Obama Is One Cool Cat

A neat photo, courtesy Reuters:

Speaking of Obama, Ryan and I had the following conversation a few days ago:

Ryan: Change! Yes we can!

Stephen: Oh, you’re voting for Obama now?

No, daddy. Change my diaper. Yes we can!

Playground Ball On Hamburger Mold

Mixed media, 2008

Part of Alyssa’s ongoing Toys & Tools series, currently on display in our kitchen. And the family room, play room, den, stairwell, bathroom, bedroom, and garage.

(And the backyard.)

Camera Phone Photos

Here’s a small collection of photos from my camera phone:

My Daughter Is The Silliest

Alyssa was biting down on her spoon this morning.

Isn’t she the cutest?

The Silver Surfer Quarter

Via Businesswire:

This summer, silver is the new gold standard — for movies, with the June 15 release of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and for movie promotions, as Twentieth Century Fox and the Franklin Mint join forces to create an original limited collector’s edition “Silver Surfer” U.S. quarter that will challenge movie goers to Search 4 $ilver[sic].

I was outraged when I first read of this, and was going to call for someone to be fired over it. Seriously, advertisements on our money?

But then I saw the super high-resolution photo of the reverse, and it’s pretty clear that it’s just a bog standard California state quarter with a (bad 4-color process) sticker printed over it. The ‘8’ from ‘1850’ is clearly visible on the Silver Surfer’s head:

Compare with the standard California reverse:

So it’s just a stupid marketing gimmick. Yay Hollywood, I guess.

Flickr: Diary-X Swag

This made my day:

(From Dreamyshade’s Flickr photostream, found via Yahoo!’s Alpha Beta search engine.)

My Wife, The World Famous Photojournalist

Taken by my lovely wife Michelle in New Orleans, days before the hurricane hit in 2005. Oxford University Press is publishing a book about the event, and has requested permission to use it.

Go Michelle!

Things I Have Done In Recent Days

In the last entry, I mentioned that I was having difficulty finishing the construction of a retaining wall. I’m happy to announce, as the picture to the right attests, that the damned wall is done.

Now I just need to build a similarly-sized wall on the other side of the house. (Sigh.)

I am also happy to announce that I have a job, and in fact I am starting said job tomorrow morning. I’m a “team lead” — not sure yet what that means in terms of responsibilities — and I’m working with C#. My C# is pretty rusty right now, but I’ll fix that.

I am also also happy to announce — I seem to be a very happy announcer — the very early, pre-pre-alpha release of Zugzwang, the chess game I started writing the day I lost my last job. It Really Works™ — you play against a chess program named Crafty (who is set to always make moves immediately), and he basically kicks your ass.

At least he kicks my ass. I’m not good at chess.

Anyway, there’s lots of fancy stuff in it that’s not entirely visible yet. It has a plugin architecture, so you can add new engines to play against. I’ve sketched out (but not enabled) human-on-human play via Bonjour and ICS. And the entire game is defined by an external file (currently internal) — so you can make up fairy chess pieces and play chess variants against your friends.

It’s got tons of bugs — most notably, it won’t tell you if you’re in check and it will let you move into check freely (although this confuses Crafty, who will then stop playing with you). Castling and en passant don’t yet work, so if Crafty attempts to castle the game just sort of stops.

Oh, and sometimes when you quit the game Crafty forgets to stop playing. If you’ve played a few games and your machine starts to get slow, reboot.

Mac OS X 10.4.x only, because it needs Core Image, WebKit, and a few other things. You might have to have a decent video card, I’m not sure.

Having said that, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can download Zugzwang 0.0.1.

Leftover Diary-X Crap

So I’ve got a lot of promo stuff left over from Diary-X taking up room in my office. It looks like so:

I’ve got 40 mugs, around 250 patches, and in the neighborhood of 25-30 of each button. The mugs have the Diary-X logo and say ‘Insert inspiration here’ on the reverse; the patches are a parody of the Top Gun logo, and the buttons are: an uppercase U with a slash through it, “Learn to spell or unplug your modem”, the Diary-X logo, “Stop polluting the blogosphere”, and “Link less, think more”.

If you want any of these, send me a note via email (my address is myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com) and tell me what you want. I’m only charging shipping — $3 for each mug, $0.50 for whatever assortment of buttons and patches you’d like. Non-US should add an extra $2 total. (See the sidebar for the actual offer.)

Own a piece of internet history! Offer good while supplies last. Some restrictions may apply; see store for details. Some assembly required for items broken in transit.

Update: There’s nothing left. You should have acted faster!

What to do when you lose your job

Yeah, that seems about right.

How much trouble are we in?

So much trouble.