I liked this for last year so I am doing it again.

( 2009 )

Best tweet ever:

Jonathan Coulton: My daughter says now that the king of pop is dead, I am the bestest singer ever. Mission accomplished.

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. Kushiel's Justice
2. Kushiel's Scion
3. The Wheel of Time
4. The Good Earth
5. Designing with Web Standards second edition (yes, the one and only tech book I've ACTUALLY read through)
6. Catch-22
7. Dragon Sleeping
8. Dragon Waking
9. Dragon Burning
10. Day of the Dragon
11. Ethan Frome (lol)
12. Night
13. Lords and Ladies
14. The Diamond Throne
15. Redwall

(I think I could go on for a long, long time XD That list took me about 2 minutes. I have read SO MANY BOOKS and tons of them are in series... I didn't even touch most of The Wheel of Time series, any Redwall books but 1, only the first of the 6 Diamond Throne-related books, the first 3 Kushiel books, none of the Sookie Stackhouse books or Confessions of a Shopaholic, toooons of Mercedes Lackey books I have read... etc... I read like a crazy lady when I'm really into it!)

OMG she finished our cake topper and it is perfect!!

Mountain Dew is doing this promo thing for WoW. Yes I am shamelessly advertising for them, because you can get an in-game pet D:

So... clicky!! XD

Wedding rings are at home!! They just arrived :D :D :D I can't wait to see them!! I didn't expect they would arrive in less than 24 hours. omg omg omg ♥

Had a freaking blast in Ulduar tonight!! We one shot Auriaya and then went to work on Thorim. Got him!!! Wow the first part is pretty hard but once you start fighting Thorim, not hard at all. We "1 shot" phase 2. It took, um, quite a few more shots for the first part. Lol.

Whooooo so fun. And Zat suggested that Thorim is the hardest one, so if we can kill him reasonably easily (well, assuming we can do it again more quickly XD) hopefully that means good things for the other bosses!

I also now have 2 pieces of Ulduar loot but they both lower my crit. Fail. :( They do both increase my armor penetration though which... well, Blizzard is shoving it at me so... well at least it isn't that bad for warriors XD

This is my 3rd day in a row raiding though and I have to do it more tomorrow :( (Miiiiistaaaaake) I am so fried from it all. Should not do this again!

Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp76ly2_NoI and then watch http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/6eddb255b2/a-gaythering-storm

I think I missed the class in school where teachers taught me that gay marriage was OK. What Massachusetts schools are they attending?

We ordered our rings today!! I am so excited for them to come in, but they won't be in for 3-4 weeks and then we won't be able to wear them until August anyway. :P Chris is getting his in a 10.25 and mine will be a 4.5.

We went up to the store in Maine (Linda Clifford) so we could see them in real life before we ordered. The saleswoman was super nice and helpful and it was overall a really fun experience :D It was funny trying to recognize the rings vs. the stock photos I'd already seen though (most of the rings were quite small XD)

Here are pics from the website though:

( Rings!! )

So when my mom heard I wanted a companion cube cake she wanted us to have a more traditional cake too and offered to make it.

But is it bad that I want to ask her to make this?

( Cake )

Now that I've had my iPhone for a while, here's what I think of it!

The apps are awesome. I love being able to check my email while I'm on the go as well.

As a phone it kind of sucks. While talking I'm not sure if I accidentally cover the mic or if its just random stupidity, but sometimes people have a hard time hearing me or my voice cuts out entirely (but I can still hear them fine and neither of us are having reception problems). I have a hard time with the volume sometimes as well, and I can't turn it up (or I don't know how to - I've checked the options though). (Not volume with ringing, but hearing people)

I have solved some of these problems with just putting it on speaker phone, but that isn't ideal in noisy places (obviously). I was having a problem with Chris not being able to hear me quite a bit though while I was in Chicago, and at least putting it on speaker phone helped for that.

