Slashdot, by way of Variety, is reporting that MGM has announced that they will produce The Hobbit, hopefully with Peter Jackson directing!

I’m more than just a little excited about this. 🙂

Five years ago on this day, I was taking an Honors Artificial Intelligence midterm exam. I was still puzzling over the last question regarding some variation on a backpropagation algorithm that I wasn’t sure that we covered in class when I stepped off the elevator in Stipes Hall.

There was thirty people or so just stopped dead in their tracks watching the TV that was mounted above the elevators. CNN was on, and they were covering some sort of plane accident that happened at the World Trade Center. My first thought was “wow, that was one hell of a flight miscalculation.” Then the second plane hit, right there live on TV.

It was clear that this wasn’t going to be business as usual. I had to work, so I headed on my normal path through the student union where I found a few hundred people watching the big screen, and several others saying that they just heard that the President of the University had canceled classes for today because of the attack.

Attack? Who could possibly be attacking us with airplanes?

I headed to Sherman Hall to my office and I finally got to see some news coverage that had some details… this was no accident. They had a radio on in the offices around the corner from me, someone stuck their head to say that the integrity of the first tower was failing rapidly and that they heard that people were jumping from the towers. It wasn’t much longer before the World Trade Center fell.

I don’t remember if I finished my shift that day or not, but I went right back to the dorm to watch the news coverage with my friends. It was a terrible, terrible day for this country. It is still so vivid that I don’t really want to watch the rehash of those events that has been going on everywhere. I didn’t see the movie. I don’t really plan to.

Are we safer as a country now? Yes, I think we are. Did we lose some of our freedoms along the way? Yes, probably a few. Did we need to go to Iraq? Who knows anymore, I know I don’t. I do know that five years ago today those 2,973 people that died shouldn’t have. In time, we will bring Osama Bin Laden to justice, but today that shouldn’t be the top billing.

Instead, we should take today to remember and honor those people that died in the process of living their lives and support the people that are out there right now trying to prevent this from happening again. That, and as my good buddy has said to me recently: “get busy living.”

It’s been a very technology filled weekend for me. On Saturday, my good buddy and I descended on his house to work on the karate club website. We made some good headway, however the pursuits of that coding session lead me to my endeavor for the rest of the evening: find a better debugging environment for PHP.

I found my interim answer with Eclipse’s PHP IDE, which provides PHP functionality to my favorite development environment. This IDE is very new, but it functions well enough for me to do a few program samples. What’s more, it has the capacity to publish files to a server as they are being edited.

This, in turn, lead me to my pursuit for today. I wanted to see if I could make a shared drive that would allow me to write my PHP code directly on my server through Eclipse. I spent the afternoon fiddling with Samba and permissions to make that happen. Right before dinner I got it to work, and the rest of the night was spent having pizza and watching TV at my parents house.

Now that I have this shiny development environment set up, I’ll have to decide on some project to make with it. Hmmm….

20 Sochin this morning. It was solid and casual, just the way a Saturday workout should be. Not much more to say than that right now.

Also, crossed the 2/3 mark this workout. Hopefully the last third will be the best! 🙂

Tonight was a night for getting back on the wagon. I got to the dojo around 5:50, so I got an early jump into the kata mix for the evening. Lately I’ve been fighting a stabbing pain in my upper right shoulder when I do the opening move (and anything subsequently that requires me to hold my arm out from my body), so I wanted to get past that tonight. I think I worked it out quite well… I had 8 Sochin in before showed up, and after joined in and upped the pace to a fever pitch I was at 19 before I knew it.

Not to be further deterred the intrepid band of , , and me decided to take the first class as a sacrifice to Fudo Myo-o himself. I think by the time it was all said and done, no one was under 20 Sochin. I ended up with a grand total of 40 Sochin for the night, and the three of us did five light speed and tension kata in a row. That feat is not something to be regularly repeated in a workout, but we were proud to have done it once.

The second class consisted of learning the details of the kata Unsu. As a kid, I loved watching and Sensei Jennings perform this kata. I always enjoy opportunities to go through it, if nothing else because I get to enjoy the heady rush of pretending I am them for a few minutes. I actually got the jump to operate a few times, (for the unindoctrinated, Unsu contains one of the most difficult, crowd pleasing, and impressive jumps in Shotokan kata) and after 40 Sochin I am very happy to say that. I did notice a few things watching myself in cat stance. For reasons unknown, my body forms angles that remind me of what my dog looks like when he’s about to take a crap. I’ve gotta fix my stance or my hips or something, because That Ain’t Right.

