I code so much better at night when no one else is at work. Seriously, getting interrupted sixty million times a day makes it hard to get anything done. The funny thing is that many of the longer interruptions are coming from a “get it done” client. I understand that they want updates, but I really need to stop having thirty minute-plus discussions about things in my office so that I can actually do stuff.

Working all the time has its benefits: I get lots done, and I get excited about what I’m accomplishing. There are also the drawbacks: Constant deadlines. I must fix an XML-parsing bug and then start writing a simple FTP client that can post files and get files based on an XML script.

People can say what they want about .NET, but there is no way that I could accomplish this as fast using another language. While I’m unsure what kind of support the .NET Framework provides for FTP, the speed with which I’ve implemented my config file in self-documenting XML has been amazing. When I go to do the FTP stuff, I will eventually want to make it multi-threaded for response reasons. Once again, the System.Threading API will come to my rescue. I’m not well versed in threading, and I don’t have time to become such right now, so it’s just what the doctor ordered.

I’m rambling, and I should be programming.

This is probably Wayne’s last year of life, which is sad. He’s been a good companion for my grandmother, and he’s always treated me well. It’s sad to see him pretty much just fading away. He had a transient ischemic attack about a month ago and since then he’s become noticeably weaker. It was interesting to hear him talk yesterday. He mentioned to Joe and I how unfortunate it was that war still existed in the world. He said that everyone hates it, yet people still choose to engage in it. Wayne’s talked to me like this a few times over the last few years about various topics including health care and the environment. The interesting part has been that he seems to have some sense of regret over the things that his generation is leaving for future generations. I have to wonder how “enlightened” these comments really are, but they are interesting to look back on.

Last night we decorated the tree at my parent’s house. That was alright. At dinner somehow we got on the topic of my parent’s house. They told Jess, Joe, and I some pretty scary stories about the process of obtaining the house that they’re in. Apparently, they had to overpay to get into the house because the bank appraised it lower than the asking price. As a result, the bank wouldn’t loan enough money to buy the house. There was a whole line of house purchasing happening in the family where my parents were at the bottom so they were really pressured to pay way more for the house than they should have. Essentially, they partially financed a house in California for another family member. It was somewhat saddening to hear that parts of the family thought that my dad was trying to take advantage of my grandmother on the house deal, which is rather ridiculous. If the bank doesn’t say that the house is worth the asking price, it’s pretty hard to come up with the differential for an extra large down payment. I guess my uncle took my dad’s side in the whole thing so it’s nice to hear that not everyone thought my parents were being unreasonable. This was obviously a long time ago, and things have settled very well, but I guess it put my parents through a period of hardship. They also told us some other things that really shocked me as well. It’s weird how the family dynamic can be so good when things like that happened. I guess while things don’t ever go away, you learn to deal with them and such. Us grandchildren are fortunate that our parents didn’t let us know what was going on amongst each other when we were growing up.

Today was another good day. Zach called me and asked if I wanted to watch So Long, Mr. Despair. We watched about six episodes over here, and that was pretty funny. There’s something about a guy that always wants to kill himself that’s hilarious. I wasn’t so sure at first, but I’m glad that I did get to watch it with him.

I’ve been reading a bit more this last week. I’ve enjoyed taking the time to just sit down and relax with a book instead of the television for a change. Each has it’s benefits, but I’ve been away from reading books for far too long. I don’t know how long this phase will last, but I’m enjoying it while it does. I’m sure that I’ll enjoy whatever phase I happen to be in equally, though. That is, when I move on to something else, I’ll enjoy it the same as what I’m enjoying now.

The one thing that I haven’t had time to do in terms of entertainment lately is play Persona 3. That game is awesome. I could play right now, but I was kind of planning on going to bed in about thirty minutes, and I know that I’ll be up for a long time if I get started on a video game.

Nebraskon was pretty fun. I was supposed to get pictures from my sister last night, but we never did get around to swapping pictures so that will have to wait for later, I guess. Still, the convention was pretty good. It’s definitely a different atmosphere from other conventions, partially because of the slightly lower average age and also partially because it has yet to move to a hotel. Still, it’s a good time. One of the things that Nebraskon has going for it are the panels. They always seem to have a good variety of panels that seem interesting. It’s the only convention that I’ve been able to actually attend a Para Para panel at (three in two years, even). It’s also got some nice guests that are fun to listen to. The convention had like a 40% increase in attendance this year, so it’s well on its way to a hotel. It sounds like the main thing holding them back is that they don’t yet have all of the necessary equipment to be a portable convention. I’d say that they have another year where they are and from there they will move to a hotel. If they can make that move, then they’re golden. It’s also nice to go to a convention that’s still small enough that at the registration desk I give them my last name and the girl goes, “Julian?” without looking at her papers because she remembers me from last year. I was seriously impressed.

Since I report all of my listening history for recommendations and personalized radio, I’ve been trying really hard to get my tags under control for multi-artist releases. Domestic stuff is easy and mostly automatic, but anything where the original release was not in the US or there was not US release at all is a bit more hit and miss. Sometimes I get translated track names and sometimes I get the wrong artists coming up for tracks. I still have some stuff that I know that I need to fix: the Final Fantasy Tactics OST and the Final Fantasy X-2 OST, but this was by far the largest chunk. The last thing that I need to fix is that I’ve probably mis-tagged some vocal tracks of artists like Joanne Hogg and attributed them to people like Yasunori Mitsuda or Yuki Kajiura. While these two are great artists, they did not do the performance.

While this might not be the most important thing going on in my life right now, it sure beats writing about crunched deadlines and stressing over things that I can’t prevent. Maybe I’ll do that soon. For now, I’m going to go to bed and sleep well knowing that I’ve dramatically increased the accuracy of my music files’ tags.