You know how Drew Barrymore was in a reimagined Cinderella a few years back?

You know what we need? I'm thinking Ashton Kutcher as Cinderella, and Eddie Izzard as the evil stepmother. I'm not sure about both ugly stepsisters, but one of them should be Antonio Banderas. In drag, yes, but in none of these cases should the drag be even slightly convincing.

Maybe Drew Barrymore could be Prince Charming this time. She'd look cute with Ashton -- I think he'd keep the stubble, but their attitudes would make it clear that she was on top.

Pretty much any day I see women-in-tech issues addressed on a tech forum is one of those days.

If I stopped reading the comments, that would help. Somewhat.

Whoah. That was quick. I expected it'd be a little longer before he got it happening :-)

Building Ruby Castles in the Clouds.

I think it came out really well!

If you know any programmery types, please forward -- we're trying to get publicity for Sebastian's GiveGetWin.com, a sort of daily deals site, but donating to charity. He has some heavily-discounted copies of my book to give away -- fifteen dollars instead of forty.

I picked up a copy of Tribes, by Seth Godin for Krissy this year. It was a good idea, pithy, a quick read and a bit repetitive -- everything you'd hope for from a Seth Godin book, basically.

She picked me up a copy of Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao of RibbonFarm.com fame. It's a neat high-concept book. In concept, it's a rethinking of the popular idea of logic and decision-making, and it's as hard to summarize as that sounds like. Like all the very best books, I read it until I get a headache and then take a break until my head clears a bit. And like all the very best books, it's going to take a fair bit of applied usage in day-to-day life before I discover how useful it is or isn't. Tempo feels like it's going to require a lot of application and refinement to really be explainable to the layman, and I suspect Venkatesh doesn't have the attention span to make that happen.

Every so often I think I ought to write a very conceptual, rethinking-something-fundamental type book. Tempo is exactly the sort of book that keeps me from doing so, as I think, "I'd be competing with that."

And as of today, I have done a full editing pass through my book and completed all the relevant sections. It's "done", by which I mean there will be errata and responses to readers for awhile, but it's useful, polished and usable now.

Quite a relief.

For Christmas this year, my wonderful wife got me a wonderfully hideous pirate puppet. The pictures I'm finding online don't do him justice, truly.

Here's the best likeness I can find:



Here's the thing. That ratty, stringy dyed-wool hair? It looks a lot like actual hair on the puppet. And despite the nose out of an old Rankin-Bass animation, he really does have a sufficiently "really ugly little person" look to put him squarely in the Uncanny Valley.

He's awesome.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I made something like 8 dozen snickerdoodles (cinnamon sugar cookies), plus two or three dozen haystacks, the kind made with chow mein noodles.

My wife has shown me up by making an *amazing* lemon meringue pie yesterday, which is much harder. Still, I will share my snickerdoodle-making prowess, for I accidentally discovered an amazing snickerdoodle secret -- then made more batches to test it.

Start with Mrs Sigg's snickerdoodle recipe, which is perfectly good in its own right. But use 3 tsp of baking *powder* and one of cream of tartar instead of the recommended baking *soda* and cream of tartar. You'll get amazingly light, airy snickerdoodles. If you also use more vanilla extract, you get amazingly light, airy, vanilla-y snickerdoodles. Make sure to cook on the low end of the range of times she gives -- 7 or 8 minutes instead of 8-10. If you make them big, go for 8 minutes or they'll be a little raw in the center and you'll have to eat a little bit of cookie dough at the center of each cookie.

I know how you hate eating cookie dough.

You can also do things like using vanilla sugar as part of the sugar, and it helps a bit. But trust me on the baking powder thing, it's amazing. Don't bother using vanilla sugar for the cinnamon-sugar on the outside of the cookie, you can't taste it.

Unrelatedly, if you're making chow mein noodle haystacks, don't bother with seriously good quality chocolate. It just doesn't work with the chow mein noodles. You're way better off using cheap chocolate and/or hideous artificial butterscotch, both of which come out great. Live and learn!

Happy cookie-making!

This year, I've finally been a full-time professional programmer for as long as I was an amateur, student and/or part-time programmer before that. About 14 years of each.

Today my wife rightkindofme is running the Long Beach Marathon. Like, right now.

Wish her luck!

I almost never mention what's going on in my life on LJ.

Last semester, I did Ruby on Rails tutoring for CMU West. They apparently liked me, so this semester I'm doing it again.

It's pretty cool to step in and help new(ish) programmers learn the ropes, or to help more experienced programmers with the same transition I made a few years ago, learning Rails from a non-web background. I am repeatedly reminded of how much time I've put into this hobby/job/thing I do.

Unrelatedly: Krissy is, like, *this* close to her marathon. Under 20 miles of training runs left, and the marathon is on October 7th down in Long Beach. She's been training and sweating and suffering for this for quite a few months now. And it's within arm's reach. Go her!

I really do just burn out hard occasionally. It doesn't help that this past week has been entirely decaffeinated. I'm hoping that a relatively easy week this week will let me swing back into next week feeling better.

I'm not doing badly, exactly. I just have a bunch of could-be-productive time and my mind is saying, "screw you, I'm off duty."