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I’m a Risk champion. Yeah that’s right. I dominate the world with an iron fist and little yellow armies. I’ve never had so many armies on the board at once, mostly because I killed two people in two turns and got all their cards. Kim had never played before, and she struggled with strategy at the beginning, but started to get it midway through when it was too late. It was just Kim, Jesse, Deborah and me playing at Jesse’s house. It was fun to finally see the house he’s living in. Big place. They have a huge stockpile of alcohol.

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I finally got to see my good friend, Mr Aaron Holden, after a year and a half his living abroad. Aaron, his parents, his sister and her boyfriend all came up to Seattle, more to pick up Aaron’s girlfriend from the airport than to see me, but I’ll take what I can get. They saw Kim’s and my house, we caught up on what everyone was doing with their lives, and we went out to dinner at Thaiger Room. We wanted Mexican food, but Agua Verde and Gorditos were both closed. Aaron will be around for a few more months, so hopefully I’ll get to see him a few more times before he takes of somewhere else.

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Kim and I took the afternoon on Friday to spend some time helping out at the University District Food Bank. We sorted through food and and brought food up to the food line until some other volunteers left, then we moved up to hand out food in the line. Most of the other volunteers were teenagers. I forget the name of the guy who was supervising the operation, but he seemed like a really cool person and I admire his commitment to such a worthy cause. It always surprises me how many people are in need of something as basic as food. I’m guessing about 150 people came through just in the few hourse we were there. It makes me realize how fortunate I am and wish I could do more.

Back to Eastern Washington to see the fam for Christmas. The drive was foggy and easy, and I’m fairly disappointed in the lack of snow everywhere.

We got in late Friday night and went to bed. Saturday we played some cards and setup the tree. Nathan had cut down a tree that was a bit bigger than I expected considering he was the one who wanted a smaller tree, but it worked great once it was trimmed down a little. We played pinochle after not having played in a long time. Nathan had an incredibly lucky streak.

We went to the candlelight Christmas Eve church service and Dad sang in the choir. I saw a lot of the old Newport friends that I see every year and talked for a while with Adam Orth. He just got married and had his new wife with him. Heather was there but Daniel wasn’t.

Christmas morning we opened presents and took off for Grandma’s. There we did the usual talking with the relatives and eating. Grandma did most of the cooking and organizing and it was all really good. It was good to see Randy again after so many years. We played games: uno, skipbo and table croquet. All the game playing is one of Kim’s favorite things about the new family. After the cards someone broke out a karaoke machine and we went to town. I think our family has been singing more together the last few gatherings and it’s been a lot of fun. Kim and I gave everyone jam and relish that we made ourselves, most of the ingredients from the garden.

The next day we played some more cards and then began the long drive home. We listened to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini to pass the time. It wasn’t nearly as absorbing as some of the past audiobooks we’ve listened to on the drives home, but it was very good.

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Lately Kim and I have been using a neti pot. I first found out about these devices when Kim and I went to Kripalu yoga center this past summer. Kim finally bought one, and despite my skepticism over flushing water through your nostrils, I love it. I never realized how much more clearly I could breath – through both nostrils!

Basically you pour water through one nasal passage and it comes out the other, flushing out all the crud in between. Much more effective than even a good nose picking. I’ve been using it whenever I feel even a little clogged, which is most mornings in the winter.

Kim and I went to go snowshoeing near Mt Pilchuck on Saturday, but there really wasn’t enough snow to call it that. It was, however, a gorgeous day. After a slow start in the morning, we bought another year of the Northwest Forest Pass at the ranger station to park at the trailhead to Marten Creek. We hiked for a while and it looked like spring, with no snow on the trails and warmth in the air. Then we got higher and hit some snow but it was crusty and packed so we didn’t need snowshoes. We probably hiked in 2 and a half hours, and then stopped to have lunch. We sat on a log in the sun and had hot mushroom soup with bread and cheese. We hadn’t seen anyone to this point, but some older fellows who started earlier hiked back down past us and one guy who got a late start caught up to us and turned around at the same spot.

