endperform.org

I never really posted anything around Thanksgiving about what I was thankful for, so I figured I would post what I am thankful for this year:

Bethany

This is my rock, my partner and my wife.  She’s stood beside me during tough times, and 2009 has seen some ups and downs, as with any relationship.  The strength of our bond cannot be broken, and she is definitely someone I’m thankful to have in my life.  I don’t know where I’d be without her.

Emmalynn and Heather

My daughter and stepdaughter, respectively.  Both bring joy and happiness into my life.  It’s amazing to watch Emma every day and just see how she’s learning, and wondering how she will develop, or what her next big discovery will be.  Although we don’t see Heather as much as we’d like, she’s still a big part of our family and it’s always wonderful when she’s with us.  Even better is watching her and Emma interact.

John (aka the big hippie bastard ;) )

A family friend who’s been around for us both and is always happy to lend an ear when I need to bitch about something geeky, which saves Beth from hearing me babble about geek-speak.

2010 is shaping up to be a great year.  It’s possible this may be the final post on endperform.org as we know it.  I’ve got some ideas cooking in my brain for the site, so don’t be surprised if things change around here. :)

This past Sunday I saw first-hand what the floods have done to portions of the Atlanta suburban areas as I answered a call for assistance from some friends of mine whom had family affected by the flooding. I ventured into Austell, about 6 miles from my home and right into the flood zone. The waters had since receeded, however, you could tell where the water level was just by the brown coating on the trees. I arrived to the house to find a pair of dumpsters and a whole lot of volunteers working their collective butts off to get this place gutted and cleaned up. When I arrived I was put to work cleaning up some insulation and other related things, dumping them into the dumpster. The day rolled on, and throughout the day other people stopped by with food for the workers, and Red Cross vehicles would pass by once in a while. Thankfully the weather was sunny, if a little hot, but it’s better than the downpour of rain the day before.

You never really know how a natural disaster can affect someone until you see first-hand what happens. I’ve seen some devistation in my time due to my involvement with the local fire department back in Pennsylvania, but nothing to this level. I’m just happy I could help out. If you get the chance to help someone out, I say take it. You might get sore from the work, but it will make you feel better knowing you’re helping out someone in need.

Last night it occurred to me that my online life is in a bit of a disarray, still. The last time I spoke about this, I had planned on moving to username per web service. Unfortunately the username I want is taken on some, and not on others, so that of course leaves me in a bit of a bind. I think the easiest (and least painful) thing to do is just keep the accounts I have and create a contact page on my site, so everyone can find me easier.

Now, as far as organization in general goes, I’m still trying to find a balance of accessibility vs. usability. Right now at work I have a wiki set up on my box, which works pretty Ok. The problem is when I work remotely, sometimes the connection can slow to a crawl, which in turn slows me down when I’m trying to look at something. I was looking at planner mode for Emacs, but for one reason or another there are some issues. Someone previously mentioned org-mode, but I’m not a huge fan of the outline format. My other options are just straight up text, Muse mode for Emacs, or else running lynx and trying to navigate my wiki that way.

My reminders setup is working well. For those who don’t know, I’m using Remind + Wryd, which is lightweight and pretty simple to use. I’m also running a cron job to create a popup prior to me logging in for the day so I know at a glance what I have to look forward to. It works nicely, and stays out of the way.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. My family and I had a pretty uneventful holiday, but we ended up with some new geek toys. Beth and I are now the proud owners of an Asus eeePC 900 series netbook. Hers is white, mine is black and the kicker is these are the Linux versions. Unfortunately the version of Linux Asus went with appeared to be a modified version of Xandros running a full-blown KDE install. Not the greatest choice for these little devices, so I did a little searching and came up with an Ubuntu derivative called CrunchBang. It’s a reasonable distro, using Openbox + lxpanel and a few other things instead of a full-blown environment. They had a version for the eeePC as well, so I downloaded that and installed it. Everything seems to be working fine out of the box. So much so that I converted my work desktop over. The work machine was starting to act a bit wonky after an Arch update, so I’m not sure what the story is there. The home desktop seems to be just fine, but who knows. I like playing around, so I might give Crunchbang a go there as well.

2008 had it’s ups and downs, but all in all it was another wonderful year here in Georgia. Emma got to enjoy Christmas, although she’s still too young to get the whole idea. All she needed was some wrapping paper and she was happy. I got married, something I thought I’d never do again, but it amazes me what finding the right person will do (married on leap day for the win!). Professionally I’ve been on a steady path, even in a rocky economy. 2009 is looking up. Here’s a few things I want to accomplish this coming year:

* Get back to working out. We’re both trying to get more healthy.
* Get a better handle on some programming language (Python, or even pondering Ruby at this juncture)
* Pick up a new hobby. Potential ideas are photography (of the digital variety), electronics (I’ve been reading a lot of Makezine lately) or something else

How well will I do on some of these? The year will tell. Happy 2009 everyone!

First of all, happy birthday goes out to my lovely wife who’s turning 21 again for the forth time. 25’s not so bad, it’s once you hit the 30s, like me :P

This weekend has been pretty ok, nothing earth shattering, just a usual weekend. We had a decent lunch for her birthday and spent the afternoon together. This evening she’s heading out and I’ll be hanging out here. I think tonight I’m finally going to get to work on a project to make work life easier. My coworkers should be thankful I’m such a computer geek.