Still Alive

No, I'm not talking about the song. I'm talking about me.

I've been a bit swamped with work and life over the last month. Lots of feature deliverables due for this coming Friday, the rewrite of VistaGameDoctor.com, the pending launch of my other site, and a few other items have kept me from posting much lately.

A quick summary of the events of the past month...

I turned down an offer to work back in Utah again. It was a great offer at a great company with a stellar staff, but you can get the right offer at the wrong time and that's what happened here.

I celebrated my one-year anniversary at my place of employment. I also found out that if all goes well, I'll be going to two conferences this year. Either SD West or TechEd Developers first, then PDC 2008 later this year. I've been to many QA conferences in the past, and even spoken at a couple, so it will be interesting to see what happens at developer conferences.

I started to go noticeably gray. I was getting dressed in a dark room so I wouldn't wake the wife when I looked over at a mirror and noticed a section of hair that seemed to be glowing in the dark. When I went into the bathroom and looked at that section in the mirror, a patch of silver hair was shining out at me. Makes me wonder if I'll have different tones for each section of my head like I do now (brown hair, blond eyebrows and a red beard).

My anti-piracy stance came up again in a recent article over at Shacknews. I actually need to finish a letter to my congressman I've been working on regarding piracy. No, I'm not asking for increased penalties or armed thugs to go door to door looking for burned Britney Spears CD's. I'm actually hoping for a repeal of the DMCA. Piracy is bad, but the DMCA makes many things that should be legal illegal and the justification that many idiots use when they pirate is that the penalty for piracy is in many cases less than the penalty for violating the DMCA.

I'm trying to unify our data tiers at work. We have data split between three different tiers for a variety of security and legacy reasons and it makes some front-end work a bit of a pain in the butt, so we're going to try to get around that.

Finally, I'm moving VistaGameDoctor.com away from Project Wonderful back to Google AdSense at the end of this month. If you run a webcomic, PW is going to be your best friend...but for VGD, it has resulted in a major financial loss during the 60 day experiment.

That's it...I'll try to post more often. In the meantime, if you are into sports and other such miscellanea, go check out Ick's Corner. It's a site run my one of my neighbors who is as much a sports fan as I am not...and that's saying something.