It's been a while and lot has gone on. Here's the brief run-down:

As those of you that read Kara's site will already know, we've broken off the engagement for the time being. I firmly believe things will work out in the long-term. Right now they just need to work out separately. This little sanitized blurb doesn't explain the situation well but the details are not for public consumption. The important part is that I still love her and truly believe this to be temporary.

Things have been busy otherwise. I've been working on finishing up my one class this semester, Compiler Construction. It's been stressful and time-consuming but I'm well within striking distance. After scoring the best grade in the class on the final most of the immediate pressure is off. Now I just have to finish up the project. I really can't figure out how the trads deal with this course as part of their normal course-load. It takes an incredible amount of coding time if nothing else. I'll be glad to be free of it. In some ways I would characterize it as the most difficult course TU computer science has to offer.

I've been wasting my copious spare time with Blizzard's World of Warcraft. In the end it's just more of the same mmorpg but implemented very very well. I find myself increasingly in the Blizzard-can-do-little-wrong camp.

Work has been weird and hectic. I find that I increasingly have a very odd relationship with it. Sadly, I tend to just find it amusing. It's hard, under those circumstances, to get much done... but I've been working on my self-discipline and have made some small head- way. We are currently trying to hire an oracle DBA and a java developer... at the expense of replacing a truly outstanding network engineer (Darren). We'll see how that works out... if nothing else it's obvious that we're serious about the whole portal thing (long after it's particularly relevant).

I've been fooling around trying to get the mac fathom hooked me up with to talk to my linux machine with some success. The way itunes file sharing works is fairly neat.

I haven't been doing much reading lately... and I don't have any new music recommendations. Hopefully things will calm down enough after the holidays to get back to some of those topics. My family is coming in to town for the holiday and I'll be having dinner for them one evening. I'm looking forward to that. What are you all doing for the holidays?

I just want to take a minute to appreciate the folks that are writing javascript for google. They're freaking ninjas. The stuff they've done with google suggests and gmail really make the whole web app thing tolerable. Kudos to them! In the past I didn't take javascript very seriously. I think that I may need to reconsider.

I recently attended my cousin Whitney's vocal music show at my old high-school (Jenks). The surreality (?) of sitting in the PAC again aside, the show was quite good. The choirs don't screw around. I was very impressed. Fun night, nice christmas music. Props to Whitney and all the other musicians.