I finally was able to process a number of sets of photos tonight.

I ordered and received a Strobist kit from MPEX. Here is an example or two from my first experiments with the kids:

I also took a few snapshots at Christmas. First one from an early Christmas with the kids at my parent’s house:

Then over at my grandmother’s house for Christmas Eve:

Christmas day, I was up at my parent’s house near the Guadalupe River, so we decided to goof around with the cameras outside:

The following day, David, Edward, Virginia, and I went downtown to get a few shots of the Christmas lights on the Riverwalk.

Click the photos to see the other photos in each set.

Over at Stevey’s Blog Rants is a cool article: Code’s Worst Enemy. Stevey describes being up against getting a 500,000 line web-based game working again after some time off-line. He sees a large code base being the worst problem you can face in software and he makes some good arguments to that point.

He also comes to the conclusion that Justin Gehtland (Name dropper! –Imaginary Ed.) talked about in Ruby on Rails training that I went to last week (I’m paraphrasing both here): The JVM is great – the Java language is the problem. He makes an interesting choice in the end (I’ll let you read the article for yourself).

I did it. I waited until now (though there were some personal extenuating circumstances) to finish my Christmas shopping. Given my mortal fear of shopping, I had intended on doing most of my shopping online. I was encouraged by Amazon’s banner indicating that not only wasn’t I too late to shop, but that I could indeed still use Super Saver Shipping and still receive my order by Christmas so long as I ordered by today.

I went through, selected items eligible for SSS and placed my order. Bummer. A few of my items won’t arrive until after Christmas. Make that all of my 14 items wouldn’t make it until the 26th or later. Hmm. Try standard shipping. No soap, all of them showing up post-Christmas. Hmm again. How about two day shipping? Nope. Ok, the problem must be just one or two, select multiple shipments (at additional cost). Ah, Amazon, my savior! For only $140 on a $215 order, I can receive two of my 14 items on time.

I’m late making my order – I can accept that, but what is the point of trumpeting that you can save the day for us late shoppers if you don’t mean it?

No thanks, Amazon. I’ll be braving the crowds before I send you any money this year.

UPDATE

Borders – the good, old, brick and mortar version – came through. One trip over lunch and I ended up with just about everything I wanted from Amazon (a bit more here, a bit less there) for about the same cash as Amazon.

The Pragmatic Programmers have suggested that you get a lot out of learning a new programming language a year. I’ve been doing programming for a long time, and though I’ve learned a number of languages over the years, but I think I’m still behind. This year I’ve been learning Ruby (which I’m loving). For next year, I’ll need to learn something else – and like many, I think I’ll choose Erlang. For kicks, here is what I’ve touched so far:

1. Forth
2. Basic (Commodore Vic 20, C64, Pet, Osborne, AmigaBasic probably other versions I’ve forgotten)
3. Logo
4. Pilot
5. Comal
6. 8502 Assembly
7. COBOL
8. C
9. Pascal
10. QuickBasic
11. Lisp
12. FORTRAN
13. CA Realizer
14. Ada
15. C++
16. REALbasic
17. Visual Basic
18. PHP
19. Java
20. Python
21. Javascript
22. Ruby

Which would be a pretty good list except I started back in ’83 or so. I’ve definitely not done as well in recent years. My experience with Ruby has definitely re-energized my interest in languages.