[Daniel] New Pictures!

In addition to pictures of Moriah's yummy goodness, we've also put up some new pictures of Bear for those who are interested. They can be found here. There's only 6 new ones but they're a good range of Bear's daily life. That is to say, beg a little, chew a lot and relax on the couch. Stay classy, Bear!

[Moriah] Happy Halloween!

Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, I made a special meal for the occasion since we didn't have any other festivities planned. First, to fit with the mood of the evening, I put together a vegetarian Spooky Shephard's Pie. I layered fresh spinach on the bottom of a pie plate, poured in a mixture of diced veggies and beans which I had cooked down with some seasoning, and topped it off with homemade mashed potato ghosts. To make the ghosts, I scooped the freshly-made mashed potatoes out of the pot with an ice cream scoop, topped each with baby green pea "eyes" and added a slice of black olive for a mouth. Then I baked it until it was nice a hot and served a few ghosts with the veggies. Along with that, I also made Stroke of Midnight Pumpkin Bread. That turned out wonderfully, so I arranged two slices on each of our plates. To round out the meal, we drank cold glasses of old fashioned apple cider. Unfortunately, I didn't make that from scratch. Though, I think it would be fun to try some time. Overall, it was a wonderful meal that I will definitely make again. And it made for a Happy Halloween!

[Moriah] My Quote of the Day

Texans drive so stupidly because there's so much ego filling their brains, they can't focus on anything else.

[Daniel] Calm Before The Storm

The title is not totally accurate as the storm has actually begun. I've been pretty quiet this week due to lots of stuff for Remarkable Umbrella. I'm especially excited about last night's developments but I'm going to hold off on saying more for the time being. Not much of a post but I want to remember this week as it might be a turning point in my life. We'll see.

[Moriah] Testing, testing...

So we decided to test out a second vegetarian restaurant in Austin tonight. We've been to Mother's Cafe and Garden several times already and love it! It's got a great atmosphere, great service and wonderful food. But we wanted to try something different, so we decided tonight would be a good night to visit Mr. Natural. Here's how the two compare:



Mother's Cafe and Garden

-Warm, friendly service by basically all employees.

-A neat atmosphere with your choice of cafe-style seating in an air conditioned room or sitting out in the more intimate garden room, complete with lots of plants, water fountains, and fake ponds with fish swimming around.

-All food is cooked to order through the menu.

-Excellent vegetarian and vegan food! Some of the best we've ever had in a restaurant setting (aside from The Spiral Diner in Ft. Worth).

-Nice variety of vegetarian food. (It's not all tofu, for those of you who don't like that sort of thing!)

-A little on the pricey side.

-Vegan Belgian Chocolate Mocha Cake! Enough said. :)



Mr. Natural

-Friendly service, though not well organized.

-Set up like a cafeteria with a serving line and a casual, open seating arrangement.

-Food can be cooked to order through a menu, though there is also a cafeteria line from which you can choose different options.

-The food was good but not quite as upscale as Mother's.

-Not quite as much variety on the menu. Mr. Natural seemed to be geared more toward Mexican food.

-A little less expensive than Mother's though, as I said, not quite the same quality.

-A large selection of vegan and vegetarian bakery items that we haven't seen anywhere else, though the ones we bought (a vegan brownie and a slice of vegan chocolate cake) were a little dry and not as flavorful as we had hoped.



All in all, they are both good restaurants. We prefer Mother's over Mr. Natural for the higher quality food, better service and unique atmosphere, but it's nice to have variety. I would like to go back to Mr. Natural to try their homemade seitan BBQ and more of their bakery items that I can't find anywhere else. But I think we will continue to frequent Mother's more often.

[Daniel] DreamHost Rocks!

One of the reasons I have quickly become very pleased with DreamHost is how they make new things available to their customers. For instance, I am now able to run PHP5 and they support Ruby On Rails without question. I have not done much with Ruby or Rails (I've hit my new language and framework limit for awhile) but just seeing it in action and how they do things has been inspirational for me. It's fresh and different and it's available to me if I ever decide to try it! Thanks DreamHost!

[Daniel] Archive Section - Finally!

Believe it or not, I finally finished off our Archive section. After months of it being divided up by year (manually updated), to recently displaying our entire blog history and nothing else (automatically updated and slow!), the Archive page is now a lean, friendly little page. It directs you to our blogs for back entries and has a couple additional pages linked for posterity. It's simple and I am very happy with that simplicity.

