I would like to wish everyone who visits our site (probably 10 people regularly) a very Happy 2007. I have no idea where 2006 has gone, but no matter, it is time to plan 2007. I have tons of knitting projects on queue, a fabulous quilt that will take lots of work but will hopefully be beautiful. My wonderful mother-in-law helped me with the applique while they were here for the holidays.

I have started my new 2007 book list. It's my goal to read all the books I have at home before going to the library. Hopefully, I can hold myself to that. I finished 76 books for the year 2006 and am quite proud of the number. Over the course of the year, I expanded my reading to include some great authors, who I'll keep on my must-read list for this year. Just to name a few that I think everyone should read: "Geek Love" (a must read), "Atonemont", "The Line of Beauty", "Midwives", "Kite Runner" (amazing, beautiful, a re-read), "The Nimrod Flip Out" (witty, a keeper), "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" (great book need to read his others), and another "The Jane Austen Book Club" (interesting).

I wish everyone a wonderful year. Hopefully, Jason and I will be seeing snow soon so we can finally feel winter here in New England.

All the Best to you and yours.

Well, I've been busy updating the site, though not that much is visible to most visitors. I've finally finished moving this Weblog and the Gallery to modpython (please note the change in URL), which will help in server-side speed (sorry, no new bandwidth). Devon and I have also gone through the gallery and changed the color scheme a bit. I've also fixed up some bugs with browser compatibility, though there should be more changes coming, including slight modifications to the weblog. Devon really wants a comments feature, though that would take some significant work and I'm not sure I want to spend my break working on it. I also have a couple other mini-sites in the works that I'll post when they get a bit further along. Watch this post for info on further smallish updates -- major features/sites will get their own post.

Update: Ok, that was quick. I finally got around to moving the page to the left. I found that the centering wasn't working very well on small screens (e.g., my laptop).

Update: Validated! I finally got around to validating our sites against the web standards. I've managed to bring our pages up to being valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Of course, every time we update something the test may fail, but the changes needed not to keep us in compliance should be trivial.

Celeste gave me a box of this candy for Christmas. I have to admit, I laughed for a good five minutes -- I'm no Spelunker!

I'm illiterate.

Most of you who know me have probably already figured this out. It's why I freak out when people try reading over my shoulder -- too competitive. It's why I hate opening gift cards in front of the giver -- what are they supposed to think when I begin mouthing the words repeatedly? I can't imagine it's comfortable for them. (Now that I think about it, next time I receive a card from someone, I'll just glance over the text quickly and say, "it joys me to know you feel that way." Think they will believe that?)

Anyway, I've finally decided to face my fear of reading. I simply have too much to read to be hindered any longer. I must read faster. To that end, besides wasting my precious study time writing this pointless coming-out post, I have also gone so far as to purchase a rather expensive computer program that claims to help idiots like me learn to read more quickly. Furthermore, after an in-depth research program into the topic (more wasted time), I have learned that the average college student reads 250-350 words per minute. A good reader (i.e., a typically, non-wanna-be grad student) can read around 500-600 words per minute, with some people (non-Savants) able to read in the 1,000s of wpm. These speeds, of course, include some content loss, so their effective reading speed would be around 80% of these figures. That would place the average reader at 200-240 wpm and good readers at 400-480 wpm. Now, here's where I stand after my baseline tests on my spiffy new reading-for-idiots program (for those of you out there who are doubting my troubles, this is the fuck-off moment): 153 wpm effective. That's right. I'm a grad student in a program where I typically have to read 500+ pages per week and I can only read 150 wpm. At ~300 words per page, that means I will be reading for at least 16 hours per week, which doesn't include reading for my own research (like this pointless post) or reading those books that I should just 'know' or actually taking notes and writing my papers.

After some more study, and a couple beers, I discovered that one of my biggest problems is 'sub-vocalization' -- I have to hear every word I read in order to understand it. Apparently, normal people can read without actually hearing themselves read. Somehow, they simply look at the word and know what it says. Strange. I spent a good deal of time this week trying to overcome sub-vocalization. I tried everything from humming, to listening to loud music, to breathing deeply (which at least had the benefit of making me dizzy), to skimming over text as quickly as possible in order to prevent the vocalization. Nothing seemed to work until I found a tip on some website that said I should try counting by twos, 2-4-6-8-10, repeating this over and over as I read. I thought this was actually working until I discovered that, contrary to medical science, I actually have the ability to sub-vocalize two words at once. No, it wasn't the beer.

Next week: My struggle with ADD and how it is tearing me... What? What was I saying? ADD made me think of addition, which took me back to high school math, which reminded me I had an eye exam this next week, that took my thoughts to homework, which brought me back to this pointless post. WTF am I doing, I have stuff to do.

Devon and I just received a letter from the IRS. It seems I may have made an error on our taxes, resulting in a *large* over-payment of taxes. Of course, they claim that we made 22.5% less last year than we actually did. I think we would have noticed living in abject poverty. Maybe this is the Bush administration's way of creating a reason to toss objectors into prison: Offer everyone in a blue state a tax refund large enough to trigger some secret 'we-got-you-by-the-balls-now-commy-pig' law, allowing the admin to incarcerate half the population right before the election... Of course, maybe they just made a math error. Just in case, I think we'll apply the refund to next year's tax bill.

In other news, I just got me one of these: T-Shirt