At present I need to get the following done before we bail:

• Crank out BitArtist v1.1
• Get things squared away with my acting admins for WotG and Bomb Shelter
• Finish jumping through the hoops of Hawaii’s insane animal quarantine laws
• Figure out how to push back our move date about at least a month
• Get the house cleared of all useless/non-functional crap for the move
• Go back east to visit as many family and friends as we can before we move off to not see them for years again
• Fill out the damages paperwork from the last time we moved a year and a half ago
• and take care of about a million other smaller things

Why yes, I am a busy boy, thank you for noticing. I’ve been at a constant 6000RPM since we hit California and I’m ready for a vacation or a six week nap, whichever comes first.

I’ve also started to as-of-yet unreleased community projects for Way of the Geek. Oh, I may take a crack at learning AJAX and brushing up on my JavaScript and XSL while I’m at it…if I can find time between housework and trying to get back into Japanese studies. Everyone should know at least one other language, not counting programming. So yeah, I’ve been busy.

Sadly, if I didn’t stay busy I think I’d probably go insane. Either that or drive everyone around me insane because I’d be bored to tears. There were podcasts, news articles, rice balls, and associating with friends in there somewhere too.

When I came back I started thinking about what the new plugin would accomplish, got a rough idea, and set out learning the Wordpress Plugin API. I knew enough from the last plugin I built to be absolutely useless. I started coding the plugin at roughly 3PM California time, stopped a few times for more errands, and stopped entirely for the night at around 9PM. Worked on it for another couple of hours this morning and it’s finished. Like, completely finished.

So, basically with about 4-7 hours of actual work, no prior training, and feeling my way through the entire thing, there’s nothing I can’t do. Or at least nothing I can’t do to the point that it will at least function, I suppose. Rack that up with the rest of the code I’ve written over just the past months and I’ve not had a bad body of work.

BitArtist, revisiting the WP-UserLogin plugin, a new members rotation script (member-specific nonetheless) for Bomb Shelter Comics, and then cranking the new one out that has yet to be hosted by WordPress (submission just went in today). I’ve been a busy little fella.

I’ve also noticed that I prefer my plugins to pull double-duty, but I won’t waste your time with that on this post. Maybe next time, but not now. For now, I have to get ready to…wait for it…run more errands. Either my butt is going to attach itself to the car seat permanently, or my legs are just going to evolve into wheels because they never stop moving. Anyway, enjoy the wall of text here.

At any point, I’ve got a few people interested in beta-testing for me and the people who’ve seen it in action seem to be rather pleased. So I’m very happy about the feedback thus far. I don’t plan to make a million bucks off it, and it’s been so long that I’m a little fuzzy as to why I put it out in the first place, but I’m glad I did in any case. It’s been a very good learning experience and I’ve found out more about programming on this project than any previous.

I also have plans to open up an open-source code repository of sorts as a community supplement to Way of the Geek at some point, but that’s still a ways down the road. Although when I do launch it I hope it does well. We really do have a lot of bright readers, and I think with the right motivation or even just the right project they could go pretty far.

The good news? Well, if you’re a webcomic artist the good news is that my BitArtist project is almost finished and should be ready for beta testing next week. It’s going to be completely free, as in beer and speech. Hopefully people will find it as useful as I’ve intended for it to be. Quite a bit of work has gone into it, and I’d like to think that it shows. It’ll be under constant revision and upgrading and I’ll be building/modifying other software I’ve written for public use as well.

So there you have it, I’m a busy busy man. Nothing you didn’t know already, I’m sure. But you all should know by now that I can’t help but state the obvious.

Things are slowly getting reorganized and put into their respective places, but it always takes longer to unpack than it did to pack. So it’s going to be a while. I’m just glad the heavy lifting and such is over. Chad Diez swung by to lend a hand on Saturday evening, which was greatly appreciated. Chad, if you read this, I don’t think we could’ve gotten the washer and dryer in without you, bud.

Oh, and on an extremely late and completely unrelated note, happy belated birthday Shawn. You’re a year closer to the finish line now, big guy. Better start pumping them Shawn-puppies out soon, you aren’t getting any younger.

• My car broke down on Monday. It’s been to two shops and should hopefully be ready tomorrow.
• We’ve had to resort to a rental car.
• We found out our house has a mold problem (common North Cali thing) and we’re working on getting out of our lease and into a new place.
• My wife and I had our three year anniversary
• One of my friends has been in and out of the hospital.

Well, that’s been it. It’s been a very trying week to say the least. We’ve had some good news, but mostly bad. Hopefully the coming week will hold some good fortune for us.

The anniversary was lovely though. I got the wife a nice diamond necklace, took her out for a French dinner, and had a really nice time in all. It was good to spend some time out with her on our own, we don’t get to do it enough.

Okay, that’s enough about me. How have you been?

Why am I writing about this? Well, after a few years of diligent service my poor ol’ coffee pot finally stopped making coffee like it used to. I had to put paper towels under her to keep her from leaking all over the counter, the basket drip was pretty much shot and wouldn’t hold if the coffee pot was pulled out from under it, and she’d just seen better days. I’ll still keep a hold of her just in case I get an office somewhere at some point. She’ll do just fine for little jobs, but not the normal wear and tear I put her through.

So we bought a new coffee pot/espresso maker combo. Now I’m not really much for those emasculating European coffees, but a red eye is a pretty nice way to start the day if I do say so myself. So, while it does have the steamer and all that good stuff on it, I think I’ll save those things for making the wife some fancy coffees. I still remain a fan of the black and bitter usually, although I have been known to put cream and sugar in my coffee in my old age…at 26. Don’t get me wrong, she likes black coffee too she just can’t drink that much of it.

While it was a little more than your standard run-of-the-mill coffee pot, $100 isn’t bad at all for what we got. I don’t usually like Bed Bath & Beyond because I’m not into decorating and things of that nature (anyone who has ever met or seen me in real life can attest to the fact that I have no fashion sense), cooking is something that I do like to do and they have some pretty handy stuff there…sometimes.

I just thought I’d share my new morning company with you all. I should probably dial back on the coffee, but if I did that I wouldn’t get done with half my days workload. Besides, it just tastes so darn good.

At any rate, here’s the picture. It’s based off a painting of the USS Constitution. I’ll post the side-by-side so you guys can have a comparison.

All in all I don’t think it was bad work for just over an hour in the chair. This was the first tattoo shop I’d ever been into that had TVs set up in the workspaces so you could watch a movie while the artist worked, very weird.

I like it, and I’ve already found out that if I flex my bicep it looks like the ship is running with full sails, so that’s always fun to show people. I’ve never had a tattoo that did tricks before. I’ve already had it compared to Little Pete’s tattoo of “Petunia” on ‘The Adventures of Pete & Pete‘.