Ash Wednesday Update!

I haven't posted in awhile, I apologize! Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, however, I didn't make it to mass because we were hit with a massive blizzard. I walked home from work, partly because the buses stopped running and partly because I'm bad-ass. ;-) It was good exercise.

Here are my projects as of late:

• Released POE::Component::MessageQueue version 0.1.8! I have to give most of the credit to Paul Driver who really did all the work this release. But its still exciting!
• Converting the Memorati™ website to Drupal. When this is finished, it'll be alot easier to get more content and community features (forum, wiki, bug-tracker) built into the website. I've found that I really, really like Drupal. Its very simple and very easy to extend. Writing PHP for the first time in a while is weird! It looks too much like Perl in parts that I find myself accidentally typing "my" before variable declarations. This also proved how easy it is to embed Memorati™ inside another application even one written in another programming language (ed: Memorati™ is written in Python).
• Playing with my brand new Nokia N800! This is a really cool device. It runs Maemo Linux which is based on Debian. It feels just like a full linux computer but only "yay" big. Still, I haven't gotten too much into hacking it yet, but its been a revolution for doing my Memorati™ flash-cards (which are rather numerous now!). It allows me to do my flash-cards while on lunch break at work (usually in the Milwaukee Ale House, which has wifi) and while laying in bed before I go to sleep. Its never been so easy to get myself to do flash-cards! Next step, offline support.
• Reading Harry Potter: I Kamień Filizoficzny (yes, thats the first Harry Potter book in Polish). This has been awesome. I'll post more about the process I'm using later (possibly on the new Memorati™ website once its up) but basically I'm reading once for content and then going back and looking up words I don't know. My main goals are (1) reading something easy that I can enjoy and (2) massively expanding my vocabulary. I currently have more than 1200 flash cards in Memorati™! I expect to exceed 2000 before I'm done.

Thats all the big stuff! I'd add "stressing out at work" but thats not really note-worthy. I should add that the Drupal-based Memorati™ website will be more friendly to my N800's screen. So, it all kind of comes full circle.

I'll try to stay more on top of my blog in the coming days... Remain tuned!