I beat Jason.

If you didn't get a Christmas card from us, here's what you missed:

There's no place like home for the Holidays.  There's no home in place for the Holidays.

Construction should be starting in early March.  The waiting is killing us.

While I was on Amazon tonight, I found myself drawn to do a little navel gazing.  I've been a technical reviewer on a number of book proposals and manuscripts during the past year, the most notable being Windows Forms Programming in C#.  Every once in a while I use the feature on Amazon to search within the text of the books for my name, hoping that someone will include a mention of my reviewing work in the acknowledgments section.  It is very hard work after all.

Anyway, imagine my surprise to see my name show up un two very unexpected places.  It seems that one of my favorite bloggers, Rogers Cadenhead, mentioned me in a couple of his recent books: Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition and Radio UserLand Kick Start.

I'm speechless.  I am truly honored and humbled.  Inspiration has been lacking in the blogging front lately, but I now have some renewed vigor.  Thank You for helping me find that spark.

Please donate if at all possible.  It's hard to imagine the scale of this tradgey.  At the time of this writing, Amazon.com customers have donated over 3.4 million dollars from over 58000 individual donations.  Please keep them coming.

Wow.  I just realized how long it's been since I wrote code regularly.  I fixed a cosmetic issue in a single text string on a particular web form.  I got a great sense of accomplishment from that small act.  In that one moment, I felt like I had done more to advance my project than everything I had produced over the past months of doing documentation and attending meetings.

I need to find an open source project to work on if I'm going to continue being a non-developer in my day job.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used copy of Halo 2?  I'm completely disappointed with it and would like to cut my losses right now.  Why you ask?  Good question.

1) One of my friends sent me a clan invite.  When I sign in to XBOX live, I get a pop-up saying that I have a new message.  When attempting to accept the invite, I get a piss poor error message saying that I have “Insufficient Permissions”.  Holy crap.  What permissions could it possibly be checking?  I paid for this crap?

2) Here's the one that really stokes my fire.  I like to sign into XBOX live even when I'm playing single player.  That way, if one of my friends want's to play multi-player, I can be notified.  Unfortunately, the developers of Halo 2 thought it would be a good idea to ABORT YOUR SINGLE PLAYER GAME when your XBOX live connection is interrupted.  Again - Holy Crap!  Why in the world would anyone think it would be a good idea to terminate a single player game if an XBOX live connection is dropped.  Pop up a freaking icon or play a sound or something if you think it's important that I know about it, but for God sakes, don't abort my game and send be back to the last checkpoint.  How did this ever get through testing?  Don't answer that, because I already know.

3) After about 30 minutes of playing, I get violently ill.  Googling revealed something called “simulator sickness”.  Well, that's what I have.  I've never had a problem with FPS games before.  Only Halo and now Halo 2 induce this reaction for me.  If the above two problems didn't exist, I would suffer through it by limiting my sessions to about 20 minutes or so, but it's just not freaking worth the hassle.

I can't think of a better way to start the week.

My old boss, Gabriel Torok, is staring in a video on Channel 9.  Check it out.