I made a website and then I got really busy and just skimmed it. And then I noticed that there's a small community or two using it rather happily and not much caring if the rest of the world does. Interesting.

Hello, still-tuned-in members of said communities. What's working? What's not working? What might I do for you? I can see that the upgrades I did to link sharing a month or so back are a win, at least.

As for me: I'm planking and programming and dancing and pretending to learn to play the guitar all over again. I don't know how far I'm going to get with that last one. But this is awesome.

I needed a name for some software (don't tune out yet) and I wanted something that invoked the idea of migration. I googled migratory birds. And I fell down the wikihole checking out this magnificent bastard:

Check it out: the arctic tern migrates from the north pole to the south pole and back every year.

It does this for 30 years.

You ain't no wanderer, you ain't no travelin' man, just hang it up, the arctic tern has it all over you in the meandering department.

This year for Christmas, we agreed to pool our funds and make a donation To Doctors Without Borders in support of Ebola relief, and keep personal gifts small and whimsical.

But, my brother did send me his old PS/3, as he just got a PS/4, and it's all new to me mann.

So despite my impeccable moral credentials, I suffer from the same "first person problem road rage" as the kids who got new PS/4s today... trying to make an account and swearing at the incompetent assclowns at Sony network operations. (Before you blame North Korea, consider that this happened last Christmas too...)

Fortunately I'll be departing soon to share holiday cheer with family, which ought to restore my True Christmas Spirit (atheist division).

I've rediscovered something: some years back, I practiced harder and got better than I remembered.

And at that point— let's call it "peak guitar—" I was almost-not-quite-really good enough to tackle something like this.

Not that it would stop me, because I was also cheerfully shameless about being crap at things. That comes with being new to something as simultaneously wonderful and difficult as dance.

But: I'm not that good anymore. I decided to major in salsa and that was it for the guitar for several years. I have a hill to climb again, in terms of guitar ability, and also in terms of regaining my shamelessness.

So I need to figure out when I can practice without terrorizing my household (*), practice really a lot, and then take another good look at this.

But if I find myself inspired to write a few new four-chord songs along the way, I will surely share them.

(*) We've figured out that guitars are played in the basement, before nine. Both of which are very reasonable expectations.

I saw Interstellar the other day. The very next night, we watched "Contact."

It was strange to see more or less the same movie, except with more hope and McConaughey as the arm candy rather than the hero.

A nation builds a space machine for you

woo woo woo

God bless you please, Matt McConaughey

Even if she's sure he can't exist

[Now they kiss]

[Now they kiss]

The Pope says we will see our pets in heaven, and that heaven is open to "all of God's creatures." No word on what happens if the chicken you just ate gets to heaven first.

By the time you get there the chicken has 1,000,000 Heavenbook friends and they all make pious yet passive-aggressive comments on your profile all day. You start wishing you were on TheOtherPlacebook.

A choir of pigs, cows, chickens and turkeys follows you everywhere. Their singing is impeccable and the lyrics are devout, but there's no mistaking the message.

Heavenly fowl are particularly disturbing, with a halo and a second set of wings. It's impolite to complain.

When I hear that scientific studies are untrustworthy, I ask "well... in comparison to what?"

I understand skepticism born of awful things like evidence being cherrypicked to support a study sponsor, at the expense of, you know, actual sick people. Ugh. But I also understand that while science doesn't resist these biases every time, other ways of learning about the world are usually even more subjective and biased.

I see other people make very binary decisions about this. "Science is always right!" Well, no, it's an iterative process, carried out by flawed human beings.

"Science is always wrong and changes its mind all the time!" Well, no, iPhones work as well as they did yesterday and they're chock full of bits that wouldn't work for beans unless gobs and gobs of science was correct to a tremendous degree. If you disagree, may I please have all your electronics and your car?

Science has the toughest time making accurate statements about big, complex, chaotic systems (like bodies) with lots of emergent behavior, with a lot of money on the line. It's challenging to eliminate both the "confounding factors" (everybody in the study was a bottle-fed white male) and the biases (the study was sponsored by Megafoodco). But nothing else is perfect under those circumstances either.

Issues of imaginary-animal-cruelty aside, every time I complete a major project, I have this irrational expectation that a parade will immediately follow.

Today we completed a project at work that has taken over a year.

This time... I did get a parade. Or at any rate a round of bourbon and several rousing toasts with the gang at work, plus lunch with appreciative folks at F&M. Who also kicked ass on this project.

Y'know how everybody else "relaunches" their school's website with a new look and the same crappy content? Yeah, they didn't do that. They threw out essentially all of it and started from scratch.

Visualize a college website that isn't musty. Livin' the dream, y'all.

Now, my responsibilities shift. I'll be spending 50% of my time working on Way to Health, a research platform for behavioral economics — the science of getting people to take their darned medicine — which we built in collaboration with researchers at Penn, and 50% working on Apostrophe, our open-source content management system based on node.js and other cool technologies also found in One Post Wonder. More importantly, APostrophe is vastly friendlier than Drupal for the folks actually managing the content. Such as our friends at F&M.

It's taking time for me to get used to this concept. I'm ready for a new challenge, but I'm also having trouble grasping that I am no longer pregnant. A year is a long time to be pregnant with anything.

Could be worse. I could be a lady elephant.

Thanksgiving here at Casa Iguana was a good time, mostly. Roberta cooked her ass off. My father in law took a welcome interest in our inability to control the basement den lights from within the den; he's a retired engineer and has already rewired at least one son's house. We ate pie. Today we're thinking the Pennsylvania academy of fine arts museum.

My kid is participating in MIT splash which means I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the weekend.

This morning we waited in the longest, most efficient line I have ever seen or heard of. Then I got the hell out of her hair. The undergraduates who run splash make it very clear you should exit helicopter mode when dropping off your young person, who can competently manage her own schedule of Arduino whispering, Estonian street slang and whatever else the MIT students feel like teaching. There is a Parent's Island where you can be entertained to make you feel relevant but I already feel relevant.

So I went to the MIT museum. I admit I was expecting something, well, triumphantly techie. What I got instead was a poignant exhibit of nineteenth century daguerreotype photography. France gave Daguerre a pension instead of a patent, and the daguerreotype became essentially open source, especially in America where everybody had their own variation. I am surprised that the exhibit didn't draw this comparison.

The museum also features many kinesthetic sculptures, all of which are notable for their emotional impact as much as anything. And the collection of Polaroid cameras feel just as much a piece of the past as the daguerreotypes.

Of course there is some straight up geekery. Ah, the LISP machine! From a time when LISP programming was going to give us artificial intelligence and a purpose built computer just for LISP made sense. Currently the closest analogue is a custom bitcoin mining rig. Except that has no admirable air of mad science.

This gadget flunked my Turing test.

Afterwards I rented a bike- cheaper these days, with the city bike system in competition- and pushed off down Massachusetts Avenue. I pressed on past Harvard to the edge of the next town before returning for a late lunch / early dinner.

Tonight the cold I thought I had defeated came back. So I thought about taking a nap. But somehow I wound up pedaling down Broadway, across the Longfellow bridge and up Beacon Hill. Because I am crazypants.

I rolled down the other side and into Boston Common and looked at the skaters with longing, but with Eleanor's laptop on my back that wouldn't be cool. So I continued down beacon street and discovered a park on the Charles River.

Finally I returned to Cambridge via the Boston college bridge and went for Loop around the MIT campus. Where I discovered a building that clearly indicates lysergic acid is still a research tool.

Of course the building is full of robots.

Now it's time to meet up with my kid. The aquarium for me tomorrow I think.