2012 Good Riddance
I haven’t written anything, even after taking two weeks off during the holidays, because I was fearful that it would come off as grumpy and cranky and someone would read it and tell my mom that I hated Christmas or something.
2012 was a rough year, especially for the ever pretty Mrs. Robot who lost BOTH her parents this year. I don’t even know anyone could process all of this.
So. That said, there was a bit of a grey cloud hovering over the Christmas Shopping Season Tree this year.
Fambly
Not to discourage the random family member that might read this. We had a fine holiday season. There were frustrations of course, but you are hanging with family so that is kind of expected. I totally enjoyed spending time with my little niece and nephew who are bundles of fun. My niece is turning out to be a kick-ass young lady – I have no concern about her not becoming a smart and clever and ass-kicking adult. I also have no concern that my nephew will be a fine ninja.
Dinner in Charlotte Ya’ll
Both our families reside in North Carolina. We flew down on the afternoon of that Saturday before Crispness and because we are total dorks we stayed in Charlotte that night at a hotel. Why? Because we needed to stay at a Hilton one more night in 2012 to push Mrs. Robot up to the next Rewards level. She’s now Titanium or something which means we can now stay in Mr. Hilton’s home if we like.
Because of the ‘grey holiday cloud’ I decided that we should also go out for a nice meal (since it would be our last nice meal as we’d be spending time with our families (HA! I KID!! (Ha, no I don’t))) and I made reservations at The Good Fig or The Fig Table or Figs and Funs which is a restaurant that is highly rated in the cultural capital of the south: Charlotte. I can’t recall the exact name and for whatever reason the internettubes here aren’t working on this here computer.
Ah, there it goes: The Fig Tree.
A few points about our lovely meal that night…
- Small dining room area so we could easily hear the somewhat loud lady at the table next to ours. She ordered veal, but when the dish arrived there was some confusion where she thought she had ordered pork. I don’t know. But, all I know is we heard her say, “you know, pig meat”. Pig meat?
- This same woman said, “ya’ll” probably at least twice a sentence. Ya’ll.
- Waitress was good with the up-sell. Ordered foie gras and she talked me into a glass of Sauternes.
- We had a car service guy drop us off and pick us up (so that I could get my drink on and not have to worry about driving). He was charming and was watching these Indian movies on his laptop. We discussed Indian cinema with him (we have no idea what we are talking about) and he ended up texting us a list of movies we needed to see.
Damn JFK Bag Handlers
Oh, and I had two bottles of Champagne removed/stolen form my luggage on our flight down.
Two bottles of champagne stolen out of my bag on @delta 6045 JFK-CLT flight. I assume it was the classy jerks at JFK.
The Good Book
If you are on the Facebook and follow the happyrobots there, you may have seen discussion of a happyrobot e-book that I’m working on for the iPad/Kindle/Nook/ReadingMachine.
Good golly. It is taking so long to go through all the words we have on this website. I’ve finished 2001-2003. Massive amounts of time to this. This could be a full time job just editing these posts and organzing and all that.
Toolbox
If any nerds out there wonder how I’m doing it, this is how. I do these for work and have become pretty good with it all.
I wanted to use the iBook application you can use on the Mac, but it has two issues in my mind:
1. The style/class/formatting seems a bit too loosey-goosey for me. I don’t trust the super friendly interface.
2. As far as I know, books made with it only work on the iBook app and not other formats.
The software I use is Jutoh. It has tons of features and is fairly powerful. Just not much to look at.
I’m pulling the words straight from the robot database and basically set up a little page that pulls every post for a single year and then formats it using the standard HTML tags for each section. For instance…
<H1>Title</H1>
<H2>Date</H2>
<P>The words….</P>
This way, in Jutoh I have an easy way to edit the font styles and formatting for each part globally.
But, before I can even think about the fonts, I spend a huge chunk of time with an HTML editor (I use Smultron) going through the posts and checking for spelling and formatting and also making editorial decisions on what goes in and what doesn’t.
We were so young
Oh, it’s been fun reading everyone’s thoughts from 2001-2003.
Hopefully this will be entertaining.
