This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2012/02/20/empress-mars-kage-baker.

The Empress of Mars by Kage Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This here is a great book. I'd picked it up on a whim, used, without knowing much about it other than it says it's one of Kage Baker's "The Company" series.

Amusingly, it's not obviously part of that series, and if you're worried about picking this book up and not knowing what's going on, don't worry - there's no obvious metaplot here, and although it's apparently part of the future history of her series, there's no reference to any other part of it.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/11/21/its-not-easy-shop-baby.

It's not easy to go out with a Baby. This is obvious to the parents out there, who are cheerfully laughing at my naiveté - I can only point out to them that they were in my shoes, once.

But it is hard. For one, there's preparation - you've got to pack the baby into the carseat, make sure you've got enough diapers in the bag and bring that along, and probably a blanket or two, this time of year. You then have to wrestle it all into the car, and take off. Upon arriving at any destination you need to unpack the baby, possibly also the stroller, and set off. Going anywhere costs extra energy just getting in and out of the car, and as you're out and about with the baby she gets tired and cranky. You don't really stop anywhere on a whim, you tend to plan everything you do. I'm sure this will ease up as Rose gets older, but it's hard.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/11/18/drupal-7-and-jquery-cookie-plugin.

Here's a quick snippet I just found out today: The jquery cookie plugin is presented as part of Drupal 7. This is really cool and useful, but I must note that it's not automatically included on every page load, so you'll want to include it if you want to use it, and as well it doesn't seem to actually be documented anywhere on drupal.org.

Happily, the original documentation for the plugin is at https://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie/blob/master/README.rdoc, and is pretty good, although I suggest reading it through at least twice, as at first I missed that you can read, as well as set, cookies with this. Basically the parameters are the cookie name, the cookie value, and then an options object which says the expiration, the path, the domain, and such. Note that the expiration can _either_ be a date, or a number of days.

Hopefully this will help other folks out with using the jquery cookie plugin with Drupal 7.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/11/01/things-be-thankful-my-parents.

John Scalzi is doing a bunch of posts this month about things he's thankful for, and I thought I might follow suit.

I'm thankful for - my family.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/09/25/python-notes.

Trying to install py.test in order to get stuff tested in trying to convert Byakhee over to python, and to do that a few links were useful.

1) http://stackoverflow.com/q/4750806/9143 told me the basics for installing pip, which is needed to install py.test.

However, that lead to other problems, because the Windows 7 64 bit doesn't register the program the way that the easy_install installer thinks it should.

2) http://tech.valgog.com/2010/01/after-installing-64-bit-windows-7-at.html contains instructions on getting Python installed properly. All I had to do was to copy the python script into a file (which I named register_python.py) and run it.

Step 2 let me install the easy_install installer from step 1, which let me install pip. And now, that let me install py.test.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/09/24/just-between-friends-consignment-shop-happiness.

Had a lovely day out today, including some time spent at our friends Mike and Anna's house for some gaming and conversation.

Couldn't stay late, though, as we had a free invite to a 'Just Between Friends' event. I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but it's pretty awesome for a new parent - they're a periodical consignment shop entirely about the new parent. We'd already bought quite a lot of great baby stuff from them, but one of the things they're really wizard with is clothing - outfits for 1-4 dollars apiece blows away the prices in the malls. This time we went through and got:

1. A new carseat and base for $15. (I was going to get just the base, but those were $20. Go figure!)
2. A box of about 166 size 1 diapers for $20.
3. About 15-17 outfits, god knows, really
4. A changing table pad to put Rose on so she doesn't roll off downstairs, $4
5. And a little plastic cage to wash baby bottle bits in, for a buck.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/09/11/babies-byakhee-and-zombies.

So, being a Father has continued being fun. And it really is, mostly. Rose is a 'quiet' child, which doesn't mean that she doesn't have those times when she's screaming her lungs out, but does mean that there are nice, long stretches of time when she sleeps.

When we're lucky, she sleeps during the nighttime.

Happily, my wife Tammy is being very generous and mostly lets me sleep through the night unless it's a really bad night and she needs another man on deck to handle the baby while she gets some rest, which happily doesn't happen that often. Otherwise it's feedings - mostly Tammy's responsibility, since we're breastfeeding - diaper changes, and so on. Diaper changing is mostly pretty easy, although occasionally you run into a problem with her deciding to go while you're changing her... whoops!

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/08/22/light-weekend-diaper-changing.

I just had a nice light weekend. Mostly it entailed diaper changes on baby Rose, although a fair amount of time was spent driving around to deliver a baby shower present.

Parenting, so far, has been generally easy. Admittedly this is partially thanks to my mother's help, who flew out early to help us get by this month, but really at this point my duties as a parent are like this:

• Feed Baby
• Change Diapers / Keep Baby Clean
• Burp Baby
• Hold Baby

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/08/10/my-daughter-has-been-born.

Wow!

My Daughter has been born. Rose Fiala was born at 7:22 pm on Tuesday, as her mother had a C-section. Unfortunately mom's hips were a bit too small for baby's head, and they decided it would work best to ease her out another way. Rose is in great shape and is doing all sorts of newborn baby things, particularly the 'be really cute' part. Mom's doing great too!

Rose is pretty big - 6lbs 13oz, so one wonders how big she would have gotten if she'd gone for 40 weeks! Wow.

We're very tired. :)

Grandma and Grandpa Koonce are up here in Denver now and visiting, and they're loving Rose a lot. My parents are coming out later this month.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/07/12/multigrid-webform-component.

(I originally wrote this for G+, but since it's long enough, I'm making it a blog post too.)

So, I'm making a new component for webform in Drupal, called 'Multigrid'. It's based on the grid component, which if you don't remember it, allows you to define a set of common options (like, neutral, dislike, hate beyond rational thought) and define a set of questions, and then it sets up a grid of radio buttons, where the answers are across the top and the questions go along the left side.

If you're picturing the online survey you filled out recently in the mistaken hope that you might win $500 after eating at sit-down-chain-restaurant-326, then that's pretty much it.