Here's a hilarious Christmas card...

Seven point eight trillion dollars.

My favorite Mario Kart character:



Yoshi rules.

Laralee and I just got back from our second-grade science enrichment class. We finished our unit on the solar system with an activity where we paced off a scale-model solar system (with appropriately scaled planets too), and then had a presentation via laptop and projector where I ran Celestia and took the kids whizzing around the planets.

It was a blast, because the kids are so excited about this stuff. They kept oohing and ahhing as we talked about things like Quaoar and Sedna, how far Pluto really is from Earth, and even the volcanoes and sulfur lakes on Jupiter's moon Io. But the real fun was with Celestia as we zoomed over to Saturn and watched a hundred moons whiz around it in one-million-times normal time, or rode Halley's comet as it whipped around the sun every 76 years. The kids were literally yelling about how cool it was, and one of them said he was getting sick to his stomach on the Halley's comet ride.

Not only do I enjoy spouting all of my crazy scientific knowledge, but it's such fun to see a group of second-graders who are enthralled and excited about it.

They'll really like it when we mess with lasers. And chemical reactions. And rocket propulsion. I can't wait.

Because it's another unbelievably gorgeous day, I decided to get up from my desk and go biking for a while.

I just bought some new tires for my bike a few days ago, because I keep getting flats, and these puppies are sweet. They're Kevlar-lined and tough as steel, so pesky thorns don't even get through them. And a good thing, too: after today's ride I picked goat's heads out of the tire. There were forty-one of them stuck in it. Wow.

70 degrees on November 18? I suppose global warming isn't all that bad, if it gives me a chance to go out and play ultimate...

"No audience member in the history of presentations has ever said, 'it was exciting, useful and insightful but far too short''"

-- Seth Godin

Last Friday Laralee and I taught our first "enrichment" class of the school year. It's nine second-graders who are considered gifted, so they get to skip an hour of reading time and come to a class we teach. Although there's a recommended curriculum for the class, most of the topics are pretty dull. So we make up our own lessons, which is not only more fun for us (although more work) but also seems to excite the kids.

So we started with the solar system. We talked about the planets and what's interesting about them (Venus is the hottest! Neptune has winds that blow at 1,300 mph! Uranus is flipped on its side!). The kids were so excited to learn that stuff that we're going to do a second class this week.

I'm playing around with some software called Celestia, which I'm hoping I can figure out and get running on my laptop so we can take a "tour" of the solar system. The graphics in the program are amazing:



In addition to being cool to watch, you can move in three dimensions, through time, across space, and watch the planets spin and orbit and moons whiz around them. Awesome stuff.

The kids are upstairs sending e-mail messages to one another. Alex pointed out "Of course we could just walk into the other room and say it, but there's something fun about doing it in e-mail."

I remember my first exposure to e-mail, back in 1990. I heard someone mention there was a way to communicate with people anywhere in the world instantly and for free. Imagine! I could write to a pen pal in Germany (hey, I'd just finished three years of German in high school) without licking a stamp. It was a pretty new medium back then-- few people actually had e-mail addresses, and you had to fill out a ton of paperwork at the university to get one-- but it sure seemed cool.

Now it's a key part of modern communication, and something most of us take very much for granted. So it's fun (and a little funny) to watch the kids suddenly realize what it can do.

"To initiate great things, you must truly not give a damn about what people think about you."

-- from Tribes Q&A, based on Seth Godin's Tribes

Kyra has suddenly jumped on the e-mail bandwagon and is writing messages to relatives and a few friends. She sent me this last night:What a sweet girl. At least she knows how to butter me up before sending me her gift list.

I just read an article about how the current (crummy) market is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and people willing to take a little risk while everyone else hunkers down.

This paragraph-- discussing how to build a great product from a great idea-- caught my eye:There have been times in the past eight years when I've been tempted to give up and go work for The Man somewhere, because quite honestly it's easier to have someone tell you what to do than to come up with all the to-do's myself. And it's easier to be the quiet programmer slamming out code in the back room than the Front Guy writing the proposals and pitching to the customers and managing the projects and making sure everything continues to run as smoothly as it can.