[Daniel] Feeling Unproductive ...or... How To Waste An Evening

Today was not a highly-productive day. Joel, of Joel On Software fame, has written on this topic before, in a short entry he called "Fire And Motion". He basically describes how sometimes knowledge-workers can't get into the groove (or flow (or zone) if you will).



I bring this up because I struggle with this a lot. I'm the type of person that feels like if I'm not being productive 24/7, I am wasting time and watching my life pass before me. And sometimes, I do myself proud, churning out line after line of clean, concise code and ending the day on a good note. Monday this week was that day for me.



On the flip side, today (especially this evening), has not been nearly as productive. I grind through the task in front of me, like a 16 year old thrashing through the transmission while trying to learn to drive a stick-shift (which I also was, thank you very much). I try to get started and I almost immediately lurch to a halt, stuck on a detail or struck by something I hadn't thought of before. Perhaps my motivation, present just seconds ago, vanished to who knows where. I think about it and what I did wrong and, a few minutes later, try again.



This time, maybe I jump forward a few feet. Or maybe I don't go anywhere. Sometimes I give up, sometimes I yell, curse and shout. And sometimes I beat my head against the dash (the keyboard nor my forehead ever look good after this).



The problem never seems to be a lack of desire. The unnamed project I'm trying to push forward is something I feel very strongly about and have sat on for too long. I've done plenty of thinking on it (though there is more to do) and I know that I should have no problems moving forward.



The line from Joel's entry which strikes most true for me is:

Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started.

Every time I face this struggle, I realize my problem really lies in that I just have to successfully get moving. Once I get going, I can usually at least accomplish simple and/or relatively-mindless tasks that need doing and steam builds from there.



When I learned to drive manual, all I needed was to get rolling and then I could shift like nothing, smooth as butter. The tipping point came when I stopped and thought about my problem of getting started. Rather than try-try-again, I stopped and practiced killing the engine. Turn it over with the clutch down and let off the clutch slowly until I figured out the point at which the clutch disengaged. Once I knew when that point was, I was able to start out (however rough) every time from there after.



Maybe the way to solve my problem is, rather than blindly fighting to get started and push forward, to find where my tipping point of being productive is and exploit that instead?

[Daniel] "..I was the learner. Now I am the master."

Despite the title, I don't claim to be a master. Recent debates online about CSS selectors have shown me that, even now, I have more to learn. But at Moriah's request, I've begun teaching her XHTML 1.0 & CSS. It's kinda funny and very interesting, considering I've been working with HTML for almost 10 years now and CSS for 6 years of that time. It's like trying to teach someone something that just flows naturally to you but is totally foreign to that person. I suppose it's akin to teaching someone how to ride a bike, only much more difficult and less painful.



The most difficult part for me is trying to put myself in her shoes and find the pitfalls I hit before she hits them. Teaching from the ground up where these things came from, how the browser interprets the code and the syntax you use are the hurdles we've started to clear thus far. Obviously, she's on a long, sometimes winding, path but one that will definitely help both of us.



I envy her in a way. When I started with HTML, it had only just reached version 3.0 and the major browsers were Netscape 4 and IE 4. It was all tables and frames and hack-after-hack-after-hack. Anyone remember invisible 1px .gifs? The stupid animated E-mail icons? Endless page after page proclaiming the fact that it, indeed, was truly under construction?



Now, the best practices are beginning to become obvious. It's pretty clear to most designers/developers who care about their craft that XHTML for content and CSS are the way to go. Lightweight, flexible and very standardized, they are the tools wielded by the skilled and the devoted, yet simple enough that most anyone can muster.



Moriah's learning in a time without the cruft of days gone by and can see afresh how things are done best. No unlearning and relearning, no dangerous slips into old habits, no memory slips of how it's supposed to be done now. It's a fine time to start in my opinion.

[Daniel] Amazing How Things Change

So after beginning to work on the Archive section again today, I came to the realization that I officially reached my rework limit. There is only so far I could let myself go before I stopped reinventing the wheel and using standard stuff that's out there. I've given up on the custom blog solution and have moved both Moriah and myself to WordPress. WordPress is a phenominal piece of blogging software and quite open-source. Additionally, I had an idea hatch in my head today about how I could make the current look of Snow-Wolf work with blogs like this. Since then, I have moved all 134 entries from my custom blog system into WordPress by copy-paste. Not very elegant but I didn't really feel like trying to code up a tool to do it for me.



