No matter your religion or background, family is the real meaning of the holidays. My family is over tonight eating lasagna, telling jokes, and reading everyone’s Facebook statuses. We rarely get together like this even though we all live in the same city, and unfortunately it takes holidays like Christmas to get everyone together. Having a family and children that love you is a beautiful thing–a gift from God.

My Christmas Tree

In many ways, this will be a lean Christmas for me and my family. The economy is bad, I did not make as much money this past year as I would have liked, and I am not as prepared for this holiday season as I swore I would be last year this time.

I actually had started the day a bit depressed about the condition of my Christmas tree, which to start the day, had a crooked top, lights that did not work, and hardly any ornaments on it, because I had had NO time to attend to it due to working so hard and often this past few weeks.

That is when my mother showed up this evening with my sister in tow–with a whopping plate of homemade lasagna. My father came in and, with my son, Cameron, fixed up my third oldest son, Jonathon’s bed, which was yet another task that had been ignored for the past few months. Finally, my mother and sister found my unpacked ornaments and Christmas decorations and turned my tree from “ghetto” to “fabulous.”

Christmas Spirit

It was then that I got infected with the Christmas Spirit in a way that the difficulties of the past year–my traumatic wreck this summer with my kids in June, my divorce and resulting financial strain, and the myriad other problems my family experienced–could not defeat.

Merry Christmas to everyone, and always remember your blessings, as there is always something to be thankful for even in the face of great trials and tribulation. Finally, thanks, Mom! I love you and will never forget how you always seem to show up at the right time.

I just had success displaying an Interleaved 2 of 5 bar code on the iPhone. While the technical accomplishment is not that significant, the possibilities are endless with regard to the display of bar codes on cell phone devices.

Interleaved 2 of 5

Interleaved 2 of 5 is a bar code format used to encode numbers. Ticketmaster just so happens to use this format to encode the unique number of a ticket on printed media (either a printed ticket or a ticket you can print online). It will be interesting to see if a standard bar code reader is able to recognize a bar code rendered on the device. I generated the test bar code from a free site that produces a graphic file.

REST Delivery

The next logical step is to investigate the secure transmission of a bar code to a device over a RESTful service interface. Data related to the user, device, and encoding information can be sent to a web service that returns the data in a bar code representation. Once this has been accomplished, there will be no need to ever generate a ticket to a concert, game, or other event. Your cell phone IS the ticket.

After many failed attempts at entering the “blogosphere,” I have finally dumped all attempts to find a suitable ASP.NET based blogging system and go with WordPress. The feature set is just too comprehensive and the support for standards too compelling to keep messing around with Graffiti and other inferior publishing platforms.

WordPress also provides an iPhone application that enables me to blog from anywhere. It is open source, so I can customize versions of it and install it locally on my personal iPhone device. Cool stuff!