JestinStoffel.com

Today I attended the Iowa Caucus for the first (and possibly last) time. I went because I wanted to support Dennis Kucinich, not that he had a chance of winning, but because I wanted to press the issues that Kucinich represents. I ended up supporting Barack Obama, like I planned to after Kucinich was rendered "unviable" (and as Kucinich instructed his Iowan supporters to do). I was proud to lend my support for two great candidates (suckers in primary states only get to give their support to one), and I was pleased with the results.

My friend Christian had a baby about a month back, and I just had to share one of the photos with everybody. I give you Christian: The New Dad!

At work I have been writing code in the C# (pronounced see-sharp) programming language for nearly a year now, and I have to say I like it. I suppose the reason I like it is because C# is a near direct copy of the Java programming language, and I like Java a lot. C# has been around for years now, but I never could get into it because it was a closed-source single-platform proprietary language.

I finally responded to that email I stored in my inbox marked Jestin's website. I found it quite easy to navigate through and plan on posting my own blog in the near future.

So it was Sunday afternoon, and I was walking my dog to the coffee shop with my wife. We always get lots of compliments when we are out and about with our dog, because she is so pretty and friendly, and it is not uncommon for strangers to ask us to stop so they can pet her. This is exactly what happened today in front of The Bronx Pizza on 39th street in Kansas City. It was a group of adults looking to be in their 40's, and one of the women bent down to baby talk to our 3 year old golden retriever. As I said, this is nothing out of the ordinary.

If you are a user of free/open source software, you have probably heard about the problems that software patents cause. I'll spare readers of the boring details, and I'll just say that patents make it difficult for open source developers to do anything because they run the risk of stepping on a giant mega-corporation's toes. The latest thing to arouse my anger on this issue is the recent lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell.

This weekend at Renaissance Festival

This is the Stoffel family uniform

A few weeks ago, the wife gave me an ultimatum: "Give me a dog, or give me a baby". After doing some legal research, I found that the penalties for neglecting an animal are much less steep than they are for neglecting a child, so we went to the Dubuque Humane Society. After browsing the selection of what they had in stock, we rescued a 3-year-old female golden retriever from doggie death row.

Ahoy mateys! 'Tis near the end of that scurviest of holidays, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I forgot to smartly post a blog! Now that my blog posting is complete, I have little over an hour of swashbucklin' and scallywaggin'. Avast!