We rounded out the night with some 3-5 time attack, and I am taking the opportunity to be a little inventive and try some new stuff. What worked: kneeling punch. I got and with it, but they both made me pay for it in their own way. I threw it somewhat cheaply on … I stuck it in there in between his first and second attacks, because I feared getting trampled after he got rollin’. I got a nice knuckle-bump on my left jawbone for my troubles, so I guess everything balanced out in the end. I got cleanly, but she executed a foot sweep (a great idea) and tangled up my front leg so I couldn’t really get up effectively.

What didn’t work: jumping backfist. I throw it and for some reason spring up and out like a wounded gazelle or a retarded ballet dancer. I only got it to work once properly (on Rush-san, maybe?). I need to get the fundamentals of that down before I go off trying it again. I’m extremely glad I didn’t go with my gut and try that in front of Sensei Brewer last week. That would’ve been hilarious and my brain stem would’ve been pounded into a fine paste.

Anyway, phenominally good workout tonight. Lots of kata, some fun sparring to cap the night off, and we got a test of endurance that will tell only by our creaking legs and stomachs tomorrow.

Today we bid farewell to my Aunt Gail. The memorial service was PACKED. Being family, we had good seats near the front, which makes the whole experience so much better, let me tell you. Oh wait, no. Much, much worse.

I was doing fine through the pastor talking about my aunt’s 18 years of service as a lay-assistant at the church. I even handled most of the sad music pretty well. What got me was the communion. The pastor used a relatively rare form of communion called intiction, which took slightly longer and since there were several Roman Catholics (myself included) that chose to get blessed instead of receiving communion in another church the line backed up quite a bit.

This caused a balance of time where people that just took communion would stop, hug my grandparents and uncle (who were sitting in or near the front pew) and tearily head away. I was doing OK for the first half hour or so, but after a bit this took a toll on my grandparents and related family. My grandpa is in a wheelchair, and he had wheeled himself off to the side so he could be out of the way for the communion service. As more people visited him he got more and more upset, and because of a lull in the communion he spent several minutes sitting by himself. My mom and aunt got out of the pews, went over and sat next to his wheelchair, both crying their eyes out. Heartwrenching.

The communion went on for over 45 minutes, and by the end I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.

After the service, we headed to the cemetary where her ashes would be buried. It was the longest funeral procession I’ve EVER SEEN. I was told that some people had to park four blocks away from the cemetary. That’s a whole lot of love for my aunt! By the end of the day, everyone’s mood had turned from sad to reflective, so we sat around telling stories and laughing about the good times with my aunt.

She will be missed but she’s in a better place now… and that is a comforting thought.

For those of you that have expressed concern over our lack of cold food on hand, worry not… we have secured two large foam ice chests that will house our Diet Coke collection for the next few days and on Friday we will have our new fridge delivered.

It is a monster stainless steel Kenmore side-by-side refrigerator/freezer, no ice or water in the door, and 25.4 cu ft capacity. That leaves the stove and hood as the only appliances in our kitchen that are not new and stainless steel, at this rate maybe we’ll take care of that one next year!

So I’ve spent a good deal of my free time this weekend trying to get the AJAX Dojo toolkit working in my local workspace.

I’m using Eclipse’s WST tools, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what path the stupid dojo.js file is at! I either get fatal errors that it can’t find a given package or a “dojo is undefined” error and its sufficiently frustrating that I have decided to give up for the moment. I tried moving the /js folder everywhere (including into the WEB-INF folder) and nothing seemed to make it take properly. I sure hope that the new Eclipse Open AJAX project makes this a damned side easier.

I think I’ll go try to get their weekly build working now.

Yep, that certainly sucked. The install worked halfway and screwed up my projects, so I am reinstalling Eclipse now. *sigh*

It appears that the subject of one of my favorite impressions, Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin has been killed by a stingray barb while diving off of Port Douglas.

I agree with my good buddy on this one… I always imagined it would be more spectacular than this.

Tasha and I decided to allow our home warranty to lapse due to continued reports that Prestige is a sham company and does not cover things as fully as they claim to. Plus, we had only used our warranty twice this year and it was hardly worth the cost.

On cue, during D&D tonight came downstairs and let us know our refrigerator’s light was out. I checked the circuit box and it showed that the circuit had tripped. I tried to turn it back, and we got sparks. So I went upstairs, unplugged the fridge, and began examination process. The back of the freezer was hot to the touch, so we evacuated the contents of the freezer to my parents house.

Since the home warranty has lapsed, we’re going fridge shopping tomorrow. I love the way that two days after the coverage ends for my home warranty, a major appliance that would’ve been covered blows out like this.

Thankfully the new budget we started this year contains an emergency fund, and this is a weekend in which massive appliance discounts are easy to find. My parents have plenty of extra freezer space for us to borrow to stash our new month’s groceries, so this will all work out.

Life is full of crappy things like this from time to time. It’s just interesting how coincidental it can be sometimes.