When it is windy out NO ONE can hear me if I'm on the phone because of the wind going over it. Completely drowns me out! I didn't have that much of a problem with other cell phones (it was definitely a problem - just not so prominent) It's also kind of like holding a (very thin) brick to your head because it doesn't really fit at all like a normal phone does.

The maps app that it comes with is VERY handy. It helped us find our restaurant on Monday night! I kind of like the keyboard but I can't imagine someone with chubbier fingers than mine trying to use it. I mis-type things all the time! I was also under the impression that most things would allow you to turn the phone sideways but it actually seems like most applications don't work horizontally. The big thing I was hoping for was for the horizontal view to work while texting or e-mailing but it doesn't (I was hoping for a bigger keyboard). Oh well.

A lot of apps crash on me. I was using AIM at the airport the other day and it crashed on me and from then on every time I opened up an IM window it just closed without any warning. The same thing happens with Word Warp (which is a game). I understand that these apps aren't made by Apple but it is still very frustrating.

Frustrating point #2 is that ever since AIM crashed on me on Monday, I can't get it to open an IM window at all. I don't know how to make it reset the app (if that is possible - I hope so) so I'll have to google later.

The camera is crappy but I can't really complain - cameras on phones are not really meant to replace real cameras XD

So far I only have a few apps:

AIM
WoW Characters (armory app)
WoWTalent (talent calculator app)
Rolando (game that involves rolling things)
Word Warp (one of my favorites... just a word game)
KERN (typography game)
CSS Cheat Sheet (CSS reference)
Whrrl (something I thought was way cooler than it actually is so I don't actually use it)

I tried Super Monkey Ball but it was kind of barf inducing. I only played one level and I was getting to feel pretty nauseous. I don't have severe motion sickness when it comes to most games, but there are a few that just totally kill me.

The screen also gets kind of gross looking really fast (just greasy looking). I wipe it down a lot because, well, it just ends up looking nasty XD I think that happens with all cell phone screens though - it's just unfortunate that the screen is basically the entire phone!

I love when IE6 throws me complete wtf moments - z-index (as far as I know) does not apply to static elements. You have to position it somehow, whether relative or absolute or what (I actually have never tried it on fixed elements, don't use that much). But here I was getting a bug where an absolutely positioned element with a z-index of 10000 was working properly in Firefox and IE7 and in IE6 was magically behind the layout container div.

I tried putting position: relative; on the containing div with a z-index: 1; but that did not work. IE7 started exhibiting the same behavior as IE6 and was dropping the menu behind the whole container. Cue almost freak out mode.

Then on a whim (because it takes all of 3 seconds to do) I just put position: static, and it does the proper thing in every browser :D Yay!! (Now I'm just confused, because the containing div had no styles on it at all and I don't see how it would have been inheriting anything weird... but I'm just going to send away a "Whatever!" to the IE6 gods.)

It's confirmed - I'm definitely going to Chicago! Excited :D

Oh my god.

Started this morning with a weird little bug with a couple of things dropping below the column in IE6.

so I started to remove things to find out why - then suddenly, fairly inexplicably, things weren't dropping below anymore. So I started to add modules back in.

It was working great. I had almost every module added back in, and nothing was dropping! Wasn't making a lot of sense.

Suddenly, they dropped again.

I removed the thing I had just added...

and they were still all dropping!

Kept removing modules...

And now nothing except the stupid text javascript ad is properly in the right column.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND. MICROSOFT, WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?

First of all, seriously? Some of these are SERIES. That has got to count for more than "one" book :P

Quite a number of these are books I was supposed to read for high school. I didn't read all of them for sure (lol Tale of Two Cities ohhhh god) but some of them I did!

( Books meme stolen from Rhee )

Posting from my iPhone yaaaaaaaay!!!

I just finished this bout of freelance work. Time for bedtimes.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I could play with this color scheme thing for ages XD http://colorschemedesigner.com/