Jennie points out a great book, “A Baker’s Field Guide to Christmas Cookies”. This sounds like a fabulous idea.

I often find myself frozen like deer in the headlights, unable to decide at the Christmas treat table which cookies I should take. I am stuck attempting to remember if I like lebkuchen or is it really a pfeffernuse. No more, I can whip out my handy cookie guide and immediately discover which cookies I should be eating.

A field guide might also promote being able to track a “life list” of cookies I have eaten and where I was when I ate that cookie first.

A new vocation is born, “cookie-ing”. I am a “cookie-er.” To be a real cookie-er one must learn about where to find the cookies, the sound each type of cookie makes when bitten, geographic differnces in cookies, etc.. This is the beginning of the next big thing.

Cookie-ing — The act of seeking out and observing cookies in their native habitat.

Cookie-er — One who seeks out and observes cookies in their native habitat and generally understand migration patterns of cookies.

Perhaps one should form an “American Cookie-ing Assocation” to promote this past time, with rules on how the life list of cookies can be properly recorded.

Members who submit lifelist and annual list totals submitted to the American Cookie-ing Association for publication in the annual ACA List Report must observe the ACA Recording Rules. A cookie included in totals submitted for ACA lists must have been encountered in accordance with the following ACA Recording Rules:

1. The cookie must have been within the prescribed area and time period when encountered.
2. The cookie must have been a species currently accepted by the ACA Checklist Committee for lists within its area, by the I.C.A. Checklist for lists outside the ACA area and within the I.C.A. area.
3. The cookie must have been alive, wild, and unrestrained when encountered.
4. Diagnostic field marks for the cookie, sufficient to identify to species, must have been seen and/or heard and/or tasted and documented by the recorder at the time of the encounter.
5. The cookie must have been encountered under conditions that conform to the ACA Code of Ethics.

(with apologies to the ABA who provided the template for that bit of parody.

found this stange little program called n-Gen, which generates art once you supply some text. It’s fun to play with. Hopefully, it’s not some virus. It’s odd but easier to deal with than hyperscore.

I took the week off of work. Yesterday I painted the bathroom a deep burgundy color. The paint color is actually called “Scarlet Fever”. I’m not really sure why anyone would name their paint after an infectious disease.

Cable guy came yesterday. We now have Comcast phone, broadband and digital cable all for less than I used to pay for local phone service from qwest. So as soon as I switch cell-phone providers (which will be very soon thanks to number portability, maybe this week) I will be qwest free. It took a few minute to get the Tivo talking to the digital cable box. It works now, but there is a little lag when you press the Tivo channel up/down button. The way it works is that the Tivo has a little cable that plugs into the back of the Tivo and sends an IR signal to the Digital Cable box. Now that I have all that working I want the Tivo to do the volume control for the receiver. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work … yet.

I have also cleared out some significant drawers and cupboards in the house that were collecting junk. The good news is that the upstairs and main floor are now a lot neater and organized, even where the guests can’t see, but the basement has a few more junk piles. On an organizing note I have finally (re) organized the PC cables under the main computer desk. I hate PC cabling so much. There is always too much cord and those power supplies for peripherals aren’t very covenient, and don’t get me started on wall-warts. (I need to break down and order some of these.)

I have been thinking of simple ways to play music on different floors in my house without schepping (and losing cd’s). I came up with an easy and cheap solution. On the main floor, I put an el-cheapo DVD player, $37.99 after rebate which does MP3′s, WMA’s, DVD’s, SVCD’s, CD’s full of JPEG’s and CD’s. Hooking that into the reciever first allows me to play the tunes, MP3′s in my case, without the TV on. It also made me hook up the TV to the reciever, something I had been meaning to do for 2 1/2 years. While it’s not nearly as slick as the gateway solution or the linksys offering it’s way cheaper. The side benefit is that I don’t have to move my DVD player from floor to floor depending on who want to watch a movie where.

For the upstairs I am considering re-purposing a PC with Freevo, but need to find a cheap and simple remote to go with it.

I have always had a healthy respect for Amazon’s implementation of the “shopping experience”. I have used it since it’s top 100 list were composed mainly of technical books, before the ‘net took over. Today, I rarely buy a book without consulting the posted reviews. I was pretty impressed with the “Search Inside the Book” feature since it is both audacious and well implemented. But tonight was over the top, I wanted to add a few things to an order and it was so easy. I cancelled one item and added two more, and it only took a few minutes. It was far better than any meat space shopping experience lately.

I got a comment on an old entry on smart mobs. The commenter claimed that they were having trouble seeing my style sheet in Safari. I just about emailed them when I realized the email address and web site were probably a spam trap. For shame, using my own mercy for non-mainstream browsers to get me to confirm my email address.

I have also noticed an uptick in spam referrers in my httpd logs. I have seen this periodically in the past but it seemed pretty random. Now it seems like they are using some of the services like technorati to get the url when I post.

We had a nice snow last night. The kids and I went out and sledded down our hill. What a blast now that Matthew is old enough to really enjoy it. I am planning to build a banked track for sledding this year if the snow is favorable. Minnesota is plenty miserable in the winter, but having snow makes up for the cold for the most part. The last few winters were pretty pathetic snow wise. Hopefully, we’ll get a good one this year. (Note: If that wish comes true then I’ll probably be grumbling about shoveling and snowblowing by mid-January.)

Joel holds forth on the software approach of the day.

This is an interesting post in a variety of ways. It points out how little is really known about some aspects of s/w engineering even until today. I laughed out loud when I saw the quote, ” They wawa regularily and their stock is up 20%!” I remember one over zealous management type at my office who said “… the stock price is a reflection of your hard work.” Whatta moron. This was in 1999, well before the bubble burst. Even then I knew that it wouldn’t last forever, and our stock price was a reflection of a fundemental imbalance where there were more buyers than sellers temporarily. While we were working hard in 1999, we worked harder the following two years when the stock declined drastically.

Reminds me of what a wise software engineer said to me. “You can be sure that someone is lying if they know exactly what day software will ship and exactly how much it costs.”

Should one finish a book that you aren’t enjoying? I often do. I think I do it out of guilt more than anything. What is stanger still to me, is that I will often pick up another book by the same author a year later and see if the next book is as bad. In some cases this has worked as I really like “Red Mars”, “Green Mars”, “Blue Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson, while I loathed “The Years of Rice and Salt.”

There are so many good books, I probably shouldn’t finish books I hate. It’s not that I think it will get better just around the corner. It’s that I don’t want to be a quitter. If it’s really stinko, I’ll skim. When it’s over I’ll know the character went to Prague, but I won’t remember exactly why.

I am reminded of something I both heard and read Garrison Keillor say when he was talking about which poems he had included and excluded from his anthology “Good Poems.”

Just finished “Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert, by Jason Kersten. It’s a good journatlistic look at a very strange murder in the New Mexico desert. The story is fascinating to me. The basic deal is that two guys went camping in the desert who were unprepared. They get lost . Four days later the boys in brown go looking for them. They find one guy half crazed with dehydration, the other guy dead. The first guy admitted killing him, but claimed his buddy begged him to.

Makes me think I gotta think twice about inviting people to go camping with me.

I’ve been reading through “Google Hacks”. Good stuff there. Sometimes I wish I could make a living as a researcher. Finding data is so interesing to me. Of course, that’s part of what my job is now, I suppose.