Well, I am increadibly blessed. The Lord saw fit to provide Keizer with 6-7 inches of snow on Sunday-Monday, and it is still hanging around. I took Ben out to play in the snow Monday afternoon, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. He ended up having a good time, as you can see, and even threw a few snow balls. The snow was awesome!

One of the bad things about snow, is that it really snarls up traffic. I was supposed to have a meeting at a client’s office, but between the weather and traffic, we ended up moving the meeting to yesterday, and that worked just fine. As far as driving on snow and ice goes, I am fairly confident in my ability to successfully navigate it, but I am never sure about the “other guy”, as I am sure is the case with many people. I have had a good amount of experience with driving in the snow, so I know to drive cautiously and to not be in a hurry. Most people seem to have a similar attitude, but you will often see the 4×4 that doesn’t understand that his 4 wheel drive won’t help him stop any better than me in my minivan. The really big bonus for me is that I can walk to work in about 20 minutes, so even if the roads are horrible, there really isn’t much that can keep me from being able to get to work.

Lastly, my wife mentioned to me that more snow is expected this weekend! Actually, I just looked at KGW’s weather page and they say that there is a possibility of snow tonight. Kwl!

I just wanted to send my best wishes to all of you on this party day of the year. I hope everyone is have a safe and peaceful holiday.

I have been re-introducing myself to perl over the last couple of days. The reason I am doing this is that I want to write some management scripts for User Mode Linux instances. I am helping the CS professor at Western Baptist College with this project, and I want to save him a bunch of time. The reason that I chose Perl is that I have some experience with the language, though not much in the last couple of years, and I know that I need to learn it better.

The question that I am at now is, “What is the most secure way to launch system calls in Perl?” I know that you can use system, exec, back-ticks, and I was just wondering which is the most secure to use. Any help?

Here’s hoping for snow later today! Bring it on. If I can’t get any here, then later this week I will go to the mountains and it that way. However, I would rather it come to me! Bring on the snow!

Well, it is officially Christmas day, and Santaclausianism is in full swing all over the US, if not most of the Western World. I will speak more about Santaclausianism more if people would like to know what it is, but those of you who were in Dr. Tim Anderson’s Christian Theology class should know what I am talking about.

I would just like to say Merry Christmas to all of our readers! I hope and pray that you will come to understand what Christ did when He came to earth to be born as a baby. Have a wonderful day, and please, keep safe.

I learn things by example, and if you learn like I do, then you should check out Dev Shed’s PHP area. They have a bunch of good articles about how to do everything from fairly simple stuff to rather complex stuff. So give them a look. They also have sections about MySQL, ASP, and many other languages and development tools.

With this year’s Christmas shopping that is! Yay!! I braved the Woodburn Outlet mall this morning, and man was it full. Talking to the lady behind the counter of a shop where I bought some stuff, she said that business had been fairly slow for them all week, but she was hoping to make it up today. All I know is that given the number of cars and people in that mall, someone was doing a good amount of business. However, I am done, so I don’t need to brave that trecherous world again. The only shopping I will be doing between now and Christmas will be going to my local grocery store for some milk, bread, and perhaps a cheese ball or two (mmm, Cheese ball…).

May all of your holiday shopping be done as well!

I was born. So I guess that makes me 25, wow.

Over that last couple of years I have actually had to think about what age I was. “Am I 23, no, I guess I am 24″ would be a phrase that would often be heard when people asked how old I was. Now I am the nice round number 25 (yes I know…), and I doubt that I will be forgetting that anytime soon.

So another day has come and gone, and the year counter went y++. Nothing has changed aside from that. I am still the youngest guy in my office, still the my parent’s child, and still young, though in reality I often feel far older. That could be due to lack of sleep (possibly) or the fact that I am a father of 1.8 kids, husband of almost 4 years, and owner of a mini-van. Yup, I feel old. To quote Robert Jordan in the Wheel of Time, “Duty is heavier than a mountain, but death is lighter than a feather.” The proper theology of that statement is not the subject of the moment, but it does describe my current melancholy state. However, praise be to the Lord for all of the borrowed time that He has given me. It is my continued desire that as I walk through life day by day, that I will be pleasing to Him, and one day hear from His lips the phrase that I so long to hear, “Well done good and faithful servant, well done.”

Well, since my wife doesn’t think she is going to be up for sitting through 4 hrs of movie-ish things tomorrow, she is 8 months pregnant after all, I will probably be going to see ROTK by myself tomorrow. According to Fandango, there is a 10:20am showing at my favorite local theatre and I think that is the showing I will go see. Hopefully at that time in the morning most people won’t be interested in seeing it. I hope all of the true diehards, like me most of the time, will have already seen it. I will post a review tomorrow sometime about how well I liked the movie, but I am guessing that my review will be something like yesterday’s PVP comic below.