Compared with last year, this year's holiday season has been awesome!!! That's in relative terms, of course. In absolute terms, the season passed fairly quietly. Mom came out to St. Louis to spend Christmas with the boys, decided she needed to catch up on the sleep she'd missed the last year, and promptly slept for 95% of the week she was here. It was our pleasure to have her though. She needed a place where she had no responsibilities for a week and could rest her mind and body. The day after Christmas, she and I ventured back to Virginia, the first leg in my 3000 miles in a week campaign. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent figuring out what she needed to bring with her to Florida that could fit into the shoe box she calls a car. Amazingly we fit more than a garment or two in that sucker. Thursday, we shoved off from Virginia for leg two; a trip to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Mom is to take up residence and employment. After stopping in Jacksonville to spend the night with avery and her family, we arrived at the house where Mom was to rent a room for the next 8 months. The house is a perfect fit for her. It is small, easily maintainable, on a very quiet street, and quite near a quaint downtown. The owner, Linda, is an interesting lady and will provide Mom with some much needed companionship. St. Petersburg itself is nice. It is about a 30 minute drive from the house to the beach on the Gulf coast. Tampa Bay is a block away from the house. The temperature these last two days has been 72 and 77; not too shabby for late December. Downtown is pleasant; it is not a business district per se, but certainly caters to the tourist demographic. Sadly we were not able to investigate Tampa Bay yet, but I'm sure the bigger city will provide plenty of entertainment on subsequent visits. Leg three begins tomorrow as I rejoin Avery and a couple friends for the trek back to sunny St. Louis! As they return to learn, I return to code. Happy New Year!

I hope that most of you have seen this, but just in case and for posterity's sake, dear God watch this video and love every minute of it! That said, Merry Christmas to all…

It's pretty sweet when a friend succeeds at a high level of competition. My hat is off to Lewis Howes for his performance in his last collegiate football game against DIII powerhouse Mount Union. Read the write-up here. Not too shabby for a guy who didn't start playing football until his sophomore year in high school. Lewis, congratulations my man. I know wherever life takes you, success will follow you.

Dilbert has a its moments and had one recently:

Some linux foo for the kids at home. Use BitTorrent? A lot of the time, you'll get a movie file in a .bin/.cue combo. Not a convienent format for playing the file. You could burn it but who uses CDs anymore? It seems the easiest way to handle this is to convert the .bin to an .mpg file. Make sure you have the vcdimager package installed, then run vcdxrip with the following options:

vcdxrip -p –nosegments –nofiles -o /dev/null -b <your-bin-file-here>

This takes some time but the resulting file should play fine in Xine or Mplayer. Far out!

FINALLY!!! Conclusive evidence that women enjoy sex more than men. Found this excerpt this morning and decided I needed to share it with the world. Why I'm posting it here, I have no idea. Maybe someone else saw it and posted it somewhere people will actually see it. And now, the proof that women enjoy sex more than men:

Because when you put your finger in your ear and wiggle it around, it feels better to your ear than it does to your finger.

Duh! On an unrelated, but still humorous note, I've also found the answer to the age old question, "Are golfers athletes?". The answer is - Yes, in the same way that moss is salad. Golf sucks…

It's nice when the companies you admire do things that make you love them even more. I, Cringely explains,

Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing.

Oh hellz yeah! They can take me to bed anytime…

Funny comic from Dilbert today:

Seems the Department of Homeland Security is making information available online that perhaps should not be disclosed to the general public. Want to view your's or a friend's (or foe's) licence online? Now you can, by going to this site and typing in your information. Fortunately there is an opt out button once you've found your licence, which will hide your licence from the general public (though it will still be viewable by law enforcement officials). If you are worried about your information being online, go to the site and remove it from the public's view, then call your congress representative and get this site offline!

I like puzzles, and not the kind that you assemble on a table that look like a cute pastoral scene. I'm talking about puzzles that stretch your mind. /. had a survey of its readers of fun puzzles that are seemingly difficult but have surprisingly simple solutions. I have been playing with the Petals Around The Rose puzzle for some time now and have yet to figure it out. Have fun playing and don't ruin the solution for me by telling me. I swear I'll figure it out.