Sorry for the absence

Hi all, sorry for the long absence. It's been almost a full month since my last post.

Let's see, what is there to update you all on. The Heartless Siren and I are still getting married, so that's good. Wedding plans have been coming along. We have some test announcements coming from the printing company within the next few days, so we'll be getting those out really soon. Waldorf and Sauron put it together for us, it looks awesome.

My thesis is coming along. The data is getting close to finished, so I'll be working on the actual text of the thesis now. I am happy to say that the results seem to indicate that my work performs better than random guessing. Honestly, that's all I was hoping for. My work is in a very young field doing something that has yet to be done well using a very specific technique which has never before been applied to this field. So, getting better-than-random results is actually quite awesome. Now someone else can pick up my work and improve upon it.

We're still working on finding a place to live when we move in July. I need to call the complexes and see if they know their availability yet. I'd like to get that sorted out sooner rather than later so that we can arrange things with the moving company.

I've spent my nights this past week creating a registry website using the Django web framework built on Python. Let me just say Django/Python allows you to get an incredible amount of work done in very little time. The site looks amazing, is fully XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 compliant, and only needs 2 little CSS hacks to make it work in Internet Explorer.

We were using Ourregistry.com myregistry.com, but they require guests to give them an email address in order to view your registry. And harvesting email addresses from my friends and family is not OK. So, now they don't get our pageviews at all. And, I can easily turn my system into a competing product (it's already 90% there). The moral of the story is: Don't annoy a nerd with silly things when you're a website, they just might make their own to spite you.

Sorry, but since including a link here would give away our identities so blatantly I'll forgo. I would guess that with some clever Googling a smart researcher could probably find my identity and the website. So, I leave that task to the reader.