The 1st Annual "Holiday Festivities at the Flat" was a Resounding Success

Our first holiday party was a great success. We extended an open invitation to friends and family to join us last Saturday. About 25 people or so stopped by through the afternoon and evening to hang out and party with us. I will be posting photos and comments on the event page.

Everyone who needed to decline the invitation was very gracious when doing so. That does not make for very amusing excuses though, so maybe next year, some will use the Holiday Party Excuse Generator as mentioned a few weeks ago on LifeHacker.

I will leave you with a particularly brutal yet strangely humorous excuse that I generated:

Dear Host,

I am beyond delighted that I will be unable to attend your yearly holiday tribute to every conceivable human excess. I will be meeting with the leaders of the Free world, and thus able to avoid you and your wretched but inevitable rendition of "Have a holly, jolly Christmas." Once the holidays are past, I hope to hurl nasty but highly original epithets at you. Please give my condolences to your party guests, and tell them I feel their anguish. My best wishes for a fruitcake-filled and flatulent holiday.

Merry Christmas!

Our holiday weekend has been relaxed, blessed, and fulfilling. Though we have been unable to travel to Houston to celebrate with my family, our time together at home preparing for the arrival of our first born has been its own celebration of new life and Christian love.
As Jean and I have prepared for the coming of Jesus this Advent season, I have experienced great joy in anticipation of parenthood and all that comes with it... good, bad, and smelly. My prayer for all of you is that the same pervasive joy in all of life's twists and turns may be yours this Christmas and always.

First the West Coast... Now the East Coast

In September, I was in Silicon Valley for some security consulting work. As I said in an old post, I had a wonderful time exploring an area so dense with technology companies. Well, this week I was in New Jersey for more consulting work. While not nearly as pretty as California, I had another great time during a brief, evening tour of Manhattan with my uncle John.
We are working far enough from New York that I was only able to get away one evening. An hour and fifteen minutes on the New Jersey Transit train got me to New York Penn Station to meet John. He has been working with Canon for a few months now in their main office in Long Island and had not been to Manhattan in quite a while. We met in the bowels of the station and struck out for a lively walk in the surrounding area. The Empire State Building, Times Square, and Rockefeller Center were all within reach of our three hour tour. Thankfully, the weather did not start getting rough and there was no ship to be tossed.
We have a busy day today, so with that giant glut of links I have just given you, I will leave you with this tidbit about my excursion. After we got back to Penn Station, I was amazed at part of the process that is daily for New Jersey commuters. I purchase my ticket from one of the automated ticketing stations, and then tried to read the garble to figure out where I needed to go. Only after asking an attendant did I confirm my suspicion that the mass of people at 10:30 pm were all staring at the arrival/departure screens for a reason. Apparently, the procedure is to wait for your train's track to be displayed, then to proceed to one of the twelve or so possible tracks via six different stairwells down. The interesting, amusing, and rather scary part of it all, is that the proper track is displayed minutes before the train is scheduled to depart. Not fifteen minutes, or even ten minutes, but less than five minutes before my ticket said the train would be leaving, the display updated and hundreds of people thundered to the rather narrow stairs down to the narrow tracks to the narrow corridors inside the train to find a seat. Thankfully, the conductors waited for all the people to board, but I half expected the doors to just close and the train to start moving right on time. What a recipe for disaster, and this was many hours past rush hour!

All Things Phil version 3!

I am a week later than I had hoped, but here it is!
You may be thinking that the site looks pretty much the same as the previous version. As a matter of fact, it is, and that is the whole idea. I am still using Apple's iWeb application for design and page creation. However, this blog portion is now powered by Blogger. About a month ago, I decided I wanted to try and combine the advantages of iWeb (elegance, simplicity, convenience) with the advantages of Blogger's service (location independence, flexibility, large feature set, mobile blogging). It turned out to be a lot easier than I had expected. On top of that, the Blogger interface is very clean, responsive, and powerful.
I will be continuing this explanation with more detailed posts about the problems I encountered while using iWeb, the solutions I have developed, and the factors that influenced my decision to go with Blogger.