Arizona: no snow-shoveling or DST

Apparently I'm becoming all grown up. Even Valerie's scale says so--I just passed 200 lbs. Granted, with my body's history, I wouldn't be surprised if it's 180 next week, but I'd prefer my health not rely on dei ex machina. (One idea: stop eating in one sitting the bags of delicious steak fries 'Brozy got me. Thank mercy we don't shop at Costco yet.)

Been a while, I know. I'm now using Google Reader, rather than Sage, actually; it's nice being able to access it from any computer. As an incentive to get anyone who's still clicking through each link in his or her sidebar, I've even uploaded an OPML file of feeds in the 100 Hour Board circle. Download it, go to Google Reader, click Your Subscriptions->More Actions->Import Subscriptions, upload it. Enjoy.

Accessing my feeds from any computer is especially wonderful because I'm now dual-booting MEPIS Linux. Surprisingly, it hasn't taught me to scorn Windows, except perhaps for being so expensive. On the contrary, asking me to choose between them is like asking me whether I love more a professionally trained, purebred German shepherd or a mutt I picked up at the pound that comes hunting with me. Sure, the mutt, while less nice-looking, is more interesting, less offish, more useful for work, and easier to teach new tricks, but boy it's nice to just point to the door and have the shepherd go fetch the paper sometimes. (It looks like they're fixing the wireless WEP encryption, though, which was my major complaint.)

I'm kind of befuddled by the distro wars, actually; I haven't seen a good explanation of which distributions are better for what users, so it doesn't make sense to me that they don't focus their efforts on a few clearly filling different niches. I went with MEPIS just because it's so easy to make a LiveCD, partition part of your hard disk, and install. My partition table right now has 15 GB for Windows, 1 GB for Linux swap, 4 GB for Linux root, 7.5 GB for Linux home, and 9.5 GB in a shared fat32, which is quite comfortable. (Yeah, too generous to Windows. But the stupid thing won't defrag all the way, and Age of Empires III alone is 2 GB.)

The leave of absence has been because of my new job, which is basically the funnest thing ever. I'm writing PHP for Proton Communications, which makes software to help people administer online courses. (Or "makes websites," I suppose, since it's all LAMP, but I'm an huge fan of web applications.) The pay is good, the boss is great, working my own hours from home is delightful; actually, the only unpleasant thing is struggling to get enough hours in. This morning, for example, I fixed four issues and only clocked an hour and twenty minutes. Kind of frustrating. Hopefully I'll be doing more building and less fixing so I don't feel time sitting and planning what I'm going to do should be clocked to incompetence.

Oh, my mom got me a 6-slice toasteroven for Christmas. It's marvelous. I also got this new laptop, a new cell phone, and an M-W combined dictionary-thesaurus. Oooh, and my grandparents got me Blockus, Tripoley, and a framed Empire of Light. (Or so I'll inform them in the thank-you notes for the cash.)

I'll post a more ruminant entry soon.