Well, for understatement of the year, I haven’t been updating much recently. I’ll try not to be too long-winded.

Trip to England

As some of you saw, in May we took a trip to England. I didn’t get to meet anyone there that I knew, but hope to go back. The trip was pretty stressful on Di, which made it not so much fun. Definitely next time we go, we will stay closer to London and get to spend more time together. There is just much more to see in London and everywhere else. One thing that I did like about England was the traffic control - or rather the lack of traffic control at many places. It surprised me how many of the intersections were roundabouts instead. If only we could get a few more of those here - and people would learn how to use them. There’s a roundabout near Minnehaha Park here and everyone exhibits complete lack of knowledge on how to use them, it’s always frustrating.

New Job

I got a new job in order to make some extra money, mostly on weekends and nights. I’m working ~10-12 hours a week couriering for Velocity Express in the Twin Cities area. The work is very easy, and it gets me basically free gas and maintenance on the car through the business I setup for it (all drivers are Velocity are independent contractors). Sometimes when work is slow, I watch some anime again. I’m not sure how long it’s going to be before I quit again, but it’ll probably be sometime in the next two months.

New Place

Di and I decided that we were going to move a while back, and the crazy apartment searching ensued. We have decided on a new place, the Franklin Coop. The apartment is nice - granted, it would have to be really bad in order to be worse than the place we’re at currently. It’s in a slightly less nice neighborhood, but it’s a much more convenient - the grocery, bank, university, and light rail are in walking distance. We’re moving at the beginning of September, with the help of some movers. We’ve worked out where all of the furniture is going all ready, and have started packing. It’s probably a little early to start, but we figure that the sooner we start, the less work it’s going to be at the end of the process. The people at the moving crew were very nice and give every intention of making the move the smoothest that we have ever done. New addresses to everyone who thinks they need one soon.

Books

I’ve finished both Getting Things Done, The Empty Cradle, What Just Happened, and should be posting reviews soon.

New Toys

I got a few new toys - a power inverter to run the iBook in the car, a new cell phone, and a Palm Zire 21. I picked up the Palm on a eBay for a nice small price, and it’s been a big help with keeping me on task and at my appointments. I also am really happy with the environment that Palm has setup for programming, and I hope to delve into the world soon. There seems to be a dearth of free (as in speech) programs out there for it. I downloaded a nice Transit Schedule program called TrainSched. Unfortunately, it requires the schedules to be in a specific format which isn’t easy to get out of Metro Transit site. I started converting the schedules today and plan on continuing. Behold, the Twin Cities TrainSched page. Expect one more database file to be uploaded each week. Next week: 16/50.

New SCCS

I started using arch exclusively. It’s branching and merging tools make it not only easy to follow other source control systems, but easy to make changes locally or a small branch of changes which then gets merged back. I’ll be putting the debian stuff in arch soon, so it’s not just sitting on one computer begging for a hard drive failure.