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I’m sitting on the train right now. At one of the station stops, these boys were playing a game where you have to run in one door, down the aisle and out the other door before the doors close or else you are stuck riding the train to the next stop.

Well, this one guy didn’t quite make it out the door. His partner (who made it outside) couldn’t have been happier and started jumping and laughing and pointing.

The boy on the train tried pushing the ‘open door’ button but the doors didn’t open and his gleeful friend went speeding by as the train pulled away. “Unfortunately” it was an express train and the express doesn’t stop between Highland Park and L.A. so he had to ride all the way to Union Station (it skips 4 stations).

His smile slowly faded as we made our trip and his face turned sour when we got to L.A. because the cops were checking tickets. He put his head down and ran into the train going the other direction.

Now a young spanish-speaking family are trying out all the ringtones on their new cell phone and the four-year-old daughter is dancing.

The fun never stops here in L.A.

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We’ve been cleaning out all of our closets lately. Yesterday we threw away like 4 boxes of stuff. I’m giving away my Dance Dance Revolution pads and playstation. If anybody wants it you better speak up soon.

We went to Diddy Riese with Leah on Friday. That was fun. They raised the price to $1.25 thought.

We’re going to see Mark and Aubrey in a couple weeks. They are coming back to the states, so we are going to drive up to NorCal with Leah.

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I’ve got my RSS feed up and running. If you’ve never used RSS before I would recommend it. If you use a mac you could try Vienna. Its a great, free RSS feed reader for Mac OS X.

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I found these old polaroids so I decided to scan them and post them here.

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mrs. d asked me to chaperone for the academic bowl and of course i said yes. i always say yes even though i have about a billion other things to do. then i found out that ken jennings was going to be the moderator for the whole event, where students from across the state compete in a quiz contest against each other. i told all my classes that i was going to get to meet ken jennings. actually i told pretty much everyone i know that i was going to get to meet ken jennings.

the friday before, i was working out the details of the bowl with the few seniors that were going. one of my junior high students was there, isaac. isaac is a genious. he gets straight A’s puts together amazing presentations and projects, won the spelling bee, and the geography bee, and on top of it all he can write. he came up to me, trapper keeper in hand (ok i know they don’t really have trapper keepers anymore but i just don’t know what else to call them) and glasses held on by one of those cord things that go around your head.

‘my mom says that i am going to be ken jennings when i grow up. it would be so cool to get his autograph’

i’d just like to take a few seconds here to remind you that i live in utah. and utah doesn’t have a whole lot to brag about. they’ve got three things to brag about as i see it. the first is that the winter olympics were here (we’ve got the greatest snow on earth) second is john stockton (apparently he is a super great basketball player; there are streets named after him) and third is ken jennings (he won more games on Jeopardy! than any other person) so while it might be kinda geeky to want ken jennings autograph, he is a little bit more of a celebrity in utah than everywhere else

so i told him he should come.

he took out his cell phone right then and called his mom.

‘well, i probably will come but i think i’ll have to walk’

i told him we could work out a ride if he needed one.

so saturday morning came. i was at the school where the competition was being held by 8.30. the team showed up, and sure enough so did isaac. he even printed off a picture of mr. jennings on the internet for him to sign.

before the competition starts, isaac asks ken for his autograph and he signs the photo and chats with him for a while. what a great guy. isaac is way excited and stays with the team the whole day, even though he’s too young to compete. our team does ok, and a few of us even make it into the paper (my five minutes of fame is almost filled up now) we didn’t win, our team was put together in a week, the lunch they provided wasn’t that great, but the best part of the day was that i got to be a part of making some kids day.

being a teacher isn’t all that bad.

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This weekend, Ashley and I took some portraits of Cinnamin. You can view them here. This is the beta of a new photo album system I’m testing. I’ll probably release the code on the new tech.natemurray.com (coming soon!)

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Hey everyone, we’ve just moved our site to a new server so some things will probably be missing. I’ve been working on a better way to organize the pictures so hopefully I’ll have that up in a few days. Keep checking back for more fun blog-ness!

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Here are some updated photos of our place. We’re finally feeling moved in, and even though we still have to finish up the floors, it’s really starting to feel like home. Mom was here for Christmas and took these wonderful pics for us. Hope you enjoy!

