Jodi, Kenda and I hiked South Mountain Park for 45 minutes or so this afternoon. The park was packed, but the sun was out and it was pleasant. Jodi managed to put a scratch on our brand-spanking-new 2002 Honda Civic EX :-( when parking (parallel parking next to a rock). Oh well, one of us was bound to do it eventually.

We're over at Nate's watching the DVD of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Amazing movie. Jodi had not seen it, and it's been a LONG time since I saw it.

While out at the beach, I was up late one night and decided to do some writing... so here it is.

• Christmas 2001

  • journey home? - 12/23/2001

    • Well, we headed home (?) for the holidays Saturday afternoon. Home. Is it really? I guess for me it is still, though I miss our friends back in Phoenix. I'm torn now... Everything here is familiar, well-known to me... and yet I miss our new home too. Strange.
    • Jodi and I got a lift from Kenda to the airport - Sky Harbor in Phoenix. Interesting that in the middle of the desert the airport is named after a non-existent body of water. The long flight was from Phoenix to Charlotte... USAir has definitely slipped in the standards department. On a 4pm to 9 pm flight, we got no more than a snack. And no movie.
    • I did have the luxury this time of pulling out the TiBook and hacking on some WebObjects code, while Jodi plugged in my headphones and listened to my mp3s.
    • All in all the travel was uneventful. Security measures at Sky Harbor were a minor annoyance, and no one really complained much. There was that bit in Norfolk about the 100 bags that had not made the transition during the 30 minute layover in Charlotte. After standing in line for 45 minutes to register our lost bags, we got to the beach house, and our bags came the next evening
    • Good thing, too, because one of 'em had all the Christmas presents in it.

  • quicksilver christmas - 12/24/2001

• Christmas was... wow. I mean, we've got 15 people in the house, including the two infant nieces. Opening packages was hectic. There was no order to it , none of us know about half the presents given to the others, since at any one point there were about three presents being opened.
• I did get some cool loot. Especially nice was the t-shirt from the Port Norfolk based Angel's Coffee Shop. The t-shirt was dyed in coffee, and emblazoned with the "Born To Be Wired" logo. Awesome.
• But the best present I got...
• Had to be the shirt that Jodi and her grandmother Becky gave me. Some history, first. Back in '97 I got my ears pierced. (I was living the bohemien lifestyle in Germany, and it seemed like the thing to do.) I simply cannot wear gold, and I'm allergic to stainless, so I went with sterling. I've had the same sterling silver hoops in (except for cleanings) since then. Aaanyway, I decided then that I really really liked silver.
• So one day I decided I needed a silver shirt to go clubbing in. I had not seen anything like what I wanted in stores, so I had a seamstress friend of mine pick up a few square meters of the most amazing silver satin fabric I have ever seen. I swear it flows like water, or mercury.
• Well, this wonder fabric sat on a shelf, or in a drawer, for the next 4 years. I never found anyone to make the shirt for me, and I gave up.
• Unknown to me, back in September Jodi found my fabric, and knowing my crazy idea for it, mailed it to her &uumlautber-seamstress grandmother in Florida. Via phone and instant message they collaborated for a couple months.
• So I found a package under the tree from Jodi and G'Ma Becky. Inside was the most amazing, beautiful, custom-made silver shirt!! It was like the picture in my mind, made real. I don't know how they did it, but between a pattern one of Jodi's aunts had, and her Grandmother's incredible imagination, they gave me the silver shirt I always wanted.
• Thanks, Jodi and Grandma.

I've started looking at the WebDAV spec, and also at the Slide project (part of the ever-expanding jakarta project), which includes a servlet-based WebDAV server.

Guess the year this AP quote was released:

Re: This post...

Dave writes: "AaronLand is updating. Bravo! I added him to the rotation for my WeblogsComHelper app so his updates will show up on the weblogs.com home page."

My buddy Don (get a website!) sent out these haikus:

We're watching The Mexican. It's cute, and James Gandolfini is the best part so far. Overall it's fun, and clever.

Cool! Check out the new trailer for Spiderman... Oh I cannot wait. I've been waiting for this movie since 1994.

Thanks to Google's new 20 year archive of usenet posts, comes this little gem:

Via this post on slashdot, I've discovered a great little word processor that's native to Mac OS X, Okito Composer. I think it'll do 90% of what I need a word processor for.

Once upon a time I was a really good rock climber. My friends and I would be at the rock gym twice a week, and be up in the Appalachians climbing on weekends when the weather allowed.

The "column-view" in Mac OS X, affectionately known to Cocoa geeks as an NSBrowser, is a really really awesome and efficient way of browsing hierarchies. I'm working on an app (on and off) that needs an NSBrowser, so I'm posting this link to the Using Browsers topic of the Cocoa Programming Topics documentation.

Well, one of my best friends Nate just got laid off from the company we both used to work for. No two weeks notice, just "pack up and leave". They've never been great about dealing with their employees, but this is just rotten. Two weeks before Christmas.

Looks like some people are still trying to build a better browser. "With OmniWeb 4.1 you should see some major improvements in compatibility and speed. Our goal is that OmniWeb can be your Mac OS X browser of choice for 100 percent of the web sites you visit." Good on'ya, Omni.

(re: the desk picure) Nate asks: "...umm, where's the LEGO U-Haul logo..."

Camera fun - my desk at the U-Haul Webhouse, showing my iMac server, Ti Fighter, second monitor for the TiBook, and the Lego Mac Plus:

Those of you out there that usually chat with me on AIM: we're making a lot of network changes today - I may or may not be able to get them to open up the AIM port today (soon though). If it's important email me.