Those of you who are regular visitors may have noticed that not all is right with the world of our site. The most noticeable issue is the crazy giant pictures appearing everywhere. There's also a good chance that you are getting funny red error messages sometimes when you press a button. If you get that, please copy the text and email it to me (click the Contact link at the left). I've tried to get the most common of those messages, but there are still a few that I haven't caught up with.

The Desktop GUI development space has been owned by Borland and Microsoft pretty much since that space existed. The free software world has started to catch up though. Four packages have combined to make an excellent development environment for GUI applications.

For Christmas I bought the family a new video card, so that we could actually use the full resolution of our existing monitor. Joke was on me though, because the new video card used a new kind of video cable that our existing monitor couldn't connect to. So I had to wait a little while to get a new monitor.

I played with the LOLCat Builder over at I Can Has Cheezburger and came up with these creations:

• Parrot no suspects
• Your shoes, dey has a present
• Flavor: they haz it

My Christmas presents this year were all directed towards wood working. This is a good thing as far as I'm concerned, and I didn't lose any time putting my gifts to use. The first thing I built was a box for our artificial Christmas tree. You can see it in my Christmas Tree Box photo gallery.

If you're thinking of this for your own tree, be warned that it isn't cheap. By the time I purchased the materials and hardware it cost me $60. It's definitely cool though, and I consider the money well spent.

I've been bitten by the video bug lately, probably inspired by my wife's interest in the Flip video camera. We don't, of course, have said camera, but I figured out earlier this week that our digital camera can take very short videos. I also found Kdenlive, a video capture and editing package for Linux.

I've been warned that video editing is very complicated, and even more complicated on Linux. I was happily surprised when I downloaded Kdenlive, installed it, and found it to be extremely easy to use. You can see my first effort here:

I've been going through the wishlist and cleaning up some of the entries. This is a really good time to check your entries and make sure that a) the description you've entered is correct and b) the items you have entered are actually on your list. This is doubly important for those of you who share a computer, since there are some items on lists that appear to be on the wrong list. If you don't, you have only yourself to blame if you get an item that was intended for somebody else.

I'm in the middle of building a deck. If you've built a deck before, you know that it's a fair amount of work. Being an over-achiever of course I can't do a simple rectangular deck that's bolted to the house on one side. Mine is a free standing 14 foot square, which requires a central beam in addition to the beams on the edges, built into a corner of the house. The corner opposite the corner of the house is cut at a 45 degree angle, making each of the legs leading to that corner 7 feet, and that face 10 feet long.

This news article prompted it: http://www.news4jax.com/news/14193259/detail.html

Now mind you, as an allergy sufferer, I understand that it's something that got dumped on you and there's nothing that can be done about it. But as a peanut lover, and especially a lover of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, this absolutely stinks. I think in the case of extreme food allergies, the many shouldn't need to sacrifice for the few. In this case, one kid with a peanut allergy has forced all students at the school to give up peanut products.