My sister and I have gotten strangely addicted to the shareware arcade game, Snood . I bought a full license as a Christmas present for the little sister of my old roommate, and ended up getting hooked after testing it out to make sure it worked. It's a little like Tetris.

Weather forecasts for Jacksonville next week predict clouds with temperatures in the high 50s. Hopefully the football game will be rain-free.

Welcome back. I'm now equipped with a crock pot and sundry cookbooks for 2004, as well as a pair of warm driving gloves to replace the homeless gloves I've worn since the late 1980's. I've also added a few new cat pictures on the Photos page, taken during my stay at my parents' house.

Search terms on Christmas Eve:

Form and Analysis trumpet concerto, Key center tonic performance, Transposing Bb Tenor Saxophone, Thirteen colonies trade early eighteenth century, Jim Mulcahy and Manassas, persichetti parable mp3, Prokofiev Classical Symphony Second Movement, bit torrest

Search terms on Christmas:

Anorexia Nervosa in Bulgarian Bees, Doomcad, flood deluge leonardo da vinci, diagram of the tenor saxophone, hurricane leonardo da vinci, Jennie Geisner, shockwave's forum, ghost story genre, Orchestral trumpet transposition guide, First Gymnopedie, Tank Turret Bunker, odd title of the year award, cow wordplay, the father in my oedipus complex, resuing

Yesterday's search terms:

matt and rhianna, the theme of blindness in oedipus rex by sophocles, EDTA copper conservation uses, chromatic root movement, Mama Elena, the money pit in oak islands, lancelot symbolizes, famous tightwads, transpose chord trumpet, jazz articulations, town of clark colorado

Merry Christmas, and welcome back from my two-week hiatus. I've been putting in mad amounts of overtime recently, to the point where I didn't really feel like making little pithy updates on a daily basis when I got home from a day of computing (see Dec 13 and Dec 20 for examples of such pitiful pithiness.

I will still be working a lot this week, but should be cutting back to my regular schedule starting in the new year. To make up for my recent lack of updates, I'm going to try and post a review of one thing per day for awhile, whether it's a movie, book, CD, game, or foodstuff. What could I be reviewing tomorrow? That's the kind of crazy excitement you get for free by visiting this site.

Besides work, I haven't done much of anything this month (the last two days I spent completely work-free were Christmas Day and November 7th). I had my annual holiday dinner, bought lots of CDs, played some WoW, and started exercising again. The bar continues to sit woefully unfinished in the basement, and cats continue to be cats. I spent Christmas with my family in Alexandria and had an earache on Christmas Day. Besides being painful, it made all the music I heard in my left ear sound a quarter-tone flat with a tinny reverberation akin to an 11KHz compressed WAV file. The pain has gone away, but the musical effect persists, so all my new CDs sound like crap.

Since this is something you can only understand through experience, I've made a sound clip for you, to show what things sound like at the moment:

2005 in Review, Part I of III

Based upon Reuter's Pictures of the Year

To be continued tomorrow...

2006 in Review, Part I of III

based on Reuter's Pictures of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005

2007 in Review, Part II of III

based on Reuter's Pictures of the Year

2010 in Review, Part I of III

based on Reuter's Pictures of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009

2011 in Review, Part II of III

based on Reuter's Photos of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010

2012 in Review, Part II of III

based on Reuter's Photos of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

2013 in Review, Part II of III

based on Reuter's Photos of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012

2017 Timeline

A smattering of events from 2017

• Finally dropped my daily print newspaper subscription in favour of Sundays and web access.
• We started going out a little bit more once Rebecca felt less sick because of internal Maia.

• Had a gender reveal party for our parents.
• Continued to work long hours at the startup but greatly cut back on trips to Fairfax (and the associated breakfasts at Denny's).
• Bought an Oculus Rift with my tax refund.

• Got a visit from Alice of South Carolina.
• Had St. Patrick's Day party with plenty of corned beef.
• My office moved to Herndon.
• We started registering for a bunch of baby nonsense.

