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Well, the tradition continues… Morgan’s mom sent me another birthday card this year.

I think it’s been 28 years now, all because I wrote my birthday on her calendar. Awesome.

We’ve been working on a project for a few months, and it’s just ballooned way beyond what anyone originally envisioned. The client keeps delaying the launch because another person somewhere in the management chain has a new idea or wants to tweak some little thing.

Finally, in a moment of frustration, I emailed my contact at the company and explained that I’m just not sure how best to proceed. Since she’s in charge of the budget and we’ve already exceeded what she’d allocated, twice, I want to be respectful of that. Her response was, verbatim:

Brilliant.

Of course yesterday was my birthday, and as we were out at dinner (pizza, naturally) Kyra asked if I’d like her to make me a special treat. She knows chocolate eclairs are my favorite dessert, although caramel-frosted chocolate cupcakes are also near the top of the list.

I told her that eclairs are a lot of work, but she insisted. So we picked up a few ingredients on the way home, and I kept her company in the kitchen while she made them.

Not surprisingly, they were awesome. What a great daughter.

Well, it’s the end of an era. Amazon is now officially collecting tax on orders placed via the internet.

Remember the good ol’ days when you’d save a few bucks buying things online? (Well, technically you’re supposed to report those purchases to the Gov and pay the appropriate taxes, but I’d love to meet the guy who actually does that.)

I installed the Google Fit app on my phone yesterday, just to play around with it and see how it compares to an old-school pedometer. It turns out the step count is pretty close– within about 5%– and it has some other cool features like average speed, history, and of course maps.

Today I walked over to a friend’s house, and the resulting map makes it look like I was in some kind of spastic drunken stupor.

I’m pretty sure that’s not the path I took, although the start and end points are accurate. Maybe my pocket blocks the GPS signal or something, I don’t know…

A couple of weeks ago, we decided that every Sunday we’d have a “family activity” where we make a batch of cookies and take them to someone… a friend or neighbor. So today I finished up my lasagna while Zack and Kyra took responsibility for the cookies.

Of course we have to sample some of the goods– quality control and all that. I think this is going to be a great tradition.

Yesterday was an awesome ski day. I headed up to Winter Park with a group of friends and we had a great time. The weather was amazing, the snow was just right, and I didn’t slash Mark’s leg with my ski like last year…

On the way home we just had to stop at Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs. It’s definitely the coolest old-hotel-turned-restaurant around.

We just watched this.

Good stuff. It sure makes me not want to climb Everest.

There’s something satisfying about seeing a particularly complicated database query’s execution time go from 0.7 seconds to 0.02 seconds. I’m working on a tricky report for a client whose database has tens of millions of rows, and I was becoming frustrated with the sluggish queries. So I sat down and started looking at the query, testing its performance, until I saw a couple of fields that I could index. I ran a few commands to do so, and BAM, it sped up by a factor of almost 40.

A wise man (I think it was Brian) once told me that the solution to most database query performance problems is to “index the crap out of it”. So true.

I couldn’t let a sunny 60-degree day in February go to waste. I joined five die-hard friends in a game of Durango boot (a variation on ultimate) at lunchtime today. We played on a slushy, snowy field, and 15 minutes into the game none of us could feel our toes any more. But we were slipping and sliding and having a great time. Ahh, February in Colorado…