I know the postings have been somewhat irregular (and perhaps I am understating that a bit). Things have been really busy in my life. Some might argue that it borders on overwhelming. Here are but a few of the goings on in my life. This will also serve as an update to those I have not had the time to e-mail.

I am in the middle of a major project at work. You see, working in IT at a college means that while students and faculty are away on break, we have the opportunity to do major projects. I just happen to be leading one of those projects which involves me and a team of students performing minor upgrades to nearly 700 plus academic machines in about a month. As you can imagine, there is no time for anything else at work. Even catching up on work related e-mail or trying to find the time to fill out insurance renewal forms is something that must be done after hours. Therefore, this piled on top of my already quite full off-work times is taking it’s toll. Even now, I can only find the time late in the night (or was that early in the morning as it is well after midnight) to write this post. I am so burnt out. If it were not for the fact that I get the whole week after Christmas off, I don’t know what I would do.

This of course means that I have not had the time I need for much of anything else. I have not even really begun Christmas shopping. I have a few ideas of what I am going to get for Bethany, Maxim and Miles. Bethany is nice enough to provide a wish list. I will get some ideas from there but what about Maxim and Miles. I have no idea what I am going to get for them. I know it seems that this is something a parent should know but what does one buy teenagers these days? All of the things they want cost a fortune not to mention have poor capitalization (XBox, iPod nano… Who spells these things?). I absolutely need to find a few hours this weekend to just wander around a mall and try to find something they wont forget about moments after they open it and be ruined for life with the memory of the Christmas that their Dad just didn’t “get it”.

Also, my Powerbook decided to commit suicide and jump off of a two foot high table while turned on, thus rendering it’s hard drive kaput (that is the technical term – I looked it up). Even though I have been too busy to backup, I did learn my lesson from the last time around and am in a much better position to recover. All of my e-mail is IMAP now so it is not lost. Music that I have purchased was on the iPod. Furthermore, many of my key documents I had on my iDisk safely tucked away. I probably did loose some stuff of course, some recent photos and some recent documents (one of which took days to create) but all in all it is not as bad as the last time I lost a drive. Being without it is very hard though so I hope to get it back from the fine folks at The Foundation soon.

Better news is that Bethany and I may have finally settled on a date for the wedding. Actually, this makes the third time we have settled on one. The first time. The date we were looking at originally (Sept. 9th) was taken by our friend who introduced us. He got engaged two weeks after we did. We do take some of the blame because, even though we had picked that date we just did not have the time to officially announce it so it was fair game. Therefore, we chose another date – June 24th. After we set the date AND informed several key people (including the one I am about to mention), Bethany’s Father remembered that June 24th is the date of his 50th high school reunion. Since he is on the planning comittee and it has been in the works for several months now, he feels obligated to go and has asked if we could chose another date. Therefore, we have now chosen… Drumroll… June 17th. We will actually be getting married on the night of the 15th in a small, private, candlelit ceremony. June 17th will be the reception for about 300 of our closest friends.

The third floor at the St. Paul house is coming along very well. It is going to be a really great space and will work well for a temporary bedroom for Bethany and I. The sheet rock and taping is all done and hopefully it will be ready for us to paint the week after Christmas I have off (no rest for the weary). We will also try to get some of the work done on Maxim’s future bedroom during that time. All told, we are making great strides in reaching the point when we can all finally move over there.

I am also gearing up for my yearly trip to my Mecca – Macworld San Francisco. This is looking like it is gearing up to be one of the better ones. Rumors of Intel based Macs are flying faster than toasters and if that holds true it will certainly be the talk of the show. I can almost hear the collective bantering now of every Mac user in the exhibit hall badgering the software vendors about when their product will be ready to run on Intel. I suspect that none will get a satisfactory answer beyond “Soon”. I used to work the show floor for a software vendor, I know of what I speak. I am exited to see all of my friends out there. The Now Software folks, The ACN crew and even my friend Scottie will be out there for his first time. Of course, Bethany will be flying out as well on Wednesday night and we will spend the weekend with Val and do some wine tasting in Napa.

So, there is the personal stuff and why the posting has slowed to a crawl. I will try to post more soon. I do have several items on deck that I would like to post including:

• A followup on my return to Firefox.

• An update as to how I am using Backpack for Getting Things Done now that I can have multiple lists on a page. This also includes using Writeboard for some of the roughing out of my vertical mapping.

Of course, this will be better facilitated once I get my Powerbook back. Not saying it wont happen with out it. Just saying it will make it more likely.