3am is when the world is most interesting.

We ‘took the plunge’ and got our first coral fragments this weekend, in addition to a coral banded shrimp that Mary has named ‘Monster’.  So far, so good – the coral is looking healthy after the switch to our tank, and the shrimp is gorging himself on the tons of food on the live rock.

This morning, I launched a new version of the HR Geeks website.  I’m proud to say we now have the only non-hideous, non-1995 website of any geek group in Hampton Roads

The site is running WordPress, with a highly hacked up GridFocus theme.  After much debate, and a not-insignificant-delay, I determined that I didn’t have the free time or energy to maintain the site using a custom CMS, or even a pre-built ‘framework’ like Django.  The big scare over a ‘public’ CMS, like WP, is security issues.  Luckily for me, I use WP on a number of other blogs, so keeping track of upgrades and the like is fairly easy to do.

As part of the migration, we also dumped the old PHP Webcalendar system, and moved to a public Google Calendar for all event tracking.  PHP Webcal was a very non-elegant system to use, while Google Calendar provides a superset of the features, with nearly 0 effort on our part.  There is even the possibility that we could grant access to the public calendar for certain groups to modify their own dates.  I’m not sure how access controlled Gcal is  currently (I know you can have multiple editors, but is it free for all for them?), but it’s worth a look.  Having iCal support, now that I’m using OSX full time, is incredibly useful.  The HTML output is substantially prettier than any of the other PHP web calendar’s that I’ve seen so far.

These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn’t so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

Read the rest here:  http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS

The last few days, I’ve spent cleaning out, updating, linking, fixing my accounts and profiles on countless social networking websites and services. I really wish the industry had come up with a federated account system – it’s a real pain in the neck to change your registered email address at dozens of different websites!

It’s also eye opening to see how many sites you’ve created accounts on, but haven’t used in months (or years – Orkut, for example).

So far, I’ve updated twitter, linkedIn, last.fm, del.icio.us, facebook, flickr, orkut, and bloglines.  I feel like I’m missing some…

Now that I’ve got a little bit more free time, I ordered a couple books from Amazon.

I’ve already finished about half of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, and it’s pretty good, if you dig American Psycho or his other works. Not a very fast paced plot, but entertaining anyways, it’s a semi-fictional autobiography (well, mostly-fictional, from what I can tell).

I’ve also picked up the next 2 books in the Ender series by Orson Scott Card, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. Despite all the science fiction I had read growing up, I had somehow managed to avoid reading any of the Ender books. A few months ago I picked up Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, and read them both in one weekend, I enjoyed them so much. Hopefully these next two live up to their predecessors! Apparently, Card has written a few additional Ender-universe books that parallel the originals, and look at the world through different viewpoints during the same overall plot. I think they will be fascinating to read – kind of like multiple-angle DVD’s were supposed to revolutionize movie watching. I assume, however, that the newer Ender books won’t just be pornography, like the DVD’s were!

And just because I want to abuse my Amazon Prime membership, I picked up a couple of Robert A. Heinlein books – Starship Troopers, Time Enough for Love, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Apparently, there is a substantial amount of these books that I missed in the past by reading the mass-market paperback edition. I discovered this through a friend[1] of a friend’s blog, which piqued my curiosity. Hopefully what I missed was Quality, rather than some Directors Cut garbage (like the extended breathing scenes in the directors cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey).

[1] I’d link to her blog directly, but Geoff’s blog is currently experiencing some Rails problems, and I can’t find the link to her site. Firefox history to the rescue!