Back from vacation today. 4 sunny days and 3 nights in Las Vegas, Nevada. We stayed at the lovely Paris hotel and casino. I've been out there 7 times now (I think), and this is the third hotel I've stayed at - and probably the nicest one. Photos have been posted to the gallery There was a massive Home Builder's Expo going on. Let's just say it's nice to be around normal people again. I passed on the opportunity to go see the displays on the convention floor, but I hear that Kohler had quite a setup. I did get a few goodies, courtesy of Judy. The best one is a nice black & white glossy photo of ...
The Fourth Annual Festivus Dinner & Reception was held on Friday, January 9th at Buca di Beppo in Milwaukee, WI. This year's attendees included, well, most of the people who were at the Third Annual Festivus Dinner & Reception. [Technically, it's not "Annual" anymore, because there wasn't a Festivus in the 2003 calendar year. The last one was held in December 2002. But let's not split hairs...] The Airing of Grievances was, as always, the highlight of the evening. My post-Grievances-grievance is that the Spirit of Festivus is, in the words of the honorable Francis Costanza, "This is the part of the holiday where you tell your family and friends all the ways they ...
I've been published! The (vast) majority of my web development is done in Cold Fusion. Recent versions allow for user-defined functions, which essentially allow you to run commonly used blocks of code using a shortcut. (Not a great definition, but that's more or less what it does) My function takes two dates and returns a string with redundant date formatting removed ("August 3 - 11, 2003", "December 23 - August 11, 2003"). I'll often use this to display dates coming out of an events calendar - by letting the UDF do the work, I only have to pass the start and end date of the event, and it's displayed correctly. I originally submitted the UDF, oh, maybe 2 months ago. I had assumed that it wasn't going to go up on the cflib.org, but last night I got a flurry of e-mails from Raymond Camden about it. There was a bug in my code, which he had already modified. We went through a revision or two, and now it's up. You can view and download the DateRangeFormat function from the Common Function Library Project.
New Year's eve was, suprisingly, a blast. We spent the eve at Dan & Jen's place with a great group of friends, and had fun singing the nite away. Dan arranged for a karaoke machine for the evening. I wasn't sure how well it would go over, but after a few belts of scotch, I was ready to perform. I've since been informed that I have a "wonderful" singing voice. The theme of the party was "Rock Stars" - either come dressed as a rock star, or be forced to perform Groupie duties for the evening: getting snacks, drinks, etc. Judy went as "J-Lo", and I was Kurt Cobain. Also in attendance were Joan Jett, Jim Morrison, Gwen Stefani, and ...