Santa and a Very Giraffey Christmas

Santa left Eryn a giraffe hat.  A giraffe pillow.  And a half-eaten cookie.



At Grandpa Larry and Grandma Geri's, he showed up in person to deliver additional gifts.

Books!

I saw this Old Spice advertisement in a gaming magazine.  I can't figure out why our books are on the shelves behind him.  I'm not sure that they pertain to either side of his personality.  But this is yet another in my long line of advertisements and pictures featuring our books.

Little brother?

I walk past this picture at least twice a day on the fourth floor at work. The first few times, I had to stop because out of the corner of my eye it looked like my brother was walking past a creepy picture of Dexter.  This would be a very large version of my brother, but I think it still looks like him.  Looks a little like me when I was 285 and had glasses, if you topped the then me off with the current me's hair.

Lines of thought...

Apparently XKCD and Mitchell and Webb have arrived at the same idea involving alcohol and Microsoft products...

XKCD and the Ballmer Peak:
 


Mitchell and Webb: Slightly less than two points (season 4, episode 4)

Burlesque

I'm making up for missing 9 days of blogging. I'm going to use being ill as an excuse. And the holidays. And all sorts of other things. I have much to talk about. My friend Chris was in town on Thursday. He's the new VP of what amounts to R&D for Telerik (if I was hearing everything correctly). They do .NET controls (from my perspective - they may do other things as well) and are based in Eastern Europe. Very cool job. He, Cookie Queen, Kyle and I went to Brasa for dinner (delicious - glad the waiter talked us into smaller portions) and to the Nutcracker Burlesque show afterwards. The show was peculiar. The first half was fairly boring. It wasn't until the second half that we were treated to the dreidel burlesque dance, the native american skinning a bunny and dancing in his skin burlesque dance, etc. I had warned Chris before hand I hadn't been to this event, and my experience with Nutcracker derivatives was sketchy (search my blog for Nutbuster). But I had a good time once they started embracing burlesque. And the woman who played Clara did a great job. Sort of fetishy on my part I suspect, but I liked that when she was watching the dancers, she was always on her toes, even when sitting behind a table. Sexy. Weirder was that the band seemed to include someone I knew. But I wrote it off because his hair looked longer than I expected. Until I ran into him in the entryway. He's a manager at work. His wife worked for me until recently. Damn strange. In the end, everyone seemed to have fun.

If you don't believe me, here he is, enjoying himself.  Although two people, including my daughter, asked me if the person sitting on his lap was a woman or a man.

And Cookie Queen with one of the male dancers.  I wish he had worn his Superman pouch (I'm not sure if that's exactly the right word...very small underpants, however you paint it), because that was damn hilarious. I did not get my picture taken with Clara.  I just told her I appreciated her performance. She was either surprised (she'd been standing around for 15 minutes) or creeped out by the skeevy old guy who was the only person to tell her "good job".  In the end, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would given the first act.

Grrr...grrr....GRRRRR!!!!

I'm whitening my teeth. It makes me drool so much I have to find a sink to dislodge a mouthful of drool every 5-10 minutes. And I mean a mouthful - almost cheeks bulging. Like some sort of masticating hamster. And if Ming is reading, I mean I'm like a hamster in every cheeky, well-endowed, visit the vet for $100, way. I wouldn't normally be so vain as to care about my teeth, particularly given the amount of coffee I drink. But the last time I was at the dentist, between myself and insurance, I was over my payment by about $85. So when I received an email from my dentist stating I could whiten my teeth for only $15 more, it seemed like kismet. A bonus was they gave me the plasters of my teeth. I sneak up behind Eryn clapping them together so she can be freaked out.

iPad Rundown

iPad rundown.  I've done it before, but this time it's for Kristine.  Caveat - I'm still running on a first gen iPad.  No camera in mine.  And I have other things on my iPad, but these are the things that are commonly used (although Eryn has some tap games she likes to play that aren't on here, like Dragondale).

