- I just had a 2+ week vacation where I planned on getting a lot of things done. I got a lot of things done but not everything I needed. My failure to complete my list of tasks largely has to do with my laptop biting the dust on me halfway through. I didn't realize how much of a slave I am to that thing until it went down. For ten years I have owned nothing but Thinkpad laptops (this is my 4th) and this is the first major hardware failure I've had. Fortunately the machine is still under warranty (didn't know what to expect there since I bought it from somebody on Craigslist) so this will only be equivalent to a temporary lobotomy and I'll get these monkeys off my back soon enough.

- One of the things I got done was migrating the RZMCOM codebase to .NET 3.5 and xNET 3.0. This was the first step I needed to take before revamping the site interface and took way more time than I thought as the xNET 3 API still needed a few small tweaks to accommodate my needs here. Unfortunately, the laptop - which contained all of the up-to-date source code (and the source code repository) - died before I could finish everything. Currently the site performs marginally better than before but I have finally figured out the bottlenecks and expect things to speed up considerably once I get my environment back up and implement the optimizations I was working on the second it went down.

A few things here are broken but if they are broken they will probably go away in the next UI refresh. I hadn't worked on the site in a while and it was fun to get under the hood and play around. You might also notice that my Twitter status is now on the main weblog page. The plan going forward is to create a superfeed that puts my status updates, weblog posts, and image uploads inline. The key here is that RZMCOM becomes authoritative for all of this stuff. My statuses, posts, and images are very important chronicles of my life and I don't like the idea of Twitter or Facebook or Flickr or whatever being the primary source. Now that I have the integrations figured out, I'll just syndicate this stuff out and remove dependencies to the social networking app du jour.

- So a couple of months ago I had a recurrence of an excruciating problem that hit me five years ago. While getting tended to, I found out that either the initial problem never properly healed or I had a particularly ugly form of cancer. In order to answer that question I had to have a colonoscopy - an experience that, for the sake of separating out the gross stuff, will get its own post. I scheduled it during my time off so I would have adequate recovery time before the grind machine of my job fired up again.

I'm pleased to report that it was the former scenario and - outside of that - my colon came back A OK. The treatment I got causes a lot of discomfort and will likely be with me for another week or so, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

- For the final part of the break I went to Chicago to see my good friend Rene. Nene and her wonderful family were so gracious putting me up for the weekend and going out of their way to ensure my comfort. Between reattaching my frozen toes every few steps, I learned a bit of Chicago history, did some dancing, saw a bit of Theatre and hung out at the top of the Hancock Building. I also learned a couple of new card games: Tripoley and Mafia. Even my supreme post-banding discomfort couldn't sour an excellent weekend and start to the New Year.

After the -14 wind chill up there, the mid teens temperatures we're going through here in Atlanta are downright cozy.

- Happy New Year all...