Skillet's new album, Comatose, takes a new musical turn. It moves away from the heavy and edgy sound found on the previous CD, Collide, but it also stays well away from the techno and industrial sounds that were familiar to Skillet's earliest offerings. The new sound combines old school metal, there are some great guitar solos on the CD, with a touch of goth, ala Evanesence, all laid in a solid bed of guitar pop.

As Christmas approaches each year I look forward to continuing a tradition that I started a few years ago. On each of the twelve days leading up to Christmas Day I give my wife a small gift. While this idea was inspired by the song I don't actually give the gifts that the song suggests. She might like the five golden rings each year but I doubt she'd have much use for eight maids a milking, or the swans, or the geese, and so on. Instead, I give her small gifts that are sometimes sentimental, sometimes useful, and sometimes just funny.

 

The twelve days of Christmas referred to in the song are the days following Christmas.  In some religous traditions there are events associated with each day. For my purpose it made more sense to give a small gift each day leading up to Christmas.  Giving the gifts afterwards would be a bit anticlimactic.

Early November, 2006, my dad and I took a quick day hike along Bell Trail. This trail is located about 1.5 hours north of Phoenix and about 45 minutes east of Sedona. It follows Wet Beaver Creek for a few miles and then, after crossing the creek, climbs to the top of the Mogollon Rim where there are spectacular views in all directions. Hiking this trail in the Fall allowed us to see lots of colorful leaves -- something we don't see much of in Phoenix. The pictures for this hike can be found in my Bell Trail Gallery.

Miracles is C. S. Lewis' classic book in defense of miracles. If a skeptic reads this book in order to see how well the author can wriggle around semantics and play with historical fuzziness he will be disappointed. And, if he thinks that Lewis will stop with simply stating his case that miracles can happen, he will be shocked to find that Lewis puts together an argument that supports the fact that miracles must happen. Lewis' explanations are not for the light reader though. He relies heavily on sophisticated philosophical thought and assumes readers are very familiar with authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hume, Hobbes, and so on. If the reader can keep up with the heady reasoning (I'm not at all sure that I did) then this book is full of rich and detailed discussions concerning much more than just simple stage magician type tricks that some like to call miracles.

As the title suggests, this is another of Brian Jacques' Redwall books. This story revolves around one small but ferocious mouse, Mariel. Mariel and her father, Joseph, are captured and tortured by the evil searat Gabool. After he throws Mariel to the ocean, leaving her for dead, she washes up on the shore near Redwall Abbey. With the help of the residents there, and the spirit of Martin the Warrior, Mariel begins a quest to defeat Gabool and rescue her father.

Today I released version 2.1 of Unregister. The Unregister component allows for users on a Joomla site to unregister themselves. For more information about the Unregister component see the intial release posting. The latest version of Unregister fixes two bugs:

• It removes the dependency on register globals being turned on. For security reasons Joomla recommends that register globals be turned off. Up until this release Unregister would not work properly when this setting was off.
• Some malformed HTML in the unregister form was causing Unregister with some browsers on some sites to fail. The HTML has been cleaned up.

Most of the time my sweetie and I go here when its just the two of us. If you want to bring your kids, as we have just twice, I suggest you go on a week day to avoid a huge wait with hungry kids. Friday nights are pretty bad even for two because they don't do reservations. Why don't more restaurants do reservations??? Geesh. Anyway, their busyness is a good sign.

The Unregister component is a Joomla plugin that allows users on a site to unregister themselves from that site. An associated module puts a link on the sidebar that gives users access to this component. After almost a year (yeah, it's pitiful) I have finally converted the code base over to the Joomla development environment and made a release under this system. There are no new features to the component but now that I have the new system setup I will soon be adding features that some users have requested. The component and module are available for download from the Unregister project page or go directly to the download page.