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Okay, it’s not actually April yet, but I’ve always wanted to use the phrase “Sometimes It Snows In April,” which is a Prince song from the movie Under the Cherry Moon. It’s almost April, and snow is in the forecast for tomorrow morning. The forecast tends to change daily, of course, so we’ll see if it really happens. Nonetheless, I am excited by the prospect!

I’ve been using Vagalume, a last.fm player, on my internet tablet. This might be one of the best and most useful pieces of software that I’ve ever used. I particularly like the neighborhood radio feature, which plays songs from last.fm users that have similar tastes to mine. It’s like having a portable radio that only plays stuff that I like.

The temperature dropped into the 20s last night! There was ice on the lawn. So much for Spring.

Update: the forecast is calling for snow tomorrow night!

We went to Outback Steakhouse last night to celebrate Carol’s Birthday. Bren spent the whole day working on a card and a gift bag for her. Both turned out to be fabulous. Unfortunately we didn’t take a photo of her work. We did, however take a couple of photos of the party.

I am an uncle! My brother and his wife just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. More details to come.

Just a couple of days ago, I was using XMLSpy at work to do some test XSLT transformations. Our XSL templates here at work are pretty complex, with a few xsl:include tags to import common code. After trying for nearly a day to get XMLSpy to render my transformations, I gave up. I tried every available rendering engine, I tried inserting all of the included code into one file, I tried simplifying the XML - all to no avail. I finally wrote a small C# program to do the transformation, which worked much better than XMLSpy. I’m writing this because I just came across a story about the ever-increasing price of XMLSpy. I have wondered myself why it’s so expensive, but large companies seem to be willing to dish out the dollars.

By late 2000, the price of XML Spy had inflated to $149 a user. By the end of the next year it hit $399 a user. By late 2006 it was up to $499 a user (at some point dropping the space between XML and Spy, becoming XMLSpy). As I write this it’s up to $539 a user.

I’ve recently rediscovered the joy of comic books. Joss Whedon was kind enough to continue the Buffy the Vampire Slayer T.V. series via comic book. Reading the Buffy comic has been just as fulfilling as watching the show. Now, in addition to Buffy, I am reading The Umbrella Academy which is written by Gerard way of My Chemical Romance. I admit, I was unsure about reading a comic written by a rock star, but so far it is really good. Both comics are published by Portland-based Dark Horse Comics.

I would not normally advocate Wal-Mart, as they are evil in so many ways, but I’ve been reading the Wal-Mart blog lately. It’s called Check Out. I don’t know exactly who the “associates” are that write on this blog, but it does bring a human side to the company. Obviously, it’s a marketing ploy, but I still enjoy reading it. It is G rated and censored (no foul language allowed), like the store. I wonder if they will address their unfair business practices that bring other companies to their knees? I doubt it.

Now that Bren has a fancy camera (Nikon D40x), I can get good bird photos. I’ve started a Flickr set for my bird photos here. I hope to get a large variety of Northwest birds into the set this summer.

I couldn’t take it anymore. My beard was itchy and hairy and just annoying. Here’s a photo taken just before I shaved. I’m a beard failure.