Christmas Cookies

Christmas 2009 draws to a close as I spend Saturday driving my kids from Iowa City to Chicago for them to hop a flight back to Nashville. This holiday season was spent  with the family at my folks place in Van Horne; along with Jared, Haley, Beth, John, Emmett, Christine, Dave, Larry, Lou and my fav GF, Angie.

I was surprised that the remote helicopters I picked for for my kids went off like nobody’s business. They eventually attempted to terrorize my cat, Spengler, but he soon lost interest after several bombing runs. Mucho kudos go out to John and his lofty gift to Jard: one of those mini-digital video cameras. SWEET! A shout-out goes out to my brother-in-law, Dan. If it weren’t for him, neither I, Jared or Haley would actually have their OWN domain name. You ROCK!

New Years Eve was spent playing 5-hours of Rock Band at my theatrical-com-padre Vicki’s house. Ask about her last trip to India. On second thought, DON’T ask her. In the mean time, I’m gonna’ put on some Modest Mouse.

Here’s a few pix from the trip to Chicago. So long, 2009. I hardly knew ya’.

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a chat-bot that acts much more than a simple echo server. With the plethora of Instant Message clients on the market (Yahoo, AIM, GTalk, Pidgin, Adium, etc.), it was difficult to determine which IM client suited my needs. First, the client needed to be available across several platforms (Windows, Windows Mobile 6, Linux, OS X). Second, their needed be an existing publicly available API in order to write the chat-bot code. Third, it was imperative that the API was actively being deployed and developed. Why mess around with an IM client that nobody was using?

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