What is the haps lately.

My internets being restored, it's time for a retrospective about what's been going on lately:

Apartment.

I got a new place! I now dwell in a third-floor walk-up one-bedroom on the north side of town. (I'd use more hyphens in that if I could.) I'll be staying here for approx. six months until the wedding creating my bachelor pad.

Now that I'm moved in, and having gorged my soul on consumerism via Apartment Therapy, I'm rarin' to see what I can do with this spot. There may not be much I can do to hang with those cool kids without $1000 Eames chairs and hardwood floors. But Jill and I spent the first weekend here making small purchases at Target, and I'm already feeling nice and cosy up in. Hopefully pictures soon.

Wedding planning.

Jill and I have been spending our Chicago weekends vetting spots for the ceremony and reception, her mom being sweet enough to do lots of research and show us around. Recently after checking out a hotel with enormous chess pieces (we may still tap that for the guest rooms, which were really nice) we've found a cute spot in Kenilworth that I think we could really do something cool with. I'm thinking floofy Victorian stuff and cocktails like the Wright Bros. might have drank 'em. Like that Violet Hour spot we ended up at one night (more on that one later.)

Residency interviews.

Interview season is open and Jill's flying from place to place. I'll let her fill you in on that later on...

Dogfood IRC.

Not so much an official announcement, but recently I got sick of my IRC client again and took back up the task of writing my own. I'm taking off in a different direction from Werk, my last attempt - this time I'm avoiding Qt and C++ compiler frustrations by switching to Lua and wxWidgets. Now there's no build step, deployment is dirt simple, and coding takes half the effort. And it's under 1000 lines so far. More later!

My "Game" book.

For obvious reasons, I'm in the business of budgeting and tracking my spending these days. I felt a need for a pocket device of some kind to help me do this. Something where at a glance I could see how much I'd got left in each of the basic budget categories after bills: Gas, Grocery, Going Out, Savings, and Misc.

Now being the programming type I immediately started wanting an iPod Touch app or such nonsense, but realizing the iPod expense might be counter-productive to budgeting, I went for a little leather-bound notebook instead, invented a system, and I log my little daily expenses in this now. Each month I break down how much I've budgeted for each category and start a page for each. I use running totals so I only have to add up one figure per entry. Cost me ten bucks and no development time.

Some systems just work better on pen and paper!

That's it for now...