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Pants optional.

Archive for December, 2008

Winter Solstice and the so-called “War on Christmas”

Dec 18

Posted by Aaron in Rants, Secular Life | 1 Comment

We are all very excited about the upcoming holidays. Our presents are packed (and most of them shipped / delivered), the tree and lights are up and decorated, we’ve made cookies, and we’ve dove headfirst into the Winter Season media: The Grinch, Bing Crosby, Ultra Lounge, Muppet Christmas, etc.

The thing is, although all of this looks like the holiday we commonly refer to as “Christmas”, it’s really not. Our family celebrates the Winter Solstice – the astronomical event occurring between the 20th and 25th each year, where the Sun is at its lowest azimuth and the day is the shortest. 

Historically speaking, people have been celebrating Solstice for CENTURIES (I would even venture to say “millenia”), and many of the traditions that we all know and love (tree, gifts, Santa, etc.) all have secular / pagan origins. But what bugs me is this whole “War on Christmas” thing that’s all the rage in the media right now. It’s just plain silly, and it’s mountains from molehills. I want to discuss two topics here: Why the “War on Christmas” is ridiculous, and why (and “how”) we celebrate Winter Solstice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagging Up the Classics

Dec 15

Posted by Aaron in Humor, Musings | 2 Comments

Although I’ve maintained a website for about 10 years now, I only recently started blogging (2005, IIRC). I began blogging on Myspace. Although the Myspace blog software was really only a quasi-blog (it’s really more of an online journal, like LiveJournal, than a blog), it was a lot easier to promote since it was tied into my profile and people could subscribe through their Myspace profiles. 

But I digress.

When I finally ported it over to WordPress (on the wise advice of my wifey), many of the posts were simply tossed rather haphazardly into the MySQL database. They were, of course, thrown into the all-inclusive “Everything Else” category, but that’s it. 

On top of that, the earlier versions of WordPress didn’t natively support “Tags”, only categories, so the majority of my posts (95% of them, I’d guess) were tagless. And I’m all about some tags.

A week or so ago, I decided it was time to organize them properly, tags and all. Some of the posts I had to re-read in order to figure out how to correctly tag them. Initially, the tags were boring “family”, “economics”, “chemistry”. But as I progressed, the tag naming got a little more creative: “Science, bitches!”, “OMG TEH DRAMA!!!”, “Egregious Use of the F-Word”, and the ever popular “Ass-hats”.

If you’re curious, have some time to euthanize, or are drunk, you may find entertainment in the posts associated with the following selection of tags. I’ll let you see if you can figure out what the commonality is for a few of them. (List is a limited selection of tags arbitrarily chosen for colorfulness — the full cloud of tags is in the right bar, below my Amazon widget).

Without further ado, in alphabetical order, I give you:

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Ziggy, 2.0

Dec 14

Posted by Aaron in Friends, Family & Pets, Ziggy v.2.0 | 2 Comments

It’s official.

We’ve known about the pregnancy for several weeks now, and while many of you may already know, I kept a lid on it until after we were able to go to the OB and verify that things are all progressing very fetusily. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Odin” Development

Dec 12

Posted by Aaron in Academia, Geekery | No Comments

I’m beginning development on a project I am going to refer to here as “Odin”. For reasons mostly relating to intellectual property (until I can determine if this will be open-source or closed-source), I need to refrain from divulging details about the nature of the project, aside from that it could be conceivably be used as a pedagogical tool. 

I met with one of my Prof’s yesterday to discuss Odin, and he thought the idea was really cool, with a lot of potential. The problem, in my mind, is whether or not it is too ambitious. Odin will require some mid-level graphical programming and probably some mid-level math for calculations. (By “mid-level” I am thinking in that the range’s upper bound is upper level mathematics.) I’ve been mulling over the concept for a while though, and I have a pretty good idea in my head for HOW it should work, at least. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Chilly Willy

Dec 5

Posted by Aaron in Humor | 2 Comments

There’s a reason why statistics have shown that married men live longer lives. 


From the archives…

For those of you not familiar with a “Chilly Willy” here’s a synopsis:

Chilly Willy is also a specialty shot. Taking a 1 to 2 ounce shotglass and placing it upside down on the table, pour chilled (non-pepper) Vodka into the bottom well of the shotglass that will now be facing upwards. Close once nostril by placing your finger over it. Place other nostril over Vodka. Snort. Not for people with sensitive sinuses.

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