It's the beginning of another year. Time to make resolutions and evaluate the last year and make predictions and/or hopeful wishes for the next year.

Holiday Report

The holiday season was great. I was able to work in some vacation time and work-from-home time to spend almost two weeks at home with Christine and the kids. I think they got sick of me always being around.

I wish I could just not eat during January. I feel like I put on 10 pounds during the last two weeks with all the eating and relaxing. Hopefully now that I'm going to be back into a regular schedule I can work on losing that extra flab.

Christine got a La-Z-Boy recliner for Christmas and earlier this week, we took her wedding ring into the jeweler we bought it from eight years ago and asked him to make some changes to the band and add some small stones. That's a belated anniversary present.

I got some much-needed clothes.

Our kids got some SpongeBob SquarePants stuff like blankets, DVDs, and writing pads. SpongeBob has been playing on the TV ever since.

Of course, we spent a lot of time with family and friends during the holidays. We did a Christmas dinner on 21 December with my parents and siblings at my parents' house. My mom made her spectacular clam chowder. On 24 December, we hung with the Nielsen clan in Hyrum and played some Bingo. After opening our gifts on Christmas Day, we drove to Christine's parents' in Roy to spend some time with Christine's family. On 29 December, we joined Christine's family again at her brother Jay's house in Sandy for some wassail and homemade soup. Finally, on 31 December, we partied with my friend Chadd's family and others at Chadd's father's house in Logan.

While I was off work, I wrote some code

I was planning on spending a lot of time while I was home working on an Iodynamics project. Because of the holiday, however, our client was not able to give us the feedback on the first draft of a specification we delivered. So... I did something I've been needing to do for a long, long time: I recoded The Utah ISP List.

It's nice. Everything is optimized for the latest versions of Perl and the code runs nicely under mod_perl and Apache::DBI.

The changes aren't live. I think we're going to throw some other changes in before we push the updated code up to the live server, so if that interests you, keep your eyes peeled.

Whew

So, tomorrow I'm going back to work for the first time in 13 days. I feel rejuvenated but I'm nervous about going back to work. Before the holidays, I was feeling somewhat lacking in the motivation department at work because my projects were being held up by so many external factors. I hope 2003 starts off with better productivity and less hassles.

I just hope my sleep schedule (during the holiday break I usually went to bed between 2 and 4 a.m.) gets back onto a “reasonable” pattern for work.

I'm a music pirate so sue me with my own money

Recently, I was at a Media Play store and saw the latest CD by Peter Gabriel. It's been quite a while since P.G. released his last studio album— Us. I was worried I might not like the new material so I fired up my LimeWire client and searched for MP3 files of the songs on his new CD, Up. I found most of the tracks from the CD and gave them a virtual spin in xmms and decided I really liked what I heard. I promptly went to buy.com and bought the CD and another recent CD Gabriel has done which is a film soundtrack: the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

I hope someone from the RIAA reads this and thinks long and hard about the stupidity of fighting the proliferation of online music. They are powerless. They should instead campaign to support online music and the purchase of music as a way of saying “thank you” to the artists that provide music you like.

Well, that's all for now.

Below are some pictures!

Our family on 24 December	Kermit The Dog on Christmas	Maya & Lucy in the kitchen Christmas morning
Lucy checks on a baby seated in her new stroller.	Matt & Chadd visit at Chadd's New Years Eve party.	Chadd works at winning the team some points at Pictionary.