Archive for December, 2006

Wassailing, Take Me Away

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

Christmas is upon us, and I have practically finished my shopping, though there is one quick item left to pick up. You have all seen the tree that ate Christmas by now, but you may not know that we have also set up a rather involved Christmas village on the dining room table (also famous for the cake to end all cakes). I have taken a few pictures to follow, but if you have a few minutes, I’d like to share a couple of quick videos I made of the place. This first is a little photo montage thing, and the second is a roll around of the town on its very own railroad.

Clicking on the pictures will take you to the photo set to see them all, if you run to that bent.


Merry Christmas to all of you, and best wishes for the holiday season.

426,248 to Go

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

I have lots of plans.

First of all, how are you? It’s been a while since I have said anything here, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking of it.

Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, on to business.

I am currently working on the hardwood floor on the second floor. There is much of this to do, and it takes far longer than it seems like it should. I’m sure professionals would look at my work speed an laugh, but that is how it is, and I am doing it as well as my deteriorating body will allow. We are about a year and a few months behind on this, but that is how it goes sometimes. What is in now looks really sharp, and I think the whole project will be a success at the end, even if we did do the baseboards a little wrong. I’ll keep you updated on the project.

I am still as fat as ever, so no progress on that front.

My next project that I am just starting in on is the Wieland Archive. This will be housed at the appropriately named website and will contain a database of archival information. This will consist primarily of items my father has collected over the years, as well as pictures and letters. I think at the end the archive will contain in the area of 100,000 items or so. It may well be the most complete collection of anybodies life. Entering the information will take years, I suspect, so all the better to get started. I was thinking about using regular blogging software to handle all this, but have instead decided to create my own content management system to run it. It should be pretty lean, as few bells and whistles are needed, at least on the back end. I’ll still try and keep the front end pretty. I’ll let you know when the first version is up and running.

We got a 2005 Prius, and are quite happy with it in the first couple of weeks.

Over at EatMe I have put up the first part of my Thanksgiving dinner menu. I will try and get to the rest of it as soon as possible, for those of you who are interested.

I am currently running Firefox 3 alpha (which installs with the ominous name “Minefield”), and haven’t really have any trouble yet. The pages seem to load very fast, but aside from that there don’t seem to be many immediately noticeable changes, but of course most of my extensions failed to work. I am also running the new Thunderbird 2 Beta1. There are some front end changes in this one, and it seems to work well so far, but I am still very new to it. It is prettier for sure. They have also added tagging, which some people will love, but isn’t a feature I use all that much. I think Mail for the mac had it, but I don’t think I ever used it. My testing of MS Word 2007 continues, and I love it. It is really nice to use, and I may actually buy it when the beta runs out. I am going to download the new version of Open Office today, so I’ll be better able to compare.

Must watch more Christmas movies.

I Got Your Tannenbaum Right Here

Friday, December 1st, 2006

The tree is all decorated, and I took some pictures. I’m in one so you can better see the magnitude of this thing.