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i’m sitting at gate B4 of the burbank airport. a chime interrupts the christmas music to tell passengers not to accept packages from strangers. by the time this public announcement is through ‘chestnuts roasting on an open fire’ is over and ‘holly jolly christmas’ is playing. christmas music has got to be the number one thing about christmas people like to complain about. i’m not sure why. any other time of the year its perfectly ok to play britney spears 20 times a day. most people are willing to carelessly endure the top 40 songs on a constant rotation for several hours. but when winter comes around suddenly we can’t endure the repetitiveness of christmas music.

maybe it’s not the repetitiveness that people can’t stand. some people are probably just upset about the commercialism of the ‘holiday season.’ this may have some validity. it’s kind of sick when moms are fighting in the aisles of walmarts across america over tickle me elmos. i’ve even found myself sipping overpriced hot cocoa at starbucks just because its called ‘candy cane cocoa.’ but people, do you really think the music is making you max out your credit cards? even this cynic doesn’t believe there are subliminal messages in the songs. (josie and the pussycats is the greatest band ever! candy cane cocoa is the new orange mocha frappuccino!)

its actually pretty sad to complain about christmas music. “i’m so sick of these christmas songs being played over and over. put eminem and christina aguilera back on!” OR “damn those big stores. they are playing music just to put me in the ‘christmas mood.’ and if i’m in the christmas mood i might just start thinking of someone other than myself and end up doing something nice for someone, like buying them a gift.”

so this year i’m not going to complain about the christmas music, in fact, i might just sing along through the whole season. or at least till i get sick of ‘jingle bell rock’.

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Hey everyone, you may notice within the next few weeks that there are posts from people other than nate murray. mat and ashley have joined the team! we hope that between the three of us we can keep something updated that everyone will enjoy.

I’m working on a new template and site overhaul that is going to be really awesome. It will feature better categories, too. I’m going to pull out the tech-stuff and put it in its own category (tech.natemurray.com maybe?). It will also feature a more organized system of pictures and other goodies.

So stick around, life has been pretty crazy lately with the move and all.

We just got our Christmas tree!

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I’m sitting on the train on my way to Union Station. I decided it would be ridiculous to try and fight the traffic on the way home. The day before Thanksgiving the freeway is always packed. We’re almost done with our condo. We just have to finish the floor in a few places put on the moulding. Our neighbors are getting irritated at us for banging on the floors all the time and we’re getting tired; so we’re eager to be done. Last night we went to Pottery Barn to look at curtains, but we ended up getting a rug instead. When we arrived at the register to pay the girl told us that they had just lowered the price by about $100 and just hadn’t changed the sign.

Tomorrow is Ashley’s birthday. It fell on Thanksgiving this year, so we won’t be going out to celebrate until next week.

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Here is a php script that will show you examples of every style of a given stylesheet. You can demo it here. You can use any url of a stylesheet as seen in this example here. You can also use any text you want to. Download here.

Basically it works by flattening your stylesheet into classes and creates an inline style sheet. This lets you demo contextual styles as well. It compresses contextual styles to be separated by ‘_’ instead of a space.

Limitations: Currently it does not use the “import” statement or any other css statement besides .class, #id, or regular html tags (e.g. h1, h2 etc). It will only read the actual files. Also because each contextual style is compressed into a flat style you lose a bit of the cascading. That is a limitation that will probably be fixed in later releases.

If you use this on your project drop me a line. I’d be interested to know if anyone finds it useful.

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Pictures from SoCal

The Cycle of Moving

Pumpkin Carving

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WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock
And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,
And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it’s then the time a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,
With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

-James Whitcomb Riley

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I’m glad its fall, but sometimes I feel like I can only tell the change of seasons by the change of the displays in Wal-Mart. It’s nice that we’ve been having so much rain. Yesterday it even hailed, and I’ve never seen hail before.

Our close of escrow is coming right up. We’re really excited to get the keys and paint it before we move in. You can view the picture here. We have a free blue hide-a-bed couch if anyone living in the LA area is interested. I’d be glad to email pictures.

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