Education:

• TED talks
• NASA
• Star Walk 
• BrainPop (Eryn)
• See games

Media Consumption:

• Netflix
• Kindle
• Link to Kindle store (instead of buying through the Apple store)
• Zite - news, not current, but based on topics - best way to get programming posts on the iPad
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pulse - aggregator (I don't use Flipboard since I got it, but my wife still uses Flipboard)
• Pandora - free music
• YouTube
• Flixster - movies (rotten tomatoes ratings, local theaters, & hook to netflix)
• Trailers - movie trailers
• Westlaw Next
• Maps
• McSweeny's

Productivity:

• Fat Secret (calorie counter)
• Dropbox
• Textastic
• Penultimate (probably better out there - for free form notes)
• Timer (countdown)

Games:

• Carcassonne
• Small World
• Life
• Tichu (cards)
• Words (with Friends)
• Ticket to Ride
• Civilization
• Toontastic - Eryn, make kids videos
• Lots of chess apps
• Lots of math/geography apps
• Sudoku (Kids)
• Angry birds (Eryn)
• Cut the Rope (various versions - puzzle)

Music:

• L&M Guitar
• Guitar Toolkit

Food:

• Whole Foods
• Epicurious
• AllRecipes
• BigOven
• SparkRecipes
• RecipeGrazer

Links:

• Work Email
• CBS (local news) - most newsreaders suck
• Kickstarter
• Khan Academy
• MIT Open Course

I wanted an iPhone...

Felicia Day pointed me at these links via Laughing Squid:

Disgruntled people complaining about their Christmas gifts on Twitter... Compiled by Jon Hendren.

 Below, Jonathan Mann turns it into a song...WTF?! I Wanted An iPhone!!!

Monitorwang!

I was doing open source review the other day.  This was an option for some code I was reviewing.

DELL…
ACER…
LG….
VIEW SONIC

I immediately shouted in my head, "MONITORWANG!!!"

Are they wishing me a happy holidays?

I don't think they are...

11 Best Science Books of 2011

Just so I don't lose it, Brainpickings.org lists their favorite science books of 2011. I should really get Eryn the Dawkin's book.

Learning to Read...

A little fuzzy, but you can read it, "PLEASE RETURN YOUR OWN DISHES TO THE CAFETERIA.  Janitorial does not do this."  Obviously we need to start a remedial reading program at work.  As they say on The Chive, some people just like to watch the world burn.

Santa...

...apparently stays at the Grandstay Hotel and Conference Center when he's visiting Burnsville. And he likes to promote that fact. And he's sponsored by Buck Hill and John Adamich's Dodge of Burnsville. John needs to change his logo, because his d backed to a b (dodge of burnsville) looks like two balls and a wang shooting a small o of jizz out the end.  Apparently, it's been worse than just a visual (link to blog).

Luna and the Pancake

Pooteewheet says I'm mean because I sometimes throw a pancake for Luna on top of her indoor pen.  I feel I'm being considerate, because that way she doesn't burn her mouth trying to wolf down a pancake in the two seconds it would take her if it was where she could immediately reach it.  There's video at the bottom.

Shaving Cut, Remix

Given that just below my nose bled for over two hours this morning, despite having chapstick in my pocket, I'm going to disavow all the advice in that last post.  It went on despite twenty minutes of ice, twenty minutes of pressure several times, and the chapstick trick.  I hear Sank's recommendation about the styptic, but I suspect that wouldn't have done the trick either.  It went on so long I googled, "Is it possible to become a hemophiliac?"

Fortunately, that's not likely.  But I did find the potential root of the problem over on reddit.  There's a consensus that the number of blood vessels in the face, coupled with the lack of jagged edges on a small razor cut, inhibit clotting.

While reading through the thread, I got to this comment, "Yah it's actually a pretty common thing in equine medicine too. Horses have a tendency to injure themselves, especially the faces and especially the eyelids which get ripped off quite a bit. Every one of those bleeds like hell and makes you freak out that your patient/pet is going to die but isn't really all that severe (sans the last one)."

