Happy birthday to my dog Pearl, who is three years old today. She survived the terrible twos and has turned out to be quite a nice young lady.

Pearl’s big achievement this year was graduating from her crate. I used to have to put her in her crate when I left the house because she kept chewing things. She still “punishes” me every now and then, but I’ve trained her and she’s trained me. We’ve negotiated.

Pearl’s other big event was breaking her left pinkie toe. This didn’t slow her down one bit, especially after she chewed off and partially ate her plastic splint.

Here are some pictures of Pearl from the last year.
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GameStop and Amazon.com are both running a promotion wherein if you pre-order Starcraft II you will get a key to participate in the beta program.

Previously you had to luck out and:

• get an invitation to the beta at random
• get a one-time buddy invite from someone already in the beta
• get a key through one of Blizzard’s ridiculous Facebook contests
• buy a key on eBay for up to $200+

I wound up pre-ordering through both Amazon and GameStop — Amazon for me, and GameStop as a thank-you to a co-worker who loves the original Starcraft.

Here’s a comparison of my experience.
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Keeping your loved ones safe sometimes means holding down a steady job and saving money. Sometimes that means learning to defend yourself effectively and legally. Sometimes that means staying out of sketchy areas, or keeping your temper in check behind the wheel of a car.

Sometimes keeping your loved ones safe means protecting them from themselves.

If you have knives, firearms, ammunition, or other potentially dangerous items in the home, you need to do the responsible thing and lock them up.

The model 91006 electronic digital safe made by Bunker Hill and imported by Harbor Freight is an inexpensive way to keep curious fingers away from your belongings.
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Sometimes you get what you pay for. Sometimes you need high quality gear that won’t fail on you when you need it the most.

And sometimes you can get by with the bare minimum because something is better than nothing at all.

The 9 LED flash light from Harbor Freight Tools is cheap, inexpensive, and pretty damn useful. Oh yeah, it can be had for as little as $3.99 for a pair.
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I don’t know what I enjoy more: the warm feeling of a bearded fluffyface, or the fanfare associated with cutting it off.

This marks my third official Gibberish “Beardaggedon,” but this year I added a twist:

I asked my friends and readers how I should cut my facial hair.

I am excited to announce the winner, capturing 27% of the votes.
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Ten months ago I purchased Apollo, my 2009 Yamaha FJR1300A.

Ten thousand miles later, I have a few thoughts on what has been an almost perfect motorcycle for me.
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I bought the i-Rocks IR-8100 USB hub and card reader about two and a half years ago. It has worked flawlessly all this time, and I appreciate having more USB ports within easy reach as opposed to the back of my computer.

It works great, but it has an external power supply and is a pain to take with me when I travel. I hated having to pack yet another power supply, and it sucked to unplug a bunch of peripherals every time I left the house.

I decided to try i-Rocks again, and bought their IR-5400 USB flash memory card reader.
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We used to play a lot of Settlers of Catan around here. I mean a lot. One of the best parts of the game is that the map is different every time. The hexes that make up the board are mixed up at the start of the game and distributed randomly.

One of the drawbacks to this is that the hex pieces are easily disturbed. There’s nothing hold them together, and without a single, unified game board anything can mess things up. Bump the table? The hexes move. Roll the dice on the board? The hexes move. Don’t nudge the edge of the assembled board, or you’ve got a miniature fault line on your hands.

Enter Mayday Games’s YuCatan game board for Settlers of Catan. Made of thick cardboard, the YuCatan board is designed to hold the Settlers map hexes firmly in place. Mayday was smart enough to only leave room for port tiles around the edges, so you don’t have to waste your time with empty ocean tiles.

I used the board one time about two years ago and it’s sat on my gaming book case until last week.

I was very surprised to learn that the board isn’t built to withstand use in a humid state like Virginia. I keep the house at 43% humidity, and apparently that is too much for the board to handle.

Observe:
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Every year I grow a beard for the winter. I like to pretend I do so to keep my face warm while motorcycling, but for the most part I just like having a beard.

However, it gets pretty hot and humid in Virginia during the summer, and I usually shave it off sometime in the spring.

I call this event the Beardaggedon, and I posted about it twice before in March 2008 and December 2008.

So it’s getting close to Beardaggedon in 2010, and I wanted your help in deciding the fate of my face sweater.
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I’ve had an ADT alarm on the house for over five years. The main reason I got it was for the fire and smoke monitoring. I wanted to make sure someone would come if the house lit up while I was away. I don’t really care about the things inside the house, I just want someone to rescue my three dogs.

Over that five year period, I’ve had a few false police alarms. Those were mostly caused by pet or house sitters, and ADT called every time to see what was the matter. It was never a big deal.

However, I inadvertently triggered the fire alarm over Easter weekend, in possibly the lamest way imaginable.

Here’s why user interfaces and usability are important in all facets of our lives, and not just software and Web sites.
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