One of my favorite things about living 5 miles from town is how dark it is out here at night. I had forgotten how many stars there are at night. I think that it’s one of my favorite things about the house, looking forward to enjoying it this summer.

We’ve had our iPhones for a week now, and I’m pretty happy with it. Twitter, facebook, IM, RSS feeds, and email. Even posting this entry from it.

Getting over being sick kinda sucks, but I got a couple video games out of it. “Wario Land: Shake It” is a great game. Lots of replay value doing missions, but not crazy long like a lot of the current games on the market. 2D side scrolling games still rock.

This is a test posting from my iPhone. If it works it should have a picture attached to it.

Seems to work. Using the wordpress app from the app store. Let’s you attach a picture you have already taken or snap a picture from the app itself.

This amused me. Mostly because it’s kinda true.

http://powazek.com/posts/1655

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

Not unrelated are the 3 virtues of a great programmer:

1. Laziness – The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
2. Impatience – The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
3. Hubris – Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.

I try to hide my god-like arrogance, but I know I mostly fail at that .

I love spam … and now, i know a little more about it.

MMMMmmmmuuughhhhmmmm … tasty, tasty, Spam.

Official SPAM FAQ

As part of our wedding package, Katherine and I received 1 free year to the Lakeview Fitness center. So far we have been taking advantage of it several times a week.

I enjoy working on the weights for a while (very low weight, very high repetition. I’m working on stamina, not building mass), then hitting the Stair Masters and then a 5 minute jog on the tread mill to cool down before jumping into the pool. When i go by myself, or meet Katherine there, I usually spend 1.5 to 2 hours there. About the same amount of time as if i had gone to karate, but the workout is very different.

Katherine gets there and immediately heads for the swimming pool. She swims crazy fast and is blowing way past my own swimming goals. I like seeing that, gives me something to push towards and she seems to enjoy it a lot. She has also been helping me improve my swimming, and trying to break  me of some of my bad habits.

One thing that I have noticed about swimming is that it seems to help me heal. I injure myself fairly regularly. I have a couple of bad ankles, a bad knee, 2 bad shoulders, and a back that likes to go out if i twist wrong while I’m jumping. I’ve also broken most of my toes multiple times in the last 3.5 years and am currently getting over Plantar Fasciitis.

What I’ve noticed though is that swimming seems to relieve the pain AND speed up the healing. My guess is that it is a combination of stretching more and additional muscle usage in a low-impact kind of way. I’m a firm believer, that if something hurts you need to work the pain out of it. Swimming seems to provide that benefit faster than other forms of exercise that I know.

Just something else I wouldn’t have figured out if it wasn’t for Katherine.

Previously our navigation was along the top of the page … It had a nifty scroll down effect that showed child pages … but it didn’t work real well for deeply nested pages. It also had the flaw that unless you happened to notice it or knew it was there it got lost very easily.

if you scroll your eyes slightly to the left you will notice that there is not a section called “Pages” there. That is the new navigation. As you click around it will still show child pages as they are available, but its a touch more obvious to the casual obeserver.

Most likely it will need some tweaking as we add more pages, but it should work for now and be a lot easier to use.

I finally finished my version of how Mike proposed. The story, complete with pictures, can be found under the “Stories” tab, titled Engagement-Katherine’s Perspective. Watch for Mike’s Perspective to be added soon.

UPDATE: I added mine too …

Labor Day weekend (August 30 & 31) Katherine and I went up to Cleveland to see the airshow with her family. Despite early morning clouds on Saturday the weekend turned into perfect weather for an airshow. All of the pictures are available on mbond.smugmug.com

Sean Tucker and the Collaborators put on a great show. I was most excited about seeing Sean Tucker, and he didn’t disappoint at all. That man loves to fly and it shows. After the show was over Katherine and I saw him head out again. Sunday afternoon, which was even nicer than Saturday, we saw him randomly flying around a good ways away from the airport. He must have headed out just before the blue angels went up.

Katherine really like Bob Carlton in his Sail Plane. Watching unpowered aerobatics is incredable, takes energy management to an extreme.

