Sorry for the interruption but I was out of town for most of the holiday (we left the 26th for Chicago, but thats a whole post on its own!). I did however, want to brag about some of the Christmas Gifts that blessed our house this season though.

Amy’s big gift this year is to have the Master Bath and Bedroom repainted. When we bought the house from her parents, we inherited the DEEP red color of the bath and bed room. Its a dark red (think maroon) that is hard to match colors with. Now we’re going for a lighter, beachier look and are painting them Beachnut (its a lowes color). The master bath is done (Amy found some Votive candle holders at a store in Nashville), next on to the bedroom!

Grace had a very Hannah Montanna Christmas. She got a Hannah Montanna Guitar Game (like Guitar Hero) that plugs in to the tv, a Hannah Costume, and doll. Its pretty cool and she likes pretending to be a rockstar. Maybe someday. I like playing her game (since I haven’t bought Guitar HEro World Tour yet) and she’s getting better at it.

Mose got a Trampoline. One of her favorite things to do is jump. We’d wake on Saturday mornings to the heavy thud of emma jumping up and down in our door way. Now she can do it all she wants and it doesn’t make the house shake. Its pretty cool and Grace and Emma take turns on it. Amy wanted to try it out, but its for people under 80 pounds (and neither of us meet that requirement!

The girls also got some tinkertoys, and some other little odds and ends that they like to play with, but the coolest by far is my Ultimate Wall-E Robot.

We saw the movie in the theaters and we’re big fans (mose loves him). We had seen the Ultimate Wall-e at the Disney Store but we weren’t going to get him because of the price tag. Needless to say, Santa found him on Sale and he was wrapped and under the tree for me on Christmas morning. He has fun dancing, chasing the dogs around and just exploring on his own. If you haven’t seen one yet, I’ll work on some video and see if I can get anything posted. Its pretty cool though and the way he can respond to voice commands or find his own way around the room is fairly smooth.

Was there one gift that you prized more than the others??

• Fedora 10 Preview Uploaded : http://tinyurl.com/5ht448 #
• Damned twitterers
  Quit hogging the twits! #
• Maybe now we can get back to the important national dialog, you know, who got kicked off the amazing race last week… #

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Thats right. I think I said it a couple of days ago, however, i wanted to let you few souls who visit this blog sporadically know, we’re going on a trip. Amy and I that is. the girls are staying in Georgia. The wife and I are going to an all you can drink resort. How cool is that?

We looked at Disney cruises for the whole family, but we decided that we needed something for just the two of us. Good thing too with the third one on the way. Anyways, if there are no posts from me until next tuesday, thats why, I’m in jamaica and I have better things on my mind. No worries though, we’re taking three digital (one’s an underwater) cameras with us and plenty of flash cards. I’ll have photos and posts to let you know what happened on the trip!

Twitter is everywhere. Its on my phone, its on my laptop. It helped decide the election (don’t believe me, go search twitter for election, obama, biden, mccain, palin, vote or anything else to do with the election this year). It helped people find gas in Atlanta when we had a shortage. Now, its helping get the word out about the latest uploads to Linuxtracker.org.

Yesterday, I managed to cobble together some code (from some that I found online) that automatically posts to the linuxtracker twitter account *EVERY* time a new torrent is uploaded. It posts the name of the file as well as a link to the torrent details page. Its a pretty simple piece of code that actually uses the php_curl library to do the heavy lifting. The part I stumbled with was getting it to post the whole damned URL. Luckily I stumbled upon it.

I’ve posted the code below for anyone to use, mind you, I changed the names to protect the innocent, and I won’t answer any questions about it. I just wanted to share!

//Twitter Update!

$email = "USERNAME";
$password = "PASSWORD";
$status = "This is the status message here. Duh.
";

$url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml";

$session = curl_init();
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $email . ":" . $password );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,"status=" . urlencode($status));
$result = curl_exec ( $session );
curl_close( $session );

?>