The Obligatory RSN

It feels like it's been weeks since I've done the blog thing, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I missed it. Unfortunately, the spare time that I burn here has been stolen by variously deadlines at work, the moving/unmoving process and the Inexorable Hand of Fate. The work thing has been the most frustratingly soul-crushing, overall. The two-week advantage I acquired by burning through the holidays working 60 hours a week evaporated quickly in the face of additional feature requests and early deadlines. This is the first night I've come home in a while that didn't have a set agenda, usually consisting of a single item: "redesign code furiously to fix problems uncovered in testing during the day." What did I achieve in the last month of activity? Well, I added a bunch of features, cleaned up both the code and the design significantly, and finally (and most importantly) demonstrated that the problem was definitively in my boss' code. The moving process is now complete, and The Mansion is history. I'm sad to see it go, and a bit overwhelmed by the prospect that all the problems with this place are now my problems, but January is a good month for new things and that place was killing us slowly anyway. Of course, we still have the vast and unconquerable unmoving process to complete. The Brat puts a ton of pressure on herself to put everything in the house into its Designated Away Zone immediately, but I'm pretty happy to just have the network up and running. I can even play my iTunes upstairs and downstairs at the same time. Walking up the stairs and hearing to the music shift between the stereo downstairs and my computer upstairs feels so ridiculously good that I think I may have discovered an Eighth Deadly Sin. Meanwhile, the Inexorable Hand of Fate (not to be confused with Manos, which had multiple Hands of Fate) has been mucking with my life again, pushing me closer to some people and further from others and just generally making it hard to take the impending permanence of the house and impending disaster of the job too seriously. I figure that if I can't even predict whose floor on which I'll be passing out or what might inspire me to write multi-line haiku emails, there's not much sense in worrying about the future. I'm reasonably sure that I won't understand it once it gets here. Tomorrow is the day that I have officially designated as New Years Day 2007. I wrote off the month of January, but I have big plans for this year and I'm looking forward to finding the time to execute them. It's All Coming Together, and in addition to the normal life-plans I've got a few things lined up for the blogs in the next month that I've been anxiously anticipating. I've scheduled a beginning-of-the-year clean-up and review of my bookmarks and linkblogs, so expect a major link-dump of cool stuff sometime in the next few days. If this goes well I'm going to make it a monthly blog event, so any feedback will be appreciated. I also plan to blog a house-tour once The Brat is vaguely satisfied with her work, for those of you unwilling or unable to come see the new space. Topher suggested that we should write a Safe Free Pr0n Download Tutorial, which seems like a good idea given the frequency with which our friends seem to pick up spam-ware. I've got a few iTunes smart playlist tricks up my sleeve that I've been dying to write about. And don't forget the impending 8,742-part Rebuilding Firefox series that I've been promising... I know everyone is looking forward to that. Extra-blogging activities that will probably get mentioned here in the New New Year include excitement like buying a new car and the inevitable discussions of which music festivals to attend over the summer. I hope to have a weekly(-ish) podcast up and running by mid-March, and sometime around then we'll start finishing the basement as well. I've also promised myself that more live poker is in the cards for me this year, and if that works out as well as internet poker has I'll have plenty to say about it as well. So, that's the obligatory Real Soon Now list. There's also a half-dozen requests I've had for various posts - software development and testing using VMWare, syncing bookmarks with del.icio.us, Google Reader posts in both basic and advanced flavors, etc - which I hope to get to RSN as well. Plus I've got a few new Coolest Things Ever currently in review. And I'm taking suggestions, so if you've got any geek questions or your looking for a step-by-step on something that I actually know how to do, let me know and I'll add it to the list.