(That’s a rabbit’s nest, with four babies in it.)

Here’s one of them…

…and another shot.

Maybe. More on that below.

Went to the mall, found the tables they had set up outside Sears, waited for a seat to open up, sat down and answered enough of the 10 questions to get invited to round two.

This was on Saturday, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. There were about 60-70 people there, or so it appeared to my eyeball. We got a general rundown of how things were going to work, then took a 50-question test, much harder than the screening test of the previous day, and with the questions presented on a computer projection screen, looking just like on the show. While the tests were being scored, we were kept busy by Sarah of the “Clue Crew”, who told some stories from the show, and did a question and answer session.

I was one of nine chosen to stay. We were given some training on how to use the buzzer, and then we were brought up in groups of three to play a mock game. The game was very mock, I think they were just making sure we could buzz in correctly, and speak up when answering, and then snappily choose the next category.

We got to do a simulated little interview, to get us used to when Alex does his little human interest break, and to make sure we weren’t going to just stammer and drool.

So the deal is, I’m now in their active file, and will stay there for 18 months. they may call me, they may not. I guess the only sane way to approach it is to choose to believe that it just won’t happen, and be pleased if it did.

I got a job back at the beginning of the year.

Here

I’m rewriting some PHP web applications into .NET and SharePoint. That’s right, I’ve gone to the dark side, and I’m having fun.

Oh yeah, my company is responsible for these guys.

In November, Bear, our ten year old Silky Terrier, got cancer of the spleen. We had it removed at great expense, and he did great for a while. Then he died in January.

Sadness for a couple of weeks, then my wife found a dog on Petfinder.com, and persuaded me to drive out to Yankton, South Dakota to pick her up. We wound up with 2 1/2 pounds of 9-week-old Silky Terrier-Poodle mix, who we renamed from “Jenna Lynn” (yuck again) to “Peanut”.

There is not much to see on the surface at present, and there may not be for a while, but I’m pleased to have enough of a scaffold in place to start working on the harder parts.

These harder parts include:

• Getting the fastcgi to pass GET, POST and COOKIE data to the underlying request
• Building data models with Berkely DB/XML
• Getting Haskell and Lisp to talk to the C++ API for BDB/XML
• Learning enough Haskell and Lisp to make working this way fun, and not frustrating

Anyone want to help?

http://www.43things.com

The insipid neologism “blog” appears to mean little more than a Web site that *actually* gets updated, as opposed to one that *promises* to be updated REAL SOON NOW and includes an animation of a MEN AT WORK sign.

–Nick Moffitt, I think