The Goldfish Chronicles

Another couple of months in the bag. Nathan continues to be more fun than doing anything else, and when he sleeps I find myself playing Football Manager (nee Championship Manager). Addictive, superb, best computer game on the planet. I mean what other game has owned its entire genre for close to two decades? A genre which is a major seller outside the US.

More subversion migrations done at Apache, home straight in sight, I just need to find those last few kicks to break its back.

Still finding time to do things at OSJava. We’ve found a bit of energy there and the community conversation has moved from a low whisper to a constant hum. Steve and I are working on an in memory JMS server (I know there are ones out there, a lot of this is educational, both learning about JMS and getting the chance to work together for the first time in 4 or 5 years). Simple-JNDI needs a bugfix release, 2 major bugs to fix, 1 is resolved and the other needs hitting.

However, lots of other things have been released. A bug was found in Norbert, for which a bugfix was quickly pushed out. Scraping-Engine had a release, including a manual, much like the Simple-JNDI one, which is my attempt to describe how to use it. The continuous build system is up and running, and multidoc is a wonder (note to self, must set it up at Apache).

Apache stuff is hard work currently. I suffer from volunteeritis and tend to get myself far too much tied into things before I realise I’m over-utilized. I went through a few cycles when I was younger, getting involved in things (MUDs usually), then having to cut back drastically to retain sanity. It’s a good sign that I’ve not had to do that in the last 5 years, either I’m getting better at pruning from time to time, or I’m heading to one huge cut back.

Sometimes it feels like the latter, what would the house be like without an Internet connection.

I’m currently reading Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices; it’s going pretty well so far, he’s an author I knew I could trust to be readable and enjoyable. Also reading various C++ books and a C TCP/IP book for work reasons that I can only darkly hint at without getting into trouble. Also Analog/Asimov periodicals while I exercise.

Lastly, huge amounts of effort on both my wife and my parts are being put into preparing the house to be put up for sale. I want out of the mortgage business and back onto the more agile footing of renting. A lot of this week is being spent ripping up old computer magazines, saving the occasional article. I’ve had this crap for 7 years, feels very cathartic to kill it all, though I’ve not managed to rip up DDJ, Java Report, Linux Magazine or Linux Journal.

All good stuff that keeps me busy and keeps my mind off of the dark unmentionable that fills my weekdays.