The new year rolls in with a vengance. Already there are a couple of big projects billowing and expanding with unexpected enthusiasm at work, at least one domestic improvement project completed, no time for resolutions this year.

The copy of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks lies by the fire-place, inducing feelings of guilt and anticipation in equal measure. What I remember about IO was that it was fun, I need to find time to dig into the next languages.

Speaking of time, the year is less than three weeks old, and already I’m falling behind in correspondence, email, and some cleaning up. Maybe being behind is just the natural order of things in a world where we’re trained not to be satisfied if we’re satisfied.

Over the years I have managed to squeak by on minimal vi(m) knowledge. Now I’m playing with Rails 3 on my Mac I have an opportunity to get a clean start on an mvim installation. So far in my .vim directory I have:

• NERD_tree
• fugitive
• matchit
• rails

and they seem to do OK on the new MacVim.

Lots of reading & playing to do now.

The iPhone 4 was launched in Canada today. A few people had a new phone at work, and I was keen to see the quality of the Retina display. I suspect that the display is of better quality than my uncorrected eyes can make out. The harder I looked the blurrier everything seemed – books, monitors, my old iPhone’s screen, and the iPhone 4′s display.

Now I need to budget for both an iPhone and some eye glasses. The latter I have been avoiding thanks to manly vanity, but now there’s a good reason to seriously consider correcting my vision.

The past couple of weeks seem like they must have been busy because I’m quite tired, unfortunately I don’t seem to have much to show for them. Maybe the next couple of weeks will be better on the production side!

On the social side things seem to be picking up again after the post-new-year lull. I have met up with several old friends I have been meaning to catch up with, and that has a pleasant effect on my spirit.

A new year. Between Christmas and the new year I had a relaxing, computer-free, vacation in the relative warmth of Tucson, and that has recharged my enthusiasm for doing things a little differently this year.

The piles of Christmas cards are a guide to a plan I have to write a paper letter to various people over the course of the year. I hope the recipients get as much pleasure from an unexpected letter as I do and I hope that writing to people gives me another way to look at what I’m doing.

In the mean time I have chewed through a load of low grade fiction, and read Stewart Copeland’s book, and am re-reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

It’s interesting to see how various drummers (specifically Bill Bruford and Stewart Copeland) regard jazz!

Sometimes it seems important to take a break. For the past few months I have been working hard to move a lot of projects forward, and somehow that became a seven day per week occupation. Things seemed to move forward, but how slowly they seemed to move and how little real enthusiasm I had.

Last weekend my wife decided that she was going to take a day off, and I thought that would be a good idea too. We had a great day, and lots of odds and ends around the house mysteriously got done.

After a break I seem to have a lot more energy, and I wonder how I could have been suckered into believing that the notion of 24/7 work is really productive or healthy.

Today has been a pleasantly varied day.

The day started off with me feeling a little under the weather and waking at 05:30. Being unable to get back to sleep I stumbled down to the basement to work on my Elephant Talk archives to try and finish off the migration which started at the end of last year. That was the King Crimson part of my day, software archaeology involving well preserved PHP and Perl, and looking into why various text files were present with a size of 0 bytes. This gave me a chance to play some more with git, and to use the excellent Perl local::lib module.

Barely was there time to do laundry and have some breakfast before it seemed like we had to go out to see Evgeny Kissin at Roy Thompson hall. A delightful and relaxing evening with some friends, and now all I have to do is try to stave off a sore throat and get some sleep before the work week begins.

Labour day has come and gone, the annual Cabbagetown Festival is winding down, the mornings and evenings are drawing in, and the gardens are in their final spectacular throes before the autumn really sets in.

This is the time of year when I get to meet neighbours who I haven’t seen since this time last year, as we realise that this could be one of the last times we’re all likely to enjoy a pleasant weekend. Cabbagetown is transformed into a bustling neighbourhood full of garage sales and people coming to see the craft fair in the park. I suspect that many of the items I see at the garage sales migrate around the area, emerging once a year to be picked up by a new host, and then they quitely settle into basement hibernation until the next Festival.

The Festival is a good opportunity to participate in a small celebration of the upcoming autumnal equinox with a small potluck and roast pig. Twirling a pig for a while with beer and conversation is a fine way to spend a Saturday afternoon, contemplating how meat ends up on my plate.

Damian Conway was in Toronto again to give a talk to the local community (Perl Mongers, Linux User Group, and others willing to be entertained for an evening for free.)

It’s always good to get some Damian time, and this year’s presentation has returned to a more Perl-ish focus. I enjoy wondering how I might have attacked the module he described – Regexp::Grammars – and I’ve come to the conclusion that I seem to have the 80/20 “rule” backwards. Maybe by next year I’ll learn how to write the 20% of the code which gets me 80% of the functionality, rather than dejectedly abandoning my (seemingly endless) 80% of the code as it limps slowly towards 20% of the functionality if I’m lucky.