As I write this, it's roughly a week before my 40th birthday. I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room tapping away on Windbringer while Lyssa undergoes surgery to remove a cataract from her left (and only working) eye.* When this post goes live on the day of my actual 40th birthday, more things will undoubtedly have happened. I don't know how much time I'm going to have in the next few days, so I guess I'd best take advantage of the spare time I have due to how busy I've been lately.
These beginning-of-the-year posts are always hard to write. Somehow they're always too close to the end of the previous year for everything to have sunk in, but also come too soon for anything to have really happened. I've been wrestling with this post for days (since the third of January, actually) and every time I sit down to work on it, not a whole lot hits my keyboard. When this year started I hit the ground running and haven't had time to sit and really reflect yet. So, I'm going to do the best I can to make this post …
Can you remember ever having lived in a time of peace?
Seriously. Give it a little thought.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I can't think of a single period of time beyond a week or two in all the years I've been alive that I've known anything like peace in the geopolitical sense. I was born in the late 1970's with the horrors of the Vietnam War fading slowly in popular memory. Even though I was too young to really record any memories the Vietnam War was …
A couple of nights ago I went to see Tron: Legacy again with Jason, and we spent much of the evening afterward discussing it, as we are wont to do. I haven't been keeping up with reviews of it, to be honest, I just know what a couple of people said about it. Largely, their opinions were that the movie was visually stunning (it was), the effects were top notch (they were), but the plot was somewhat lacking and relied a little bit too much on references to the original movie. If nothing else, the soundtrack is awesome and I …
I wish I could say it's been quiet over here, but it's actually been relentlessly busy for Lyssa and I down here in DC. I think I overextended myself a little the weekend of the prototype Spaceblimp launch, which left me fighting off... something.. that kept me at a high fever and feeling run down most of the time. I did a little detail working on my car to cover up the myriad scratches and scuffs that accumulate whenever you park for long periods of time in an urban area. While the speeding edge of an SUV door doesn't actually …
ObDisclaimer: I don't design user interfaces for a living.
Originally, I was working on a post about Linux - about why I switched to it, and pontificating about why more people haven't. After writing about half of it I let the article soak for a while and returned to the text later, and I realized that I was having an un-earned grey beard and suspenders moment. There is no point in talking about why I started using Linux because the reasons for it are, in truth, not particularly relevant in this day and age of plentiful processor cycles and disk space …
