I prefer to imagine that a huge audience of Kevin devotees check this blog for new content daily — I refuse to check my logs just to avoid disturbing this cozy little illusion.  I have no evidence that anyone other than Poem Pitzer has actually read anything I’ve written here for the last year or so, and she usually just points out my typos.

Random news items follow!

I am down to one month remaining at my current job, and boy howdy, that last month is bound to be interesting.  In a way, I feel bad — I agreed to stay on for an additional three months in the hopes of transitioning our product out of the hippie quarter of cyberspace (the usual insult that LAMP has to bear) and into DotNet/Sql Server.  I’ve learned a lot, I’ve gone through a lot of ibu profen, and it’s become quite clear that I am not going to be able to see anything through to completion.  I’m starting to refactor my definition of success.  If I can impart a graceful and extensible structure to these works in project, I may still be able to influence battles that will be played out after I am elsewhere.

I have learned to love PHP over the last several years, but I can see pretty clearly how possible it is to fall in love with C# and Visual Studio — when they work as designed, they are things of beauty.  They inflict a lot of the structure and discipline that PHP (being a big, dirty hippie of programming language) allows you to neglect if you wish.  Really, the differences between these languages are hilarious.

In other news — Holly’s husband, DJ, is in the midst of recovering from a partial colonectomy and is scheduled to begin chemotherapy in 2 weeks.  His docs are reasonably optimistic but, even given the best possible outcomes, there is nothing fun or nice about what he’s going through.  DJ has almost always been a cold, remote personality — but he’s a great dad and a good community man, and it is hard to see this happening to him, especially after Bjorn’s passing.  I don’t suppose he’d appreciate one of these:

Fuck Cancer

Fuck Cancer

In other news:

  • My neighbors got a cat.  They have had her for three days now and they can’t decide what to name her.  She is *adorable* and will make a great neighbor for my kitties!
  • We bought a Nikon D3000 camera recently as an upgrade for the point-and-shoot piece of crap we’ve been using for the last several years.  It’s fantastic!  Anyone who can guess the number of times we’ve sung Simon and Garfunkle’s “Kodachrome” since we got the camera on Friday can have the old point-and-shoot.
  • I have developed an unexpected taste for italian opera.  Cathy has threatened to take my speakers away.