Go to your iTunes playlist and put it all on shuffle. Say the following questions aloud, and after each one, press play. Use the song title as the answer to the question.

Taken from http://irving.livejournal.com/160111.html

1. What do you think of me, iTunes?
Voodoo Chile - SRV & Double Trouble

2. Will I have a happy life?
Solea - Miles Davis

3. What do my friends really think of me?
Naughty Girl - Beyonce

4. Do people secretly lust after me?
Back Biters & Syndicators - John Lee Hooker

5. What does [insert significant other] think of me?
Dance Me to the End of Love - Madeleine Peyroux

6. How can I make myself happiest?
I Want To Be Loved - Muddy Waters

7. What should I do with my life?
Resolution - Victor Wooten

8. Why must life be so full of pain?
Scrapper’s Blues - Jag

9. How can I maximise my pleasure during sex?
The Game Changed - Terra Naomi

10. Will I ever have children?
Black and Blue - Louis Armstrong

11. Will I die happy?
Last Dance - Sarah McLachlan

12. Can you give me some good advice?
Pretty Girl Blues - Jag

13. Do you know where your [insert significant other] is?
Come Around - Marc Broussard

14. What do you think happiness is?
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen

Just got myself a new nice used table (and chairs) for my kitchen. It only took me 18 months to get a table for the kitchen and it was only the impending departure of a close friend that finally pushed me to get one (I bought it from him). It was a great bargain.

So here I’m sitting in my kitchen, typing away at the keyboard, sipping away at a cup of chocolate soy milk. I definitely have too much junk in my apartment right now. The kitchen area without the table used to be a good place for me to store stuff but it’s getting a little crowded now.

Link: ONLamp.com: Simplify PHP Development with WASP.

Looks interesting. At first glance, it looked rails-like in what it offered.

I installed php5 on my box this weekend to get phpMyAdmin up and running. I think phpMyAdmin is pretty slick. Played around with php5 (since I had it installed). I always thought that php was well suited to writing quick and dirty dynamically generated webpages. The article makes it sound like that php5 might be going beyond that legacy.

I’m having really trouble sleeping tonight. I guess I didn’t do enough this weekend to feel sleepy. Worked on some programming challenges on Saturday. Mucked about with various programs on my PowerBook on Sunday while watching the NFC Championships (Go Hawks!).

Me and RL were coding solutions to some programming challenges. Though we didn’t pair program, we reviewed our solutions via the collaborative features of SubEthaEdit. I’ve never had an opportunity to use this definitive feature. I think it is an enabling technology, allowing people over geographically distant places to work together on code and documents. Pretty darn cool if you ask me.

I’ve been playing with PathFinder4 for the last couple of days. It’s slowly growing on me. I still got another 2 weeks of the free trial before I decide to pick it up. A couple of niggling faults bother me 1) Doesn’t allow me to authenticate myself with Administrator rights like the regular finder does when installing applications. 2) No progress bar when mounting drives. Other than that the improvements over the regular finder are pretty cool. I especially like being able to open up directories in my terminal window with a click of a mouse button.

Managed to attend a talk given by DHH this last week. I thought it was interesting. There is a lot of buzz surrounding Rails these days. Reading through all the numerous articles out there on the
web, sometimes I think people are missing the point. DHH made it clear in his presentation that Rails was a framework designed to solve his problems. It’s not a generic "solve all" framework. That focus helps Rails solve the problems it was designed to solve. It’s not going to solve every problem. The specific problem it tries to solve (I think) is creating a single database backed website that can scale by adding additional hardware. I don’t think it will solve the problems faced by a pathological website but it’ll will probably do an outstanding job on the other 80% of websites out there. The important things I took away from the talk were three points:
1) Motivation is a silver bullet
2) Optimize for happiness (which is similar to the pugs philosophy "optimize for fun")
3) Make the right thing easy to do
Of the three points, (3) struck me as perhaps the more profound point. Thinking about the languages and systems I’ve worked with, it’s always struck me as odd that most system designers make the wrong thing easy to do. Why is that? I’m as guilty as that as anyone. I’m just wondering why we do that. It reminds me of the Einstein attributed quote "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction."

I’ve been suffering a malaise of sorts the last week and I hope to be able to shake it off this week.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/01/a_little_antiantihype.html

Too bad stevey’s not around for me to talk to these days.

I’ve not blogged much in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been distracted with work and life. Tonight I was able to sit down to read various blog entries via bloglines.

Interesting bits I found:
1) http://functionalj.sourceforge.net/
Not nearly as succint or as elegant as it’s equivalent in haskell, lisp, ruby or even perl but nice enough I think. I’m going to have to play around with it this weekend.