I had a heck of a time setting up Apache on Windows with fastcgi so that I could run a Ruby on Rails app on a production server. The best guide I found for doing this was http://electricvisions.com/rails.html. I used XAMPP for Windows so that I wouldn’t have to download and setup Apache, MySQL and PHP all separately. It’s not too hard to do if you want to do it separately, but after all the uninstalling and reinstalling of those apps I did while trying to get FastCGI to work, I got sick of going through the steps.

I had already installed the One Click Ruby Installer earlier when I was just using Webrick to develop my ruby apps. After installing XAMPP I just ran the FastCGI Installer from the electricvisions guide. I had to copy the mod_fastcgi.so file into the apache modules directory since the installer didn’t find my apache directory in XAMPP automatically. I come to find out later that mod_fastcgi.so is really just mod_fastcgi-SNAP-0404142202-AP2.dll renamed, which is downloadable from the fastcgi site.

Anyway, after that I followed the instructions, made the changes to the httpd.conf and .htaccess, and started up Apache. It looked like fcgi was working! Then I tried to open my rails app and got this in the Apache error log:

[Wed Dec 14 12:02:06 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:11 2005] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] FastCGI: failed to connect to (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: something is seriously wrong, any chance the socket/named_pipe directory was removed?, see the FastCgiIpcDir directive
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:11 2005] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:16 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:26 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed

I looked up a ton of crap on google to try to fix it to no avail. Finally, I deleted the dispatch.cgi and dispatch.rb from my public directory, leaving just the dispatch.fcgi, and tried again. It seems to work!

It seems like fast cgi is enough in demand that it ought to be included as an Apache module by default, or at least in XAMPP. Maybe someday soon.

Saturday night was the company Christmas party. It was at the 911 Media Arts Center, same as our last Halloween party. After the summer company picnic I think my expectations had been lowered quite a bit, but they were totally blown away last night. The food was delicious and the drinks just kept flowing. The best part was the entertainment though. While Kim and I were eating a couple of girls performed acrobatics on a ring suspended from the ceiling. There was another room setup with a cool slide show of company pics that Dennis put together. In the same room a band called The Bad Things was all setup to perform, as well as a rope and scarves hanging from the ceiling where more acrobatics were performed. Kim really wanted to play around on the ropes, but she wasn’t allowed and I think for good reason. We danced a lot to the band toward the end of the evening. My only complaint about the whole night would be that the dance floor wasn’t all that big. Kim had a really good time dancing with Scott Jennings. He was slick on his feet and Kim was a good follow. Now I’m going to have to learn all those moves!

• Reading: Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
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Kim and I went to hang out with Stephanie and her friends Friday night to go to the Element. It used to be called Polyesthers and I think it was DV8 before that. Betsy has been going to that place as long as I’ve known her. Before the club we went to an apartment of one of Stephanie’s friends. I don’t see Stephanie much anymore so I don’t really know any of her friends. Steph showed up and we all yelled surprise and had cupcakes and drank. Most people drove down to the club, but Kim and I walked from Queen Anne to Seattle center, and it wasn’t very far.

Jessie, Deborah and Betsy were all at the club, so it was nice to see someone we knew. We spent most of our time in the techno room because the hip hop room was nearly empty. I talked to Steph a little bit, but she probably doesn’t remember much after all the shots that people bought for her.

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For Jessie’s birthday she got together a big group of friends to go to Mamounia’s last night. Kim and I weren’t hungry, but were required to order food, so we got an appetizer and some soup. Later the waitress came out and told us that they would have to charge us each an extra $5 since we didn’t order a meal. Very lame. I had already spent $20 on drinks. So we got a couscous dish. The only price on the menu was for the $18 five course meal, which was just too much.

Aside from the lack of prices on the menu and the inflexible ordering options, the place was really nice. The couscous dish was tastier than I expected (it sounded boring on the menu), and the belly dancing was awesome. Jessie got up and danced with the belly dancer and it looked like she had practiced. I didn’t know anyone, but the group of people Jessie assembled was really interesting and fun. There were so many people our age who also loved traveling and working for good causes. It really makes me want to just pick up, and head out traveling right now, but I need to wait just a little longer until this wedding thing is settled.