I’m back from the depths of hell. Hopefully I can explain further soon.

It’s been a while since my last post so I thought I’d just give a quick update. I got a new laptop to do some work on — a flashy new Lenovo Thinkpad T510. It is quite sexy and reminds me of how long it’s been since I’ve gotten anything new hardware wise. I remember buying laptops and getting friggin CDs with recovery software and backup discs with Windows with perhaps a recovery partition. Fast forward to today. No more optical media being shipped with anything. Just the recovery partitions. This is probably just the manufacturer’s way of cutting costs which they’ll argue is “more green” but really, it ends up costing you more to do the same shit. You can still get recovery discs. Only now it costs you $50-100 to order it from them when you used to get it INCLUDED IN THE PRICE OF THE LAPTOP. It could also be that as I get older, I am getting more and more concerned with my money and where it goes (read as: CHEAP). Maybe I’ll do a hardware review on the laptop on here when I get around to it. I’m still working on installing Arch Linux on that badboy (which is quite frustrating). Ubuntu installed in almost 10 minutes flat, no problem. Arch installs, but I can’t for the life of me get X server working on there. Whenever I figure that out, I’ll post it here to help any other unlucky souls in the same predicament.

I’m also going to try and do some cooking/food blog posts on here or break away and start up my own foodie blog. I’ve been experimenting with some different pizza recipes, and have decided that New York style crust kicks Chicago crust’s ass. My last couple of deepdish crust recipes have come away being way too thick. Next time I’m going for a simple New York style thin crust with maybe some fresh mozzarella and marinara with basil. I’ve also learned how to make a kickass bulgogi recipe which I’m definitely going to put up on here with some pics. Tomorrow will be bacon-wrapped barbecue chicken with macaroni and cheese. Mmmmmmm!

Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) – the old adage impressed onto all computer science students their freshmen year. I was reminded of it just now when I finally figured out a problem that was hounding me for a while on one of my test development sites. I’m trying to delve into the world of python web development, but was having a really weird problem where every file I uploaded to rentabuddy.com was zeroing out on the server. At first I thought maybe it was a temp directory issue, or a permissions issue. Finally, I tried logging into WHM to see if I had gone over my file quota. Well whaddaya know. I forgot to configure the domain with a development package. Oops. On the plus side, python development is now a GO!

I think I’ll try writing a simple CMS from scratch to get a basic feel for the language and then graduate to one of the available web frameworks like web2py or django. I want to try and always have something in the works so that I’m constantly learning something new. Working at a Microsoft shop isn’t a bad thing, but I feel like I’m being pigeon holed into a specific area of the programming industry that is dependent on the direction given by a handful of guys in Redmond. I’d rather keep my options open.

In other news, I’m still finishing up my startrek episode review/discussion site, trekktalk.com. So far, it’s got Google OpenID and facebook graph API authentication working. I’ve got adding, editing, and deleting comments for episodes working. I have a rudimentary wiki scrape script that I ran a while ago on memory-alpha.org, the ultimate star trek reference site. I think all I really have left to do for this first iteration is public facing user profile pages, maybe some kind of unique username system, perhaps a more clearly defined “home” or front page for the user, and anchoring for comments (to facilitate direct linking).

Happy New Years!  Everyone has lame resolutions that all revolve around health and food.  Since I don’t really need to lose any weight and I’ve already quit smoking, my 2011 resolutions are as follows:

• Play MORE video games.  Try and beat them too since I have a nasty habit of just dropping them midway through.
• Learn Python and Java.
• Try and complete more of my programming side projects instead of leaving them half-done (this seems to be a recurring theme in my life).
• Learn to drive stick.
• Try and do some more grad school classes.  I had put them off to pay off some debt first, but I should really try and get this done.
• Pay off debt.
• Read more books.
• Be less political.

I think I had one resolution in 2010 and that was to quit smoking.  Well, I got that done!  Let’s see how many I get done for 2011.

I completely forgot I even had a blog!  I promise I’ll write up a decent post later tonight or tomorrow detailing what’s up with my life now, but since I’ve obviously been busy enough to forget blogging, I guess it can’t be that bad