:  I cannot use a keyboard with my watch on, so as soon as I get to work it comes off.

• Wedding photo:  A picture from our wedding that is not on this site because I have never gotten around to scanning the pictures that we got from the photographer.  It is Stephanie next to our getaway car.  The other picture (obscured by an apple juice bottle) is one that Meredith took on the day we got engaged.

• Double-pen:  A double-headed pen that makes me uneasy.  Highlighter end is neon-greenish-yellow, pen end is black.

• Binary clock:  The binary clock that my mother-in-law gave me at a wedding shower.  Ten points to the first person who can correctly tell me what time it reads.
  Hint:  it is in BCD mode, and the MSB is the top-most light in each column.
  Update:  Jonah gets the ten points for correctly identifying the time as 08:21:50.

• Black keyboard:  I spray painted my keyboard black four years ago (an idea I have to admit I copied from Garrison… imitation is the sincerest form of flattery though, right?).  I decided I’d bring it in to work.  If you work for a software company and need to see the labels on the keys, I don’t want you anywhere near my computer.

• Rear-view mirror:  I hate it when people sneak up behind me.  There was an episode of Seinfeld about this.  I got this two dollar mirror, which I think is more effective than giving all my sidling coworkers boxes of Tic-Tacs.

• telnet session:  I spend a lot of time in telnet.  I think my orange on black color scheme is easy on the eyes, and delightfully old school.

• “Curly”:  You can’t see him very well (in fact, you can see him better in the first picture), but there is this little alien-like figurine with a magnet on his head that holds paperclips (like this, only in red).  I got this in Fort Lauderdale when we were visiting Stephanie’s sister last spring.

• Apple juice:  Coke products (including Minute Maid juices) are provided for us for free.  I always drink a bottle of apple juice in the morning.  Each bottle contains 250% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C!

• Calendar:  A calendar layout I came up with.  There are no breaks between the months except an extra-bold line, and no weekends, but there is the week number.  On the left side of my monitor I also have a one-inch-wide version of the calendar that is invaluable.

Well that’s my crib!  Goodbye, MTV!

It’s a “Jump To Conclusions” mat.

Yesterday afternoon there were these two ridiculously huge moths on the railing right next to the door of our apartment.  So I snapped a few pictures of them to share:

This morning the yellow one was still there, although it had moved to a wall nearby.  They are kind of creepy—like they are omens from a horror movie, indicating that we won’t live to see next Tuesday.  So if Stephanie and I die in the next eight days, blame it on the moths.

On Saturday we got back from our week on the beach in Oak Island, NC.  Today when I got to work I had 162 unread e-mails and someone had moved one of the PCs out from under my desk and unplugged my keyboard.  So I’m kinda busy today.

On Monday I made a fairly decent sand castle.  Unfortunately it started raining as I was finishing the fences, so I didn’t get to do as much as I had wanted to.  I did manage to snap a few pictures.  I really liked the bridge.

Sadly, after the coming of high tide, it would have been impossible for a team of the greatest archeologists of all time, using the most sophisticated tools ever devised, to determine that a castle ever existed on that spot.  The kingdom was completely leveled by tsunami.

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.

Last week I installed Opera for the first time, to make sure my site was usable to Opera users.  Well there is some weird cookie/caching thing that makes it difficult to switch back and forth between text-only and full-graphics versions of my site, but other than that I only saw one thing that didn’t render the same as Firefox (and that turned out to be an ambiguity in my css that is now fixed).  In fact, I haven’t yet found a site that doesn’t work in Opera (of course, I haven’t really been looking very hard).

I was not “won over” by Opera, in the way that I was with Firefox.  Firefox was basically aimed at IE users who wanted a modern piece of software.  I mean, they don’t advertise it like that, but if you look at the keyboard shortcuts and the menu layouts, they’re practically identical.  Opera... not so much.  I mean, I rely on Ctrl+Enter finishing a URL in the address bar-- I can’t remember the last time I had to type “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.  And I rely on URL auto-completion in the address bar.  Opera lists URLs that match what you’ve typed so far, but hitting tab doesn’t select the first item in that list.. meaning, I have to use the mouse too much.  And Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab-- another shortcut I use all the time.  Of course these are all ergonomic issues associated with using new software, and it may very well be that Opera has better ways of doing these things.

The good thing I noticed about Opera is that it’s fast.  I mean, really fast.  It was the first thing I noticed.  I had long thought that something was wrong with either my server or my PHP code because Firefox often pauses briefly during a page load.  Not with Opera.  When I looked around the Opera site, I found that this speed is (not surprisingly) one of their selling points.  I’m still not giving up Firefox, but now every time I use it I am painfully aware of just how slow it is, whereas before I was blissfully ignorant and assumed that’s just how the internet worked.  On the plus side, it looks like the latest Gecko engine has undergone some big performance improvements, so maybe Firefox 2.0 won’t suffer from the same slownocity as 1.5.

PS-  The sky looked pretty cool the other day so I took some pictures of it.  I thought they were pretty so I put them on the site.

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!

Last Sunday was our first anniversary (it’s is crazy to think it’s been a year already!).  We spent the weekend at my uncle’s mountain house on Roan Mountain.  It was a nice break from Charlotte.  It was also my first time there since almost six years ago.  I put up a set of pictures from the trip, for all who may care to see them.  One thing I need to comment on is the year old cake that we ate for our anniversary.  Amazingly, it was still moist and tasted good.  Stephanie’s mom did a good job of wrapping it up somehow so that it didn’t get freezer burn.  I was pretty scared before taking the first bite.

Well I thought I had more to say about the trip but I guess not.. enjoy the photos!

We got older but we’re still young