Life has been a near-continuous work-fest for a while, but I've lately begun to catch a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. (And no, dear cynic, I'm quite certain that it's not an oncoming train. :-) There are a number of things I'm looking forward to making time for again -- including just living life.

Certain things inevitably fall into disarray when neglected, plants included. Our "China Doll" has a mealybug infestation that's spread to a nearby palm, the tomato plant on the balcony that's just started bearing fruit in quantity has come down with a bad case of whiteflies, and I'm getting close to killing a poor oncidium due to general cluelessness. Fortunately for the photosynthetic lifeforms in my care, I finally took Bill's advice and picked up a copy of The House Plant Expert, which is indeed packed with useful info. I've managed to make the time to begin heading off the worst of these horticultural issues, but am looking forward to really getting my hands back in the soil at some point. Few things in life are as calming as working on a garden, apartment-bound or otherwise.

I'm also looking forward to putting more time into musical pursuits (i.e. picking up the guitar again). I bought a copy of BIAS Deck LE a short while ago to facilitate my first amateur foray into multi-track recording. Mainly I'm hoping to leverage it as a practice tool: a way to lay down backing riffs to improvise over. So far I've been very impressed by the sound quality I get just pulling a chair up to my iMac and using the screen's built-in mic. The ambient noise is tolerable (especially if the air conditioning and clothes washer aren't running!), and the frequency response is not too bad. Certainly good enough for practice. If I ever get more serious about recording, a better mic might be something to consider, but I have a ways to go yet before that's the worst thing wrong. :-)

Tons of interesting OS X stuff has whizzed by that I've scarcely found time to take a look at: PyObjC, MusicKit/SndKit, the "SC21" Cocoa bridge for Coin3D (an open source Open Inventor implementation)... And that's discounting WebKit/WebCore, and all the new API that's making its debut in Panther. I sense a period of intense learning and catching-up ahead.

I have some significant updating and overhauling of this site in mind too, in conjunction with completing the toolset and Obj-C framework for doing template-based HTML generation that I started work on some time ago. (Of course I realize that there are scores of existing site-building tools out there, any one of which I could just adopt and use, and I have looked into several of them. But like many in my business I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy -- sometimes, I realize, to a fault. More to the point though, I'm enjoying exploring the potentials of a particular approach to doing the whole thing that I think is making the do-it-yourself approach a worthwhile endeavor, at least educationally. More on that later maybe, if I find it actually works well!)

I've got a backlog of pics I'd like to add to my photos page, which I do realize is currently encumbered by the lack of a way to browse the images at a reasonable resolution. Once I can find time to finish automating the page- and thumbnail-generation process, I intend to fix that! Making time for more adventures that are conducive to taking photos is also high on my list...

Lots of interesting stuff to do. -- All in due time!... :-)