First and most important, our Saviour is born–read the Christmas story in Luke 2.
Secondly, our “2003 Christmas letter”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/christmas_2003.pdf (2.5 MB PDF) is now available online! Enjoy, and may God grant you peace in the midst of an oft-too busy holiday.
I’m currently in (and have been in) the progress of overhauling the web site’s plumbing. Once finished, the site will be sleaker, easier to use, and cuter to boot. In the mean time, you might run into a few problems here and there, especially with this being the holidays and all; I apologize.
Short term, the style switcher (the buttons on the right side that changed the appearance of the site) are on a hiatus. Don’t worry, they’ll be back, new and improved. In fact, I decided that just changing the colors and patterns of the site wasn’t good enough–inspired by the “CSS Zen Garden”:http://www.csszengarden.com/ I’ve decided to have the next set of stylesheets make radical changes to the look and feel of the web site. I’ve also decided that since this is kyleandkelly.com, and should be reflective of our family, the next styles on deck will be:
* Pink Pout
* Electrabbit
Stay tuned…
First, the family news part: two weekends ago, we went down to Indy to see the Colts whoop up on the Falcons (we’re talking professional football–American football–for the non-sports fans). The Indianapolis Colts won big time, and we all enjoyed ourselves, despite the nosebleeds and proximity to obstructed view seating.
Now then, having attended several Colts games over the past few years, I’ve discovered the following cardinal rule. It may only apply to the type of seats I can afford; I can’t speak to the suite-dwellers, or season ticket holders. Anyhow, here are the tenets of the “Drunken Football Expert Law” :
# No matter where you sit, you will be within earshot of a fan who will likely be drunk before the opening kickoff can be returned.
# Said fan will not suffer his or her inebriation in silence, but quite the opposite, will make themselves known to the entire section.
# Invariably, their ravings will follow this pattern–before the play, they are the expert. “PLAY ACTION: TWELVE YARDS GUARANTEED!” Or, “GOTTA RUN A $%*&@ING STRETCH PLAY! BAM! TOUCHDOWN!” They know exactly how a particular play will turn out.
# When the team doesn’t run that play and the outcome is as good or better than requested play, the drunken fan is not deterred.
# Heaven forbid, if the team should muff a play (any play, not necessarily the predicted one), cover your “freakin’ ears”:http://behindsimpsons.tripod.com/f-inears.wav because the Drunken Football Expert will launch into a profanity-laced tirade about the idiots on the football team, their mothers, their virility/manliness (or lack thereof), etc.
# Three plays later, as the touchdown is scored, the same fan will be praising the superstars, their mothers, and their virility/manliness.
These are the tenets of “The Drunken Football Expert Law”.
“Sauron: Offer and Acceptance”:http://blog.qiken.org/archives/000196.html
Marvelous. Simply marvelous. I’ll have to lump lawyers in with computer geeks, Star Wars/Star Trek fans, and fantasy sports fanatics as “people who analyze to the Nth degree”. 
Earlier this year, we had a marching band come down the main hallway here at GFS to celebrate the opening of our 100th Marketplace store. Today, the Honors Choir from Calendonia High School moved throughout the campus, singing Christmas carols (and sounding quite wonderful). Many employers could stand to learn something from the Gordons about how to treat employees.
Man, what is it about Canada that’s so funny? I keep ending up with Canadian jokes in the “Humor category”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/archives/cat_humor.shtml…
Seen over at “UrbanDictionary.com”:http://www.urbandictionary.com/ –enjoy!
*Canadians*
Close-minded, yet liberal, many Canadians fail to realize that their country of 30 million people relies on the brand of I.V. bag commonly known as “United States” for life support. 95% of all Canadians live within 200 miles of the U.S. border, as only the extremely hearty citizens (namely, the Inuit) do not necessarily require the support of an I.V. bag. Surprisingly, though, it is estimated that the vast majority of Canadians are willing to risk death just to be taken off their “annoying” life support equipment. But studies predict that a large percentage of Canadians would revert to being on life support after experiencing the trauma of being without it.
A variety of fluids are included in every Canadian’s I.V. bag, ranging from music and movie to automobile to language. When one of these fluids is drained from the average bag, a vast majority of patients report increased pain and mental stress.
One overlooked medically significant stereotype that applies to Canadians is their strong opinion. This can apply in many contexts. A prime example is the quickness of most Canadians to lose support of their sports teams. When local teams do not fare particularly well, as exemplified by the former Vancouver Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association, the team is forced to move south to other markets due to the rapid losses in attendance. Yet, in their sharply opinionated manner, Canadians are quick to blame their “low-quality” life support technology for such injuries. Of course, the candid observer knows that the injury almost always results from the patients’ bad habits.
Perhaps the long-term solution to solve this ongoing problem is to cut off the affected patients’ fingers so that they lose the ability to point fingers at their life support equipment for their own mistakes. Many of the doctors that constitute Canada’s primary hospital chain (commonly known as American Culture CentERs) say that they would be greatly relieved.
Well, well well. My first trackback ping! Cool.
Speaking of, enabling trackbacks may be cool, but my trackback page is definitely not. I’ve got some work to do there; I’d like to just have trackbacks show up inline with comments. That seems to be pretty inline with what I’ve seen on “most”:http://www.oreillynet.com/ “sites”:http://www.lockergnome.com/.
Also, what’s this about trackback only working with “MT”:http://www.moveabletype.org/? As much as MT rocks, I’ve used trackback on a number of different sites and I’m fairly certain they’re not all running MT.
Who Wins and Who Loses as Jobs Move Overseas?
Read through the article if you want, but be sure to read page #2, where Mr. M. Eric Johnson, director of Tuck’s Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College expounds:
“It’s all about innovation and productivity. As long as we maintain those two engines, we’ll continue to have a very high standard of living. Out in the Bay Area there are plenty of folks who would love to create a little bit of protectionism around their I.T. jobs, but we are far better off letting a lot of those jobs go. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what’s left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.”
This bit of idiocy earns Mr. Johnson the PHB of the Week award. It’s especially scary since he works in some capacity (if you can decipher his title) at Dartmouth’s business school. Is he teaching his students that programmers are “low-skill” and management is a higher-skilled position?
I wonder if he’d advocate taking this view of the medical world as well–doctors and nurses could be replaced by outsourced workers, since they’re obviously “low-skilled” positions. We’ll retain the more advanced hospital management positions and no one will be hurt.
With the holiday season upon us, undoubtedly some out there will be getting brand new digital cameras. So without further ado, I’d like to point out Derrick Story’s recent postings on tips and tricks. Derrick is the author of the recently released the Digital Photography Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition and managing editor at the O’Reilly Network, focusing on Mac and photogrpahy information.
My Picks for Favorite Photo Tips by Derrick Story — Here are my favorite photo tips submitted by readers. There are some good ones here.
Favorite Photo Tips by Derrick Story — Photo tips are fun. I’m sharing a couple of my favorites, and I’m hoping that you might have one to contribute too.
Slashdot | Voting Machines Vs. Slot Machines
A Slashdot reader had the interesting observation that current laws governing slot machines, the software that runs them, and the vendors that sell them is more strict than many of the laws governing electronic voting machines.
The choice quote: “A funny/sad sideline is that in Nevada, every year or two a programmer or engineer goes to jail for exploiting slot machines.” Yet electronic voting vendors have tampered with machines on numerous occassions with no retribution or punishment.
Think about that for a bit…
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