The result for you, oh faithful viewer? A now complete and (hopefully) future-proof archive section and possibly even more frequent and higher-quality updates. There is also the ability to comment on blog entries and trackback for those who have blogs.



Of course, no one will see this entry for a couple hours as I have to work out the details of getting the main page working. So little time...

[Daniel] More On The Archive

More work has been done on the Archive, unfortunately none of it visible at this time. It's taking longer than I had hoped it would be. Free time is sparse at this point but that's nothing new.



I wish I had more to say, considering how lax I've been the last couple days. Unfortunately, I don't have much to post. I'll have to come up with something interesting tomorrow.

[Daniel] Starting "Work"

One of my goals in life is to get out of the corporate environment and and run a small company. It's no surprise that at various points throughout the last year, I worked on Remarkable Umbrella with Tony. Recently, I have become revitalized by the idea of it and have begun to put more effort into trying to make it a reality.



This came to a head last night, after basically stomping around and being angry the whole evening due to other factors. Moriah and I talked it out and came to the conclusion that it would be best if I pushed ahead with some new ideas and reserved a couple nights a week to work on them.



So from this point forward, Tuesdays and Thursdays will be "work" nights during the week and I will be devoting most of my Sundays to it as well.



I think this will definitely help me focus on what's important and provide a sense of fulfillment in my life that I lack right now. Even if it flops hard, I still think the effort will be worth it.

[Daniel] Recipes

Finally, after almost a year since I first promised it, we have put up Moriah's recipes. Moriah did the background herself and entered recipes on her own. I wrote the code over a full year ago and gave it as a present to Moriah. It was the first thing I did in PHP, so looking at the code is painful. However, it seems to have served Moriah well, especially in the last couple weeks, so we're putting it up for everyone's use. More recipes are sure to come in the future. This is only the beginning. Enjoy!

[Daniel] Web 2.0

In addition to learning Subversion and pushing forward my PHP skills, I've been investigating more Ajax / Web 2.0 technologies. Most of it is a lot of hype over very little, over things that should have been done in the first place or shouldn't be done at all. The basic premise to create a highly interactive web site using standards and open APIs to create great user experiences. If that sentence wasn't buzzword-compliant, I don't know what would be (I suppose I could've added "a 30,000 ft, bird's-eye view of an outside-the-box paradigm...").



Google Maps was one of the bright early stars in the realm of Web 2.0, coined most prominently by Tim O'Reilly, a purveyor of fine technical books. With its easy draggable maps, the many levels of zoom, the satellite/map/hybrid view and pretty effects, it's the darling of most Web 2.0 aficionados.



Some other first rate examples include Google Suggest, A9, Flickr, BaseCamp, Ta-Da List, Del.icio.us and many more. Personally, I've used about half of these and have been impressed with what's been done so far.



But more services seem to be on their way and some important ones at that. Among the newly announced are Writely, an online word processor, and NumSum, an online spreadsheet application. Some think that the big players, such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are preparing their own online versions of Office-style software. If not, I say they are fools not to.



They are foolish because it is definitely a niche market but one that has the potential to expand tremendously if these technologies take off. And there is very little competition currently out there, with only a handful of vaguely comparable sites. Finally, the technologies are quite accessible and all three of the web giants already have a decent investment in them. Further, they all have the infrastructure in place to handle a massively used application, unlike most of the relatively small Web 2.0 apps I mentioned above.



The next several years will hold many interesting things on this front and I, for one, welcome it. The web is first starting to grow up and as bandwidth costs go down, we will only see more. Here's hoping I can be part of that.

[Daniel] Missed!

Sadly, I broke the streak I was attempting to maintain of posting every day. A weekend trip up to Dallas-Fort Worth to see Mom S. caused me to be away from the computer for a couple days. In addition, I re-sprained my ankle, this time stepping out of their garage and rolling it. Not fun. I'm going to try to be better in the future.

[Moriah] Movies To See

After watching several movie trailers tonight on iTunes, Daniel and I have decided the following movies would be worth renting/seeing: "The March of the Penguins," "Roll Bounce," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," and perhaps "A History of Violence" with Viggo Mortenson (from "The Lord of the Rings"). We will have to see which movies we can rent from Albertson's grocery store. We're boycotting Hollywood Video and Blockbuster because they charge an exorbitant amount of money for rentals AND force you to rent them for five days when you only want them for one. Just ridiculous! Anyway, if we see any of these movies in the near future, perhaps I'll post a review.