/home/brad

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!