But then I stop and think. And I realize that no, in fact I'd rather be the entrepreneur. Now I just need to find that great idea and take a little risk...

As the Senate prepares to debate a $25 billion bailout package for American automakers, I can't say it enough times:

It is not the job of the government to prop up failing businesses. Period.

Banks, auto manufacturers, airlines, trains... these are all private corporations who need to make it on their own. If they can't compete in the marketplace, then they should close their doors. Things are slower in the web programming arena these days, but you don't see me asking for a handout from the Gov, nor do you see the Senate even considering what to do about a hundred thousand small businesses that are having a much harder time of it than a few dozen mega-corporations which gobs of liquid cash and executives who earn a hundred million a year.

What happened to capitalism? It looks more like an unpleasant mix of cronyism and socialism to me...

The Halloween candy is almost gone, but down at the bottom of the bags, hidden beneath some old Whoppers and Dots no one wants to eat, lurk a few last good boxes of



which are basically crunchy wads of colored sugar. Yum.

At 9am Pacific Time on November 10, a hosting company called McColo was shut down.

I'm sure hosting companies go out of business all the time, but this was significant because a company called MessageLabs-- which specializes in large-scale e-mail systems-- noticed a bit of a drop in the number of spam messages it saw crossing its servers.



Other companies hosting vast e-mail farms, or otherwise measuring e-mail traffic on the internet at large, saw a similar precipitous drop in the amount of spam flying around. It's clear that McColo was home to a huge group of spammers-- some estimates say as much as 25% of the global spam came through their servers.

Woo hoo! Now let's find the other hosting companies enabling these spammers...

A parody group called the Yes Men put together an awesome duplicate of the New York Times web site, complete with articles dated July 4, 2009.



It includes such rousing headlines as

Iraq War Ends: Troops to Return Immediately
Ex-Secretary Apologizes for WMD Scare
Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge
National Health Insurance Act Passes
Nation Sets its Sites on Building a Sane Economy
USA Patriot Act Repealed

If only.

If. Only.

In our family bedtime prayers with the kids, we encourage them to be thankful for things in their lives. Every now and then we get an interesting one.

Last night Alex was on deck, and he expressed his gratitude thus:

"Heavenly Father, thank you for aqua lungs..."

Aqua lungs? That was a new one to me. And Zack's heart was full tonight as he prayed:

"Heavenly Father, thank you for video games..."

I guess the Wii has a divine influence on young minds.

I'm reviewing some servers that I manage for Google and found one that's been running for a while...



Holy cow, that's more than two and a half years without rebooting. Go Linux!

As a system administrator who has spent countless hours installing, configuring, and tweaking spam filters to keep customers (and myself) happy, I found this Dilbert gem priceless.



It's only a matter of time. In order to defeat the spammers, the filters will need to be smarter than the spammers themselves.

I'm writing an e-mail to a client and I noticed that my e-mail client spell-checker doesn't approve of the word "sheesh"-- it highlights it in red.

It also doesn't like "noob".



What kind of spell-checkers are they writing these days? Clearly these are legitimate words that have their place in professional correspondence.

(With apologies to Chancellor, who was the recipient of this message.)

The little things are really the big things.

I was thinking the other day about how those little things in life tend to be the big things you remember. It's particularly noticeable in my business-- I've had many clients tell me how much they appreciate some seemingly insignificant thing I did for them.

As an example, a while ago I worked with a woman who needed a corporate intranet. I was doing the programming work and had set up her user account to show her how to use the system. She went through it with me (via phone) and then took a week off to get married. While she was gone, I logged into the system and updated her username to reflect her new last name. When she returned from her honeymoon, she was pleasantly surprised to find that her information had been updated (and you know how newlyweds can be). She called me and told me how much she appreciated that gesture, and that thirty seconds of my time has since translated into all kinds of additional projects (and thus income for my company).

Consider how little things enrich our experiences in so many areas:

The waiter who brings a refill, without being asked, just as you're finishing the first glass.