• Let friends play with the Oculus Rift and watched Evil Mike cower from robot spiders.
• Painted my former home office as a nursery.
• Sent our friend, Michelle, off to Berkeley.

• Went to a bunch of baby showers.
• Had a babymoon in Ocean City.
• Had "Friend Dinners" once a week with Sara, Car, and Ben.

• Kitty died.
• Discovered a new restaurant where the Tuesday special was 35 fried shrimp.
• Helped Sara move across Reston.
• Waited impatiently for Maia's arrival.

• Celebrated the 4th in Taylorstown.
• Had Maia, and a lot of late nights.
• Had homemade sushi in our kitchen.

• Booty died.
• We helped Sara move to Minneapolis for grad school.
• Went to a wedding while Maia complained at Grandma in the hotel.
• Maia met everyone and her 3 Binder cousins.
• I quit my job at the startup.

• We had our first barbeque of the year.
• Maia hated sleeping.
• I did the stay-at-home dad thing.

• We went to SterlingFest.
• I got a new part-time job at my old job.
• Maia got to meet Felicity in Fredericksburg.
• We went to a Halloween party as a family.

• I got in the rhythm of having a part-time job and staying at home dadding.
• We had a yoga holiday potluck dinner.
• Celebrated Thanksgiving in Taylorstown.

• Maia started solid foods, learned to sit up, and learned to clap.
• We got a wee bit of snow.
• We went to a Scotch Night at Car and Ben's.
• Sara stayed in our basement for the holidays.
• We celebrated Christmas with both sets of grandparents in sequence.

How was 2017 for you?

Advent of Code Wrap-up

After 25 nights of stowing a sleeping bag near the computer so I could wake up at midnight, Advent of Code has come to a close. I did much better in my second year, taking about 30 hours to finish every puzzle (vs. 38 last year).

Although the company competition goes until the end of the year to allow people to catch up, it's looking like I'll snag 2nd place and a $200 prize (vs. 4th place and $0 last year). This works out to about $6.67 per hour, which is more than I earned in my first internship at PEPCO in 1996. I was definitely helped by the vagaries of real life -- one top competitor had a new infant halfway through the month while another spent a week at the AWS re:Invent conference in Vegas with shoddy WiFi access.

As you can see from my times below, I managed to finish each night before going back to bed. I definitely regretted this on the day that took four and a half hours (I drove to the office directly afterwards).

I also made it onto the Global Leaderboard for the Day 25 puzzle, as the 84th fastest person in the world to finish. The puzzle involved solving a rudimentary text adventure game, so clearly it was in my wheelhouse.

I'm already looking forward to next year's competition. Maybe I'll cave to peer pressure and switch from Java to Python next time!

Update: An official 2nd place!

Advent of Code Day

3rd place: I'm $100 richer!

2023 Timeline

A smattering of events from 2023

• Rode the brand new Silver Line.
• Started learning Kotlin.

• We took a soup cooking class and have since made many soups.

• Maia got glasses.
• Visited with a lot of the Hicks family.

• Saw Elizabeth and the Catapult.
• Went to Massanutten for five days touring the petting zoo and water park.
• Ian turned 2.
• I started learning Spanish.

• Strep throat for everyone!

• Weekend trip to the Plains to see Anna and go to my work party.
• Rebecca had a petting zoo for her birthday.
• Rebecca and Maia went to Big Meadow Lodge with Annie and Dom.
• Maia lost her first tooth.

• Maia turned 6.
• Went to Lake of the Woods for 5 days with the Smiths.

• We all got COVID.
• Maia started First Grade.
• I got a new computer.

• Maia started ballet.
• Ian started preschool.
• Went to Shannondale for my 44th birthday.
• Paid off my mortgage.

• 14th wedding anniversary.
• Rebecca went to Atlanta with Emily in between sicknesses.

• Had a lot of fire pit fires.
• Friendsgiving at Tammy's.
• Thanksgiving with the Whitmers.
• Started learning Hangeul.

• Sara came to visit from Minnesota.
• Maia had her end-of-the-year dance recital.
• Did Avent of Code for the 6th year and came in 2nd place.
• Went to Shannondale with my parents.