I've long disliked the caustic methods of Richard Dawkins. I've had similar issues with Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins has a very arrogant, abrasive tone. Fans of Dawkins love his biting wit and his haughty yet matter-of-fact smackdowns. Okay, sure, I also love me some smackdowns. The youtube clips of some of his best lines can be a rare guilty pleasure.In contrast, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a very open, understanding and personable way of speaking that engages everyone who listens. The man is fucking pumped about astrophysics and he's absolutely delighted to help you understand why. You can feel it bursting out of him all-at-once and you start to get frustrated on his behalf at how the slowness of language is obviously mistranslating his intensity of feeling. He's a favourite guest of Stephen Colbert's and the two have a great rapport even out-of-character. This video is old, but it's a brilliant moment...

I got married! It was fun. :) That was over a month ago, but it took a long time to mentally care about anything else for a while. I didn't even really care as much about my birthday, and I love my birthday. Even though we kept the reception super low-key, there was still a lot of planning involved, and that stuff takes effort. Plus I had a lot of family in town for about a week and a half surrounding the big day. It was great, everything went pretty much perfectly and we were relaxed during all of it, but afterwards I kind of wanted to just crawl into bed, both mentally and physically. Christmas was awesomely low-key as well, and that's over, so it's time to look ahead to new things to occupy myself. I'm also looking forward to a couple of vacation days away next week; a...

Click for 2011-12-04 update.From the very beginning I've been examining almost every scrap of traffic we get to Fat, Ugly or Slutty. I've tried to determine the context of the discussion that brought us a visitor and understand if people are interpreting FUoS as a positive or a negative beast. Over and over and over again, the same themes emerged in forums, blog comments, articles, etc. I discussed several of these in the bit-gamer.net article and linked to them within as a little bit of "proof" of each theme. For a long time now, one of the major pieces of "common-sense" advice given to the harassed has been bugging me, and I'm starting to see evidence that I'm not the only one.To back it up a little, let's be clear about what happened to FUoS. We started a dumb little joke site for us and our friends -- a laughter...

I've had this domain for a while now, and I purchased it with the "Get Back in the Kitchen" title always in mind. It started out as a personal recipe database application that I was building in PHP/Symfony. The idea was literally to put myself back in the kitchen and learn more about cooking, ingredients, costs and nutritional data -- a personalized way to figure out our meals and store our recipes in a single format online instead of across 10 cookbooks. The "kitchen" also had another meaning for me: get back into non-work coding. As a developer, you have to always be learning and sometimes it's hard to get started without a focused project that you're excited about.But since then, several other (awesome) projects have taken up my precious free time. (I don't have a link for how much time my wedding planning has taken up, sorry.)Over the last...