2) PG has a new article: How To Do What You Love?

3) Version 2 of the Scala Programming Language

4) JoelOnSoftware wrote this entry about the Perils of JavaSchools. Lots of discussion about it.
I found this forum quite entertaining. I’ll reserve my thoughts for later.

5) For my personal Java projects, I wonder if iBatis might be better for me.

They said to be specific……

1) Read six novels in the next year (at least!)
I’ve always enjoyed reading but in the last couple of years I’ve struggled to finish books. Writing my novel has made me realize that I’ve not finished reading a book in a long long time. Most of my ideas came from material I read as a teenager. As a novelist, I think we get ideas from other people’s writing. We use those ideas as fuel for our own great ideas. I’m a little low on fuel right now. I’m going to start with novels that people have given me over the last couple of years that I’ve started but not really finished. I think I have 3 of them on my book shelf right now: The Sparrow, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age.

2) (Re)Watch three movies a month
All I can say is that I’m a great customer for netflix. I pay for their service but rarely watch the DVDs they send me.

3) Run the Portland marathon in October 2006
I need to do this and I need to start way earlier this time. I always have good momentum coming out of Summer. This year I want to be ready for a marathon at the end of September. Portland is ideally positioned for that and it’s not too far from where I live. Jan, Feb and Mar are pretty depressing months but it’s better I get my low mileage training done in those months and use the nicer spring and summer months for the mid to high mileage training.
3.1) Be doing 6 - 8 mile long runs by March. I’ll plan somemore after that.

4) Save $X
Be frugal is what all those books say. I need to be less haphazard about it.

5) Tithe $X
Life has been good to me. Time I start returning the favor.

There are a number of less specific things I want to explore. Economics, Game Theory and Personal Finance are three areas I want to learn more about.

Of course there is the novelling thing. Hopefully I can do and win NaNoEdMo 2006. The novel has potential but it needs a lot of cleaning up. I also want to do NaNoWriMo 2006. They say the sophomore effort is always the hardest.

On top of that I have my career development work. 2006 is going to be more focused. Less breadth but more depth. My main goal is to be a JavaScript wizard. The subgoals are to utilize AJAX techniques and GreaseMonkey. My secondary goal is to become a Ruby wizard. The subgoal is to use Watir more in my work.

It’s the last day of the year. Time for me to review the year. Let me start with my failures.
1) I didn’t run a half marathon.
2) I didn’t run a marathon.
That six years I’ve talked about it but never done it. Oh well….
3) I still have a large stack of books I need to read.

Next would be my list of successes:
1) I’ve picked up new programming languages and tools
The ones that come to mind are Haskell, Ruby, Rails and SVK
2) I wrote a 50000 word novel
3) I went on 2 dates

It’s funny looking at the list I’ve made I’ve not done very much in the last year. That’s untrue. I’ve done lots of things this year but none that are easy to quantify.

Starting with the 500 pound gorilla in the room, I’m not sure where I’m headed with my career. I have about 6 years of experience working in the industry under my belt now. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was just starting out on my career. Somehow I don’t see myself doing this for the next 30 - 40 years. Maybe the next decade but not much more than that. I need to start planning my career for that next step. In a way, that process has already started with more junior people coming in and more senior people moving up. A fairly sizable void has been left for me to work in. People’s perceptions and expectations of me over the last year have changed. Comments from an old manager these last two weeks have made my role even more clear.

I don’t think I’m going to change the way I do things. I’ve never liked the “firing from the hip, cavalier” attitude we take towards certain things. I can definitely do those things but I like thinking things through with more information. I guess it is going to be the case of being more prepared for things. Changing the way I do things in public but not how I do things in private.

Life would be nothing without friends. I’ve always be lucky in that department. People always like to say “I have many acquaintances, but very few friends”. The opposite is true of me I guess. I’ve always had many friends but very few acquaintances. Unfortunately I’ve not done a good job of keeping in touch with old friends something I hope to rectify in the next year.

The question of money has been in my thoughts recently. The issue is not so much money but retirement. Will I be able to retire comfortably? When I started working, I told myself that this was not going to be an issue until I hit this point in my life. Well “this point in my life” is here and I’ve dived head first into it. They say it’s never to late to start but I have my doubts about it. I fear that it may already be too late. But I’ve always been a natural pessimist so maybe I’m just overreacting to all the material I’ve been reading.

Another career? I’ve toyed with the idea of finding another career. I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that yet. What would I do? I actually have a fairly limited skill set. I’m a one trick pony. That worries me.

It looks like 2006 is going to begin the same way 2005 began; I’m a little older but none the wiser.