Jon Mohr was incredable in his stearman. His aerobatics were easily as good as Sean Tuckers, and watching him do them so low in a stock stearman is amazing.

Of course the blue angles were there as well, doing what they do. They put on a great show as well, but honestly, i’d rather watch the guys in the piston aircraft all day … I love the jets too, but there is something much more ‘magical’ about watching people who love to fly, fly their GA aircraft.

On sunday Katherine and I went back to check out all the static displays. Walk through the airplanes, see all the Nasa stuff, talk with the pilots that were around, etc … We got there around 10am, just as the planes started taking off again and got to see all the acts that we really enjoyed first thing in the morning.  Its nice standing in line waiting to get inside a C-130 and watching a B-17 fly by with their huge radials.

I hope i get a chance to learn even basic aerobatics someday.

Below is a skit that Senpai Kennedy and I have been developing for a couple years now. Saturday, August 23rd 2008, we will be performing the newest version of this demo. This video was taken Friday night at demo practice … the way we work it, each time we perform the skit we alternate who “wins” … this allows us to add a little bit of length to it each time, usually 2 or 3 movements.

Senpai is using a Boken, a wooden sword that resembles a katana, and I am using a Pair of Sai (short metal swords, think Raph from TMNT).

The video is the same thing twice, shot from 2 different angles. Thought I would share this, i’d like to hear some feedback on it. Does it look good? This is the first time I’ve seen it since its first version, I see a couple places where it can be improved.

Many things have changed in my life in the past few months about which I have failed to update friends and family.  I suppose I should begin with my new job.  As of June 16, 2008, I am the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau of Children and Families, Region 1.  To break it down, I am an Assistant Attorney General for the State of West Virginia.  I am assigned to work for the Department of Health and Human Resources in the Bureau of Children and Families (BCF).  BCF handles child abuse and neglect reports, adult protective services, foster care, daycare licensing, etc., and welfare benefits for eligible families.  I am the legal counsel for BCF in Region 1 of West Virginia.  West Virginia’s BCF is broken up into 4 different Regions.  Region 1 is the northwest quarter of the state.  I represent DHHR offices in 16 counties.  My primary responsibility is to provide legal advice on any issue that arises during the daily operation of BCF.  I also represent DHHR at grievance hearings (if a person is contesting DHHR’s finding that the person committed maltreatment of a child or an adult).  My duties also extend to representing DHHR on appeal from Circuit Court juvenile abuse and neglect cases and representing DHHR workers if they are pulled into civil case matters (mostly as witnesses).  After one month, the job has been going well. It is interesting and there is always something new to do.  Hopefully, I will continue to enjoy it.

My new job led to the next change in my life which is that I have moved.  I no longer live in Keyser.  I have moved to the “big city” of Fairmont, WV.  Fairmont is about 20 minutes south of Morgantown.  Mike is happy because now he only has to drive 20 minutes to see me on the weekend instead of an hour and a half.  It is much nicer living in Fairmont than in Keyser.  Fairmont does not have a lot of entertainment itself, but it does have restaurant choices.  Plus, Morgantown is within distance for a night on the town if one is so inclined.

What else is new?  I got a new car back in May of 2008.  I now have a Mazda 5, which is a mini-minivan.  The lease on my Mazda 6 was set to expire this October and I needed a car that has room to transport my poochies.  The Mazda 5 has more cargo area with the third row of seats down than a station wagon.  So far it has worked out well.  I like it.  It’s red.

The most recent and biggest news and change is that Mike and I got engaged this past weekend (Saturday, July 12, 2008).  We’ve set the date for the wedding as October 10, 2009, which is a Saturday.  We’re planning on getting married in Morgantown.  We are going to have my judge (the judge I clerked for) perform the ceremony.  Beyond that, we have not made any other plans.  I intend to write another post with more details about the proposal and pictures of the ring in the next week or so.

Life’s been busy lately, as you can see, so I haven’t had time to work on the site a lot.  I’m going to try to add more content, but I can’t promise much as half of my house is still in boxes.