What a pain in the ass.

Dear Ignorant Ass,

So last night you scaled a six foot fence and broke into my car.  I suppose I could congratulate you on the extent of the bounty resulting from your daring raid, but the problem is… you probably don’t know how to use half the stuff you carted off.

I’m not really sure how you decided that there was a car worth breaking into on the other side of my fence; we all get lucky.  But let me see if I have this right:  You…

1. Roamed the city, in the rain, looking for loot to plunder;
2. Climbed a six foot fence between an old woman’s house and my building;
3. Landed in a muddy patch behind a rolling dumpster;
4. Ran, (perhaps, skulked?) across my lit parking lot;
5. Inserted a screwdriver into the channel of my window;
6. Lifted forcibly, thus shattering it into a jillion pieces without setting off the alarm;
7. Traipsed mud across my seat as you clambered in;
8. Began to toss my belongings around like tissue paper.

In all, you stole:

• Two leather jackets
• $30 cash (my emergency gas money)
• 24 port Ethernet switch
• Charging cables for my phone (which wasn’t there)
• Bluetooth speaker phone
• A Cerner-specific device (which I really needed you not to steal)

Forgive my foolishness; I thought my car would be safe from people like you behind a fence.  I know better now.  But, I must ask: do you have any idea how to use even half of the items you stole?  The Cerner device is locked, the Bluetooth speakerphone has a pairing code, the charging cables are worthless without the devices, and… do you even know what a 24 port Ethernet switch DOES?!?

You ignorant waste of my time and space.  Next time, knock on my door… I’ll give you the $200 it costs me to replace my window.

I was driving to work Friday morning, when I stopped to take a left turn at Gillham and Rockhill. A black puppy was romping around a the top of the hill near the park, and as I came to stop, she ran up to, and then beneath, my car.

To make sure I didn’t run her over as I pulled away, I opened my car door to look underneath…

… and she jumped in.

She was very dirty, smelled terrible and was shaking from head to toe. So there I was: driving a manual car with a confused, scared puppy, trying to determine what to do. I couldn’t just toss her out of my car; it was freezing out. At the same time, I couldn’t just take her home… she was a stray. So, I did what first occurred to me:

I called 411 for the nearest vet’s office.

Turned out she had been out for a couple of days, by the vet’s estimation. They gave her a bath, trimmed her nails and wormed her. She’s delightful, and takes well to discipline.  The name that has stuck is “Shandy,” one of my favorite Guinness drinks.

This is where I found her, and here are some fun pictures:

Shandy

Yet, no matter how adorable she is, and how much I may want to keep her, I’m posting flyers later today around the area… if she does have a home that misses her, I’m going to be returning a happy, healthy puppy to them.

After 18 holes of golf on Saturday morning, I attended the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art‘s An Asymmetrical Evening, which celebrated the opening of the new Bloch Building.  It was an evening I won’t forget anytime soon.

The new building certainly leaves an impression… I’ve had a stronger appreciation for it since I’d heard it described as “a feather beside a stone” several months ago.  The interior is impressive and complementary, and I would urge anyone who wasn’t there this past weekend to attend this coming weekend’s celebration!

The next morning (after I returned my tux), inspiration struck and I set out to do some photography… check out the results if you’d like!

Outside the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art	Liberty Memorial

If you are interested in visiting the new Bloch Building, here are a few events to keep your eye on… see you there!

• June 8
  • 10AM-5PM: Member Preview Day
  • 6-8PM: Panel Discussion
  • 8-12AM: Friends of Art Opening Party
• June 9
  • Bloch Building Opening Weekend
  • 2-3PM: Architect Lecture
  • 6-7PM: Architect Lecture

Here are my attempts using this technique:

Here are the before and afters, raw image to edited:

Just for giggles, I also attempted the the “300 effect,” proposed within the comments of the Digg post:

Microformatted

I used the hResume microformat, which basically makes it readable by any microformat-parsing utility. Very slick. My microformat plugin for Firefox lit up as soon as I loaded it, telling the who, what, where and when of my resume.

Print / Screen stylesheets

Yes, it’s pretty. But if you’re printing it, you shouldn’t need a color printer, so I set up a print-only section of the sheet. Do a “print preview” to see what that looks like.

Portable

The HTML file is written to be portable, so you can save a copy locally, even from the web, without any external resources. Now I can send my resume in HTML format, instead of Word or Adobe PDF.

Books to the ceiling,/ Books to the sky,/ My pile of books is a mile high./ How I love them! How I need them!/ I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them. – Arnold Lobel

I’ve been recently inspired to catch up on a lot of my programming fundamentals, digging up old notes and textbooks from my parent’s house.  It’s amazing how much slips your mind in those years… and I think my brain is rebelling from a lack of sleep.  Work has been killing me these last few weeks.

The stack of books on my nightstand has been tempting me every evening, books I’ve recently bought or borrowed, a few I’ve pulled from my shelves: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial… I even cracked open Homer’s Odyssey.  But every time I take a moment, no matter the time of day, I always end up falling asleep within ten pages or so.

It’s because I’ve had a lot of late nights… a lot of code to write and review.  You’d think I’d be in a better mood: I finally was given the time to implement what I call “preview panes,” or hovering blocks of detail that appear when hovering over an object.  I also got the time to design semi-opaque module-level dialogs.  They’re awesome looking, and the users are going to love them.  But apparently I’m officially ”booked” for the rest of the year, (and then some), on a whole set of projects.

I’m a busy, busy bee.  And there’s so much I want to learn… things I want my brain to recall, apply, relate.  It’s just been frustrating.  And you know me… my mind is incredibly multi-threaded.  Between family, friends, work, study and my random ponderings… I guess it’s doing the best it can.

But some good news:  I think I’m going to launch a couple of new sites soon… A Google Maps mash-up and that Everybody Calm Down commentary I mentioned once in a blue moon ago.

I’ve just gotta find the time.  Anybody got some lying around?  *sigh*

What do you think?

(click to open larger version, in a new window… Comments welcome!)

It’s currently an “alpha” release, so… basically it’s a pet project I plan on finishing when I’m not bogged down at work.  This also means the code isn’t exactly hardened, so I’m not too worried about someone copying the code!

It was really interesting “diving into” the Google Gadget Desktop API. I’m going to type a blog in the coming weeks regarding my impressions, but I haven’t really gotten deep enough to sound coherent.

In the meantime, you can try it out or check out the source if you like. Keep in mind the archive has a “.gg” extension, but it’s really just a renamed ZIP file.  Just right-click and Save As…

Download my alpha Google Gadget

Check ‘em out… hit the ‘Albums’ link. Let me know if there are any collections you want to see!