Son, talking to a friend: Tonight if I see a shooting star I’m going to wish that we had two dads and all the toys and we lived in the same house.

“Someone said that you don’t have to learn how to play an instrument to make music with it. They saw first-hand that the same applies with coding, and that there’s no point in being shy about touching the inside parts of an interactive medium.” Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective [...]

It’s been suggested that we hang a print of this in the guest bedroom. Yes. Definitely going to happen. Click here to embiggen.

Doing some blog housekeeping today. Apologies if you are seeing some old stuff pop up in your feeds.

There was a time when I would have paid good money for a device that made kids become thoughtful and quiet when you pressed a smiley face button and zapped their brains with red laser beams. That’d be worth the money for sure. It’s an ad for a $100 no-touch thermometer. I’m not sure why [...]

DBDesigner 4 “DBDesigner 4 is a visual database design system that integrates database design, modeling, creation and maintenance into a single, seamless environment.” Looks very robust. One of the few tools that supports reverse engineering. MySQL Workbench “MySQL Workbench is a cross-platform, visual database design tool developed by MySQL. It is the highly anticipated successor [...]

I just finished technical review on a new book due out next month from Apress called Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services. (A technical reviewer basically just makes sure all of the examples work and that the technical stuff the author writes is correct and provides evaluations of the text from a [...]

A quiet and seemingly simple love story about a German mail-order bride attempting to start a new life in a Minnesota farming community in the 1920s. Inge and Olaf show us what commitment, friendship, and strength of character really are. Beautifully written, beautifully acted, beautifully photographed. Recommended. Sweet Land (Netflix)

I just finished watching the premiere episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It wasn’t terrible and it’s got Summer Glau (who shall always be River for me). But the first episode was essentially an abridged version of Terminator 2 (right down to a visit with the Dyson family) and ended by setting up the [...]

Last November, after around 25 years of computing, finally, I setup a reliable, automatic backup system for all of my important files, documents, photos, and music. And today I needed it (timing, eh?). A bunch of important files took collateral damage from a program I was writing. And I almost panicked. But then the backup [...]