CoffeeBear.net

Week 03: Tripping the Light Fantastic

Mark — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:43:08 +0000

Week 03: Tripping the Light Fantastic © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Pleasant Surprise

Mark — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:28:00 +0000

This evening was the annual Burns Supper hosted by H.A.G.G.I.S. We try to attend every year as it’s a fun evening of food, friends and dancing. And like every year, I went elsewhere for my meal, but came back for dessert and dancing. I have tried haggis once and that was an experience that needs no repetition ¹. I should mention that the desserts are not part of the catered meal, rather they are all brought by attendees of the supper as a contest to see who can make the best dessert, most traditional and who has the best presentation.

As my wife and I enjoy desserts and there were a couple of trifle recipes we wanted to try out; we decided to both enter this year. Her trifle was based on a black forest cake while mine was a mixture of blackberries, angel food cake and cheesecake pudding. By the I got back to the supper from having real food. the dessert table had been decimated. There was a tiny bit of my wife’s dessert left and only a spoonful of the gooey bits of mine. I ate that little bit of dessert and then had to excuse myself momentarily ². I was just heading back to the hall; when a friend came and got me, telling me that my dessert had won an award.

I have to say, there’s nothing quite like walking into a room full of people all clapping for you. It’s a lovely ego boost and that was my pleasant surprise.

Pleasant Surprise © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Notes:

You can basically think of haggis as soupy, liver-flavored oatmeal. I don’t like my oatmeal soupy and just the smell of liver causes me to lose my appetite. ↩
I think my fettuccine Alfredo didn’t entirely agree with my guts even if it did agree with my tastebuds. ↩

Brain Dump 01

Mark — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:29:55 +0000

One of my goals for this year ¹ is to write more here; so while I don’t have a single idea that feels worthy of a full post, here’s a dump of various things floating around/through my skull today.

Is today stupid driving day or something? I’ll grant I left for work a few minutes later than usual, but it seems odd that so many people would continually be pulling out into moving traffic (from driveways and side streets) and then going so slowly ². Fortunately the roads were relatively clean this morning, so I was able to stop before plowing into any of those idiots, but still.…
Back in the day when Javascript was new to the web, many sites used it to frequently touch my browser in the bad way. So I quickly grew to hate it and pretty much ignored/disabled it for years. In more recent times, Javascript usage has grown up/cleaned up its act. To the point where I’m actually interested in learning to use it. So I’ve been searching around for some decent tutorials but haven’t had a lot of luck. Most tutorials either assume you already know quite a bit about Javascript or are so extremely dated that they’re useless. I did run across 2 sites with tutorials that don’t seem to be too awful: Codecademy ³ and jQuery for Absolute Beginners ⁴
I’ve been thinking about about redesigning this site, but I’m trouble deciding what to do. I’ve got some ideas floating around in my skull, but I might hold off until I can look into working up a logo.

Brain Dump 01 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Notes:

I don’t really do new year resolutions, but I do occasionally set personal goals for the new year around January 1st. ↩
Example in a 40mph zone, a car pulled out of a driveway less than half a block ahead of me, pulled across the lane I was driving in into the other lane and then just as I caught up to them they pulled right back in front of me. ↩
Codecademy gives a decent general knowledge of Javascrip. Though the site is far from perfect, with bugs in the lessons that prevent you from completing them or with questions that unclear in what they are looking for and hints that can be utterly useless ↩
While technically these tutorials cover jQuery (a Javascript library) rather than “pure” Javascript and while covering an older version of jQuery (1.2.6), it still has been very interesting to go over so far. ↩

Going Dark Tomorrow

Mark — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:39:59 +0000

Tomorrow from 8AM till 8PM (GMT-6), CoffeeBear.net will be joining many others in going dark in protest of SOPA/PIPA.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Going Dark Tomorrow © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Week 02: Longing for Repetition

Mark — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:16:47 +0000

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

– Milan Kundera

Week 02: Longing for Repetition © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Week 01: Need Not Wish

Mark — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:31:03 +0000

Industry need not wish.

– Benjamin Franklin

Week 01: Need Not Wish © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

So Long 2011, Howdy There 2012

Mark — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:43:05 +0000

2011 was the year I tried out Project365. It was fun, but also rather brutal. I liked some of the photos I ended up postings, but some were not up to the artistic standards I set for myself ¹. These are most of the photos I was pleased with ²: Day 355: Lightbulb, Day 348: And What Do We Have Here?, Day 339: Painted Fire, Day 338: the Intarwebs, Day 319: Dwindled Dawn, Day 318: Orion on the Rise, Day 316: Aim for the Moon, Day 299: A Person Needs a Little Madness, Day 290: Darkness Shall Be The Light, Day 272: In Loving Memory, Day 257: Lost in the Couch, Day 238, Day 207: Little Bit of Sunshine, Day 193, Day 188, Day 171, Day 148: Nom Noms, Day 146: Daylight’s End, Day 141, Day 133, Day 105, Day 085, Day 084: Turtles all the way down, Day 074, Day 065, Day 060, Day 050, Day 046, Day 033, Day 028, Day 026 & Day 012 ³.

It was also the year I set a goal of reading 150 books and according to GoodReads I exceeded it by a good margin ⁴. 2011 was a time of much DIY madness and more than a little stress.

Unfortunately 2012 so far doesn’t look to be letting up with the stress, though we’ll see how that goes as the year goes on. One thing that really didn’t help with the stress was getting all butterfingered on Christmas day. Of course that incident is part of the reason that I decided to not continue with a second year of Project365. Still I don’t want to give up photography entirely, so this year it’ll be Project52 ⁵.

Notes:

Not that I have specific guidelines for those standards, I just know some of the photos I posted weren’t up to them. ↩
A few were left out of this list since they seemed so similar to others that I did include ↩
Huh, I knew I’d posted some photos I liked but I didn’t remember quite this many. Guess doing a recap post can be good for ye ol’ ego. ↩
Including graphic novels, I went through 214 books in 2011 ↩
One new photo posted every week. ↩

Day 365: It’s All A Blur

Mark — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 08:19:04 +0000

Day 364: Livin’ on the Edge

Mark — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:46:46 +0000

Day 363: Eyes on the Horizon

Mark — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:13:41 +0000