She said yes.

I noticed a few people visiting my site just to check up on me over the weekend and realized I didn’t have any sort of announcement about the engagement. I already announced it on my Twitter and reactivated my Facebook account, but now I’ll announce it on my personal website and make it fully Internet-official.

We haven’t set a date yet, but it will probably be at least summer of 2012 or later, after Beth finishes her masters degree at Texas Tech.

Thank you to everyone who has offered their support and congratulations, they mean so much to both of us.

This has been popularly rephrased as, “If you aren’t paying for the product or service, you are the commodity being sold.”

Facebook doesn’t care about its users’ privacy, plain and simple. They don’t really care about its users any more than they are required to in order to keep the site running so people can post dumb quotes on their walls, play FarmVille, and (most importantly) buy Facebook Credits and click on advertisements.

In what rational people will see as “a bad move” and Facebook’s target demographic won’t even notice, Starbucks, Levi, Budweiser, and other brands can now use Facebook users’ “Likes” and check-ins as advertising. These check-ins and Likes can take the user’s profile picture and any check-in text and create a branded advertisement that will be seen by the user’s friends. So just bear in mind as sipping your overpriced 31-ounce Tazo Tea, that if you checked in at Starbucks or used their iPhone app to order, you may have just become an unpaid spokesperson for a billion-dollar company. Can you opt out? No. Will you be compensated for your endorsement? No.

Just remember. Facebook is free of charge. They make their money by selling users’ personal information and publishing advertisements.

To enforce this attitude and increase my productivity (at least while I’m at work) I’m using a the StayFocusd Chrome extension to limit my access to the sites that are sapping my motivation most often.

In a nutshell, I’ve given myself ten minutes between the sites on the “blocked” list, which has to last me from 8am to 5pm. I had a few tabs open from one of my favorite sites right when I hit the ten minute mark.

When you hit the daily limit, all sites on the blocked list blank themselves and display a message saying, “Shouldn’t you be working?” Desperately, I flipped to the next tab. I managed a brief glimpse of the forbidden fruit of interesting but distracting web content before StayFocusd reminded me to get back to work. I did this again a third and fourth time, each tab teasing me with something and snatching it away. It felt like the scenes in Inception where the dreams collapse and the characters watch as the destruction rushes towards them.

Now, with a few hours left in the work week and my time on frivolous websites exhausted until quitting time, I return to productivity. Right after I write this blog post.

One thing that’s bothered me about using bookmarklets in Google Chrome is the fact that you’re not able to set a favorites icon, or “favicon.”

Standard bookmarks with favicons

Regular websites are allowed to specify images in .png or .ico format to use as a favicon, which is displayed in each tab and when bookmarking the website. Javascript bookmarklets are run by the browser each time they are called, and not served from a specific web server, which means they can’t specify their own favicons.

Bookmarklets without favicons

Firefox allows users to set their own favicons via an extension, but Chrome does not currently allow for this (but it is an open issue on the Chromium bug tracker.

While there are tricks to change Chrome’s favicons using SQLite editors, I found a simple and easy way to add pseudo-favicons to Javascript bookmarklets in Chrome, via the brainy folks at Markup.io.

Markup is a simple tool that lets you draw on and annotate web pages and easily send them to your friends. Instead of using a downloadable app or extension, Markup accomplishes this with a Javascript bookmarklet. Check out Markup’s home page. See where they say “drag to bookmarks bar?” Well, when you do so, you get a Javascript bookmarklet that reads “♒ MarkUp.” Whoa. Pretty slick use of the Unicode character for Aquarius, right?

This gave me the idea to use Unicode symbols as pseudo-favicons for my bookmarklets, to make them a little easier to recognize at a glance.

Bookmarklets with pseudo-favicons using Unicode characters

To accomplish this, all I did was edit each bookmarklet’s name by right clicking on it and pasting in a Unicode character from Twitterkeys or Wikipedia.

Pretty cool, huh? The bookmarklets still have Chrome’s “blank page” icon where a real favicon would otherwise go, but I like the additional customization I can achieve with the Unicode icons.

What is Minecraft?

If you haven’t heard of Minecraft yet, allow me to summarize. Minecraft is an extremely open-ended computer game about mining the earth, building structures with one’s bare hands and hand-made tools, surviving the zombie-filled nights, and dealing with the unending loneliness that comes from being the only human left. Minecraft’s intentionally blocky and pixelated graphics hearken back to simpler days of video games, and the ability to build anything you can imagine with stackable blocks should appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed LEGOs.

Oh, and the game was created almost entirely by one coder, who has sold thousands of units and earned millions of dollars doing so.

While you can read synopsis after synopsis about the game, the best way to get a feel for Minecraft is to play it. Minecraft is like the Matrix: Nobody can be told what Minecraft is. You have to see it for yourself.

To cut to the chase: I made a Pikachu

Some people have recreated the starship Enterprise. Some people have built functioning 16-bit computers.

I built a Pikachu.

My pixel-art Pikachu. Also pictured at right, my friend David’s cobblestone house.

I’m a nerd. Sue me. I’m having fun.