There’s three months left to go in the year, so I figured it’d be a good time to look at my resolutions for the year and check progress.

1. Family dinners whenever possible
2. More social activities
3. 14% Body fat
4. Grow Clan Lord or kill it trying
5. File all my back taxes
6. Meet some of my online friends in person
7. Get a little more heating and cooling in the house
8. Delight my partner more often
9. Make my websites suck less
10. Support President Obama

Ugh.  It looks like mostly a fail, I fear.  Seating all four members of my family at the same table at dinnertime seems nigh impossible.  I live with grazers, myself included.  I’ve had more social activities, but frankly the bar was set pretty low there.  My body fat is unchanged at 19%.  Clan Lord has shrunk to ghost town levels.  I’m only a few months behind on taxes now, instead of a few years.  I have met a few online friends, though not as many as I’d like.  Heating and cooling in my house are unchanged, though they seem to be mostly adequate. My websites are unchanged.  And my support for Obama has been moral only.

Still worthy goals, and while my results are fails, they’re not epic fails.

I just got a tech support call about somebody’s Spaceward Ho! icons being all wonky.  I had him send a screenshot:

My birthday, my hair, apparently.

I was born on my mom’s 21st birthday, so birthdays were always more festive for me than for most, I think.

This morning the girls made me breakfast in bed, then we all went out and had breakfast before school.  I’m still stuffed.

I think my favorite thing about Facebook may be that a hundred people wished me happy birthday.  Sweet!

Cake Wrecks is an amusing site dedicated to professional cake decorating gone horribly awry.

There’s a fine line between balloon strings and flagella.

Also, Arrrrr!

And happy birthday, Timmer!

It’s interesting how our brains automatically substitute for the beeps we hear.

I finally got Snow Leopard installed (after some problem with my old hard drive not being GUID partitioned, whatever that means).  Not many changes, as expected, though it does feel slightly quicker overall, which is good.  Memory use doesn’t seem improved, alas.

Anyway, there’s a new Quicktime Player, version 10.  The last version was version 7, so I don’t know what the heck happened to 8 and 9.  I imagine they were afraid people would associate it with OS 8 or 9, somehow, and think things were going backwards.

Alas, things are going backwards.  At least, my favorite feature of the old Quicktime Player is gone.  I use it to watch movies, and I often used the A/V Controls window to change the playback speed, usually bumping it 10%-20% — but for a really bad movie, boosting it to double or triple speed, and generally making it more palatable.

That entire handy window, and its extensive functionality, is lost. Poo!  I suspect I’ll be dredging up an old copy of Quicktime Player and replacing the new one, because I used that feature far more than I will the new feature that allows one to trim movies.  (I use iMovie for that.)

I just got my first test version of iPhone Spaceward Ho!. It’s got a long way to go, but it’s looking fun.

For years we’ve been tweaking Ho! to take better advantage of larger typical screens, so now it’s interesting to go the other direction.  And our finely-honed Mac interface is not a perfect fit for the iPhone — but I think it will be.

Dragon fruit is a novelty we’d always buy for our American visitors in Hong Kong.

It’s not that it’s especially delicious, but that it’s so delightfully weird looking.  From the exotic pink and green skin, one would expect something other than the plain white fruit sprinkled with black seeds.

I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to import it, since it’s relatively sturdy — and extremely exotic.  And we saw it for the first time in the States — but the fruit above was almost $5.  Ouch!  We got it anyway, just for nostalgia’s sake.

Sometimes when I have to get up ridiculously early, I sleep poorly.  If I have to awaken at 5:30 to catch a plane, I’ll sit up at 2AM, and look at the clock, thinking I overslept.  Then 3:00.  Then 4:00.  Then 4:30.  Then 4:45.  Then 7:15.  Crap!

Don’t you hate that?

In an effort to become a better photographer (and to get value from my expensive new camera), I’ve been taking random pictures of stuff whenever it occurs to me.

Sometimes I like them.