The checker who actually makes eye contact while handing you the receipt and saying "Thank you".

The smile or nod from a stranger as you pass them on the sidewalk.

The bank teller who flips through the stack of twenties and hands you a nice crisp bill instead of the dog-eared one on top of the pile.

The driver who sees you on your bike and stops to let you cross the intersection, even though they have the right of way.

The person who holds the door for you at the post office because your arms are full of packages.

The e-mail or phone message from someone you've contacted, telling you they got the message. Even if they can't do anything about it right away.

The person with a huge cart in the checkout line who notices you only have two items and lets you cut in front.

In a way it's fun to spend a few minutes here and a few minutes there doing little things for my clients and friends and family. Sometimes they don't notice, other times they may but don't say anything, but many times they comment about how nice it was that I was thinking of them.

If I was a corporate guru (which I'm not) with one piece of advice about how to succeed as a small business, it would be that the little things make a world of difference-- for good or bad. Leverage that tiny amount of effort into a positive relationship with a customer (or a friend) that lasts years.

"What's wrong with you people? You make programming more difficult than it needs to be. I have Frontpage Express to write web pages with, and when I write code with it, I never need to debug it. If you were as good of a programmer as me, you'd never need to debug either."

-- Actual manager of a software developer

I think I set a new record this week... I worked on a total of thirty-three different projects for clients. In five days. And it doesn't include all of the overhead stuff just to run the business.

I need a vacation.

The National Toy Hall of Fame (who knew?) contains such classic toys as Lego, an Atari 2600 game console, Mr. Potato Head, and a kite. And as of yesterday, it also contains...

a stick.

That's right, possibly the most timeless toy of all time. According to the museum's curator, Christopher Bensch:It's great to see some fun in the world.

Politics is fascinating, which is why it's probably the subject of so many of these posts of mine. For example, I find it fascinating* that voters in the Great State of Alaska would elect a Senator who had just been convicted of a felony. Apparently the numbers are still too close to call, but Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens appears to be ahead in the vote count. Yet scarcely a week before the election he was found guilty on all counts of failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions.

* But not in a good way.

It reminds me of that awesome election in the Great State of Missouri when voters elected a dead guy (Mel Carnahan) to the Senate over John Ashcroft. Mel had passed away just short of the election, and since the ballots had already been printed his name was still on them. In the end his wife served in his place, but I can only imagine how warm and fuzzy Ashcroft must have felt when he found out he lost to a corpse. Luckily he went on to a glamorous career as the second-worst Attorney General in history.

So anyway, I guess it goes to show you that you can never tell what the heck the voters are thinking. Or, in some cases, if they're thinking at all.

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

-- Jack Handey

Wow, the voters of Boulder County creamed the Republicans.



It's not terribly surprising that the liberals of this area lean toward the Democrats, but this was a bloodbath.

In the Presidential race, my guy Bob snagged third place with 402 votes, narrowly edging out the perennial Nader.



I'm happy to see the Boston Tea Party garnered 14 votes, although the Prohibition and Pacifist parties only took home a single vote each. It would have been interesting to see how well Ron Paul would have done if write-ins had been allowed.

Ahh, the fun of modern technology: cracking open various electronics and looking at the nice shiny parts inside.



I have a stack of old hard drives and decided to pop one open and grab the magnets. These things are spiffy: they'll literally slide across the desk and hop up on the hard drive (because there's a strong magnet inside it). Now if I can just think of something to do with those silver platters...

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing... after they've tried everything else."

-- Winston Churchill

President Obama, eh?

It beats President McCain, I guess...

Wise words from a software developer:

All of my three or four loyal readers have been clamoring for me to add comments to this blog, and I finally caved to the peer pressure. Click the little paper-and-pencil icon in the top bar to post a comment.

Right now it's wide open-- no CAPTCHAs, no approval process, none of that other annoying anti-spam stuff. It'll be interesting to see if I get obscene comments or if the spambots find me and start posting fun stuff about Russian girls on web cams...

The digital and analog worlds mix in this cool photograph from Flickr.