I thought, wtf.  I've never seen a horse with its eyelid ripped off.  But then my horse experience is limited to the horses at my grandmother's house, which included Goober, who later came to live at our house.  Fortunately, someone else had the same surprise and asked, to paraphrase, "wtf?"

The response: "It's not an every day occurrence but it's not exactly rare either. As for how it happens, it depends. They can catch it on a fence screw, or on the feed bucket, or a piece of barbed wire, or pretty much anything. Once it's caught the horse flips the fuck out (as they're prone to do) and then jerks their head away, thus ripping off the eye lid.  That's one of the reasons it's always a good idea to train your horse NOT to freak out whenever it's bound up (as much as possible). That and them walking through barbed wire that's gotten blown down/knocked down. If you teach your horse to be OK with having stuff wrapped around its legs (kind of like sacking-out), then it won't jerk away from the barbed wire (thus digging it deeper into their flesh), but rather stay put (since trying to walk off would be painful) until you can help.

Which led to my favorite question, "O.o how do they survive in the wild?"

Which of course had a very cogent answer, "To be fair in the wild there aren't feed buckets and barbed wire."

Touche'.

This was backed up by a picture of a horse with a ripped eyelid.  I know...I didn't warn you, it's gross, and it probably isn't what you were expecting at the end of a post about shaving cuts.  But now you know not to panic horses unless you're a mean fucker, and why they don't have their own haunted houses at Halloween.

How to Stop a Razor Nick from Bleeding

This might be the most helpful post I've read in a very long time, even though #5 never seems to work for me.  If I relied on that, I might bleed all day.  This all reminds me I need a mirror in my office so I don't walk out with blood all over my face looking like Sweeney Todd the Manager.  From The Derm Blog:


Here a 5 tips to stop a nick from bleeding:
1. Grab an ice cube. The cold causes the tiny blood vessels to constrict, slowing the blood and allowing a clot to form.

2. Use your Chapstick or apply a dab of Vaseline jelly: the waxy ointment help seals the tiny nick and provides a surface for a blood clot to form.

3. Soak a Q-tip in witch hazel and apply gently to the cut. Witch hazel is an astringent, which like the ice cube, constricts blood vessels, slowing the bleeding enough for a clot to form. Warning: this will sting a little.

4. Use your deodorant. This is my favorite tip. Most deodorants have aluminum chloride or a derivative of aluminum chloride like aluminium chlorohydrate. It acts as a hemostatic agent, allowing a blood clot to form quickly — in fact, aluminum chloride is what I use in clinic countless times each day to stop bleeding from skin biopsies. Apply a little bit to your fingertip or spray onto a Q-tip to apply. A styptic stick, if you happen to have one, works the same way.

5. Just hold pressure. As we say in medicine: “All bleeding stops eventually.”

Eryn's Guitar, Ming's Poster

A very nice picture of Eryn playing guitar while wearing her new Christmas dress. In the background, you can see my cool artcrank poster from pedlar that Ming bought and framed for me for my birthday. It's not on the wall yet, but will be soon.

The Head and the Heart

I'm late to the game, but I really like Lost in My Mind by The Head and the Heart (you can download two of their songs for free at their site):

Ballet

I was watching the Nutcracker at Burnsville's Performing Arts Center tonight, and during one dance I found myself wondering, "When do they create a new signature ballet move?"  Was there a day when a ballerina was on her tiptoes, and started shimmying her legs, and the trainer yelled, "YES, YES! You're on your toes, and your legs should look all stiff because you're on those tiny little points, but you're shimmying them and they look loose!  It's a visual oxymoron! That is the SHIZNIT!  Do more of that!  Much more!"  Or something similar, but probably in Russian because all ballerinas used to be Russian.  At least as far as I know.  Although shiznit translates to shiznit.  At least according to this online translator.  So at least part of the excitement was palpable in any culture.

Erik did this to me...

I'm going to blame him, and not Microsoft...

Front Controller

If you're just starting a chapter on MVC, this does not explain the Front Controller pattern at all.