The Hedge Knight by George R. R. Martin takes place in the same world as his hugely popular A Song of Ice and Fire series. Specifically, the events in the book focus in on a tournament set in Ashford (somewhat near Highgarden in the south of Westeros) about 90 years prior to A Song of Ice and Fire. The events follow a Dunk, hedge knight (a knight not sworn to a lord who is so poor that he is said to sleep in the hedges), who decides to enter a tournament in the hopes to win just one round in order to get a little money to survive.
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Books - The Hedge Knight

This week I watched Shrek the Third (2/5), Lucky Numbers (1.5/5), Mad City (4/5), and Network (4/5). Here are my impressions…
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Movies This Week (5/25)

So, I went to the Castroville Artichoke Festival this year with my wife, Tina, and my friends, Dave (founder of Sendori, not the founder of Fanpop who is also a Dave) and Rachel. At the Castroville Artichoke Festival are artichokes, live music, BBQ, cultural performances, food art, arts and crafts for sale, and crazy hats. Yep, crazy hats. There's this guy who sells crazy hats. Witch hats, USA red-white-blue hats, alien hats, pirate hats, mad hatter hats, Statue of Liberty hats, hot dog hats… you name it. Rachel spotted the hot dog hat and put it on and Dave took a picture of her. Then, the crazy hat seller came out and told us that there were no photographs allowed.
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No photos!

In this second part of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, a new major character is introduced (Will Parry) who is from our world and wanders into the new world that Lyra entered at the end of the first book. Other favorite characters from The Golden Compass (Northern Lights) return like Serafina Pekkala and Lee Scoresby as the narration follows their stories as well as those of Will and Lyra.
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Books - His Dark Materials 2: The Subtle Knife

For over a year now, I've been working in Ruby on Rails (mostly for Fanpop and more recently for Cooking For Engineers) and one of the things that I wished I could do in Ruby was block comments. Internet searches I performed last year didn't yield anything, so I gave up. Well, last week, I looked around again and found a solution.
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Ruby multi-line comments

So, I had lunch at Fresh Choice today and realized that I have established certain routines when I eat there. The most important of which I will share now: Instead of getting the bacon bits at the salad bar (which is the vegetable based crunchy imitation bacon bits) I wait until I get to the hot foods area and wander over to the baked potato station where I scoop a healthy portion of real crumbled bacon onto my salad. This works at Sweet Tomatoes and Souplantation as well, but I expect it should work at any salad bar buffet restaurant.

This weekend is the Annual Castroville Artichoke Festival and going to this event is a sure way to remind Tina and me how much we love artichokes. Eating an artichoke seems like it's just an excuse to eat tasty sauces, but even without the dipping sauces, artichokes have an addictive mildly sweet flavor. At the festival, we ate deep fried artichokes as well as grilled artichokes and steamed artichokes. They also had artichoke cupcakes (which we heard were excellent) but were sold out buy the time we made it to the booth in the afternoon. While at the festival we bought a box of jumbo sized artichokes (12 for $18). Even though we had a bunch of artichokes at the festival, once we got home, I steamed two jumbo artichokes and we ate them with a mayonnaise, dijon mustard, and garlic powder sauce. Mmmm….

Surprisingly (or not surprisingly), it was another slow week for me in terms of movie watching. Of course, I had the excuse that I was watching Heroes, the season finales of The Office and Scrubs, as well as the rest of the best that this television season was able to offer. Anyway, this week I watched one movie, Repli-Kate (1/5), and here are my impressions…
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Movies This Week (5/18)

Today, I had lunch with an old Intel coworker from my first role at Intel in the Microprocessor Research Labs. Ara Nefian developed many of the applications and functions in the Open Source Computer Vision Library as well as an amazingly accurate face recognition system while I was there and who knows how many other cool and unbelievably projects he's been working on since. He's started working on a personal project - a website that catalogs his travel photographs from around the world. That in itself is not all that exciting - image galleries are a dime a dozen these days - but his site uses pattern recognition algorithms to find photos that are related based on the images themselves. The photographs are organized in two (orthogonal) classifications - location and subject. The images can be perused on either of the two axes while a related pictures search utilizes pattern recognition to pull up other images that are similar. He's hoping that the site will help people decide where they want to travel to on vacation. By looking at photographs and deciding that you like a particular view, you can use the related pictures search to find similar photos and reveal other destinations that you might also enjoy. For example, if you like beaches, then you can find a beach that you like, click on related photos and see other beaches that share visual characteristics with the one you started with. It's like a photographic brainstorm for choosing a travel destination!

http://www.anefian.com/

I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2 for the last couple months. It seems like it's been forever. I'm not like those game reviewers who run through a game as fast as they can (and then accuse the game of having no depth or character development because they skipped through most of the side quests or dialogue), instead, I like to see as much of the game as possible. Unfortunately, this can be very time consuming for a game like Neverwinter Nights 2, which seems to be taking forever. For me, a lot of playing an RPG is building up your character and equipment (for in NWN2, you can actually craft weapons and armor) and trying them out in combat. The problem is, Neverwinter Nights has a lot of stuff going on - the mystery that your character is involved in, preparing for a war, building a stronghold, learning more about your sidekicks, and dungeon crawling all in the same game. The game play is really nice and the mechanics are sound, but I wouldn't mind getting done with the game and moving onto Jade Empire - a game I've waited for two years to come out on PC and one that I bought immediately upon it's release but haven't had a chance to play yet.