Documentaries

For those of you that are looking for some ideas of documentaries to watch, Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired) has put together an eBook of "200 documentaries you must see before you die". Since we've gotten a Netflix membership, we've been on the lookout for good documentaries, and this book is chock full of suggestions.

Some time ago, my brother turned me on to Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools list. It's a list of, well, cool tools. In Kevin Kelly's own words:

Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.

It's a list worth putting on your RSS reader, as are some of his other online publications. Or you can get a conglomeration of all his blogs with Kevin Kelly's lifestream.

Furry Christmas

We've been watching a couple friends' dogs for Christmas, and tonight we decided to torture them for our own viewing pleasure:


We laughed so hard we cried as we tried to get them to sit still long enough for that picture. I don't feel too bad tormenting them though, because they've been having all sorts of fun terrorizing the house together. Here's Kuzca wrestling with her friend Zeke:


More pictures on Flickr.

New Year, New Job

Following in the footsteps of Shana and Tyler, I too have decided to change jobs. Is it something in the air? Starting January 7th, I’ll be working for Avago Technologies in their ASIC design lab.

Xmas tree

Look, we're all festive and stuff:


The best part is that it's rosemary, so I can eat it when we're done.

History of Programming

Good morning geeks.

This page has a cool timeline of programming languages from Fortran to Java:
http://www.levenez.com/lang/



O'Reilly also makes a color version.

Bread In A Can

I'm sure this type of thing has been around for a while, but I just stumbled on it while looking for some baked beans:


It tastes how you would expect some bread from a can to taste. But it's still better than Vegemite.

Snow Day

It took all the way until the middle of December, but Christine and I finally got our ski season kicked off today at Winter Park. Our original plan was to stay closer to home and go to Eldora, but we made an early morning decision to check out some of the 6 inches that Winter Park was reporting.

It was a rough ride down from Fort Collins, with fog and slick roads all the way down I-25. In the end, it took us 3 hours to get to the resort and we were second guessing our decision to go to Winter Park. Once we got onto the snow, however, we were glad we came.

I'm used to ski resort over reporting their snow totals, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a full 6 inches (and then some) on the the slopes. Unbelievable conditions today. From the first run to the last, we were skiing through knee deep powder. Beautiful.

Sure beats work!

Smart Playlists

I learned something new about the smart playlists on my iPod yesterday.

I have a smart playlist called "New Podcasts" which, as you would expect, contains all the podcasts that I haven't listened to yet. The rules are were:

Podcast is true
Play Count is less than 1

This correctly created the playlist for me, but when I would finish a podcast they weren't disappearing from the list (even though their play count no longer fits the criteria). It turns out that some playlist rules keep the live updating from working. My new smart playlist rules are:

Genre contains Podcast
Play Count is less than 1

Now my podcasts are correctly removed from the playlist after I listen to them.

Bored yet?

(I found out about this here.)

Kuzca's Birthday

In honor of Kuzca's 6th birthday, I uploaded some puppy pictures. There are more up on Flickr.