Well, 2010 has been and gone, but we're still here, tired but happy. Hopefully 2011 won't be quite so relentless, particularly once I've finally wrapped up the TRaCS 3 project (soon!).

This year I'll finally be exploring my synth collection and making some music (and this time I really mean it). I'll also be cataloguing it all on this site.

So what has happened in the last fifteen months?

• We went on a lovely family holiday to France and EuroDisney.
• I went back to NZ for 16 weeks to try and finish the Railways project (I failed).
• I have moved my "office" out of the small wooden shed into a nice new "log cabin", still at the bottom of the garden. It's lovely. Thanks, Bernard!
• Theo has started pre-school. And the changing of that final pooey nappy is inching ever closer...

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If anyone else has one of these orphaned devices and is wondering what sort of power adapter it uses, may Google provide my answer: 12V DC, tip positive. Amen.

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My laptop (a Dell Precision M70 called Ganesh — the last and gruntiest of the single-core models, AFAICT) runs Windows XP and its driver database had become corrupted. So I'm re-installing Windows XP SP3 from scratch — by choice, I must add. Time-consuming, but the end result is of course a much snappier computer. So I'm adding some notes here as I go.

Apple iTunes wasn't happy that U.S. English wasn't installed as a language, and displayed using an Asian character set. Adding U.S. English and re-installing gave me iTunes in Suomi, which at least allowed me to find and change the language preference to English of some sort.

The EmacsW32 home page has apparently been suspended by its ISP. Hopefully it'll come back soon so I can download the latest version (1.58, based on GNU Emacs 23.0, which would be impressive since the latest stable GNU Emacs is 22.2).

Using ShadowProtect Desktop 3 has been great. You can mount your drive images (read-only or read/write) which is very handy. A worthy upgrade from Norton Ghost.

Anyway, a slow, tedious business, but hopefully my lean, mean machine will last me a bit longer now. But I think I'll stick Ubuntu on the last 20GB, just to see how that runs. I know Bevan's enjoying it.

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I can't believe it's now August. That's completely ridiculous. Here's hoping this isn't my sole post for the year...

Quick update (now that I have four Bloglines subscribers!):

• Work is going well, although progress is slow (despite working 60+ hours/week). Lots of lovely Lisp code being produced. Kate is now working with me, doing the Flex GUI.
• The kids are growing well. Sasha seems a bit frustrated with being a baby, and is impatient to get to the toddler stage.
• Bernadette is going well also. Although we are overdue for a holiday...
• I think my synth collection is now complete (apart from future construction projects). Full details will have to wait for the big project Wiki project.
• Life is good. Very good. I hope yours is also.

I dream about having a bit of time to simply make a list of all my projects and ideas. Hopefully before Christmas (I can already hear it rumbling down the tracks towards me).

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OK, so Christmas is nearly here and I haven't managed to post to this site, let alone build any sort of audience (hah!). Never mind. In the meantime, our daughter Sasha Rose has arrived safely, and is now eight weeks old. She's lovely, although she can be very noisy. And work is keeping me very busy, but that's OK.

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Wow, it's been a long time since I updated this weblog. I've been collecting my interesting links in a TurboNote, so I'll have to dump those into a few blog posts. That should get me started again.

I actually anticipate having a lot of interesting stuff to write about this year. Hopefully by Christmas I should have more than two Bloglines subscribers (Hi there, whoever you are!).

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Wow, it turns out that the main riff in Coldplay's song "Talk" from their latest album X&Y is ripped directly from the Kraftwerk song "Computer Love", from their 1981 album Computer World. Don't believe me? Then listen to this comparison of the beginning of both songs (42sec, 96kbps, 502KB). Much of the harmonic structure of the two songs is pretty similar, also. Fortunately they're both good songs. ;)

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I bought an electric hedge trimmer yesterday. Marvellous machine. I was able to rip through our hedge in no time (well, much less time than doing it by hand), and I also managed to get down the back of the hedge and deal a savage blow to the blackberry that has been trying to invade from the reserve next door.

Feeling inspired, I took my evil pruning saw and had a go at topping some of the trees that were impeding our view. With some success; the view is now much improved.

We (Bethany, Bernadette and I) also went to see The World's Fastest Indian at the Lighthouse Cinema in Petone. Bethany was very good, and made much less noise than some other members of the audience. I thoroughly enjoyed the film; in fact, I found it very moving. But then I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of thing; I went a bit teary while watching the climactic death scene in Finding Neverland, for example. But anyway, it was great to go and see a movie again (and at such a pleasant theatre). And I'll definitely be buying it on DVD, which will hopefully include some decent biographical documentary (like those found on The Hours DVD).

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William Gibson has started blogging again.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

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Robert Scoble has some good advice on how to increase one's Googlejuice (actually he talks about blog readership, but I would imagine they'd be closely correlated). He also links to another good article on blogger.com.

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