The State of the Barney

Another year draws to a close and I thought I'd take the time to do a general update of my life for the world.

Top of mind is that I'm leaving AudienceCentral for Mentor Graphics at the end of the year. The past five years have been great, and the company has some huge potential waiting to be released. The past year I've been doing a huge amount of Java work, and really quite enjoyed myself. The tools and packages available put everything ColdFusion has to offer to shame. Which isn't to say CF's a bad language, of course; CFQUERY alone makes up for a wide array of shortcomings and it's Java underpinnings give it the raw power where it's needed. At Mentor, I'll be back to almost entirely CF development. From the brief preview of what we've got ahead of us as a team, there's some exciting stuff coming down the pipe with some really neat problems to solve. In addition, the CF focus will give me the opportunity to delve back into the CF community to a greater degree than I have in the past year, which is a nice benefit for me.

Also common knowledge is that my blog server died last month. The switch to WordPress on a PHP (et al) host was quite trivial thanks to the Movable Type underpinnings of my old blog, but man have I come to hate PHP. It's a relatively new language to me, so I don't have the idiomatic familiarity I do with other languages, but even so, it's nasty to work with. Fortunately, WordPress works well enough out of the box that I can continually procrastinate on all the tweaks and mods I should be making to flesh out photo galleries and stuff for my quartet of blogmistresses (Heather, Chloe, Peggy, and Moira).

Lindsay will be three years old next month, and is turning into a person instead of a child in a lot of ways, which is exciting. It's also annoying because she's turning into a stubborn, arrogant pain in the neck, just like her father. Damn heredity. Unfortunately, she seems to also have inherited my skin issues, particularly the sensitivity to cold. Coupled with her burning desire to spend every minute of every day wearing nothing by her panties, she itches a lot. Speaking of panties, aside from wiping after pooping, she's totally potty trained since the beginning of the effort has had fewer accidents than I have fingers.

Emery's 16 months old at the moment and also transitioning, though from an infant to a child. He's running around the house, and in the past week or so just started the blabbering that indicates it's about time to start talking. He's learned a fair number of signs for various things, but real speech will be nice. From the first signs, however, I think we'll have some issues converting the signs he knows into spoken words, just like with Lindsay. Unlike Lindsay, he doesn't have a strong interest in reading. Doesn't seem to have affected his language skills at all (at least the listening part), but we'll see when he starts talking.

We're just shy of a year in this house, and it's still treating us well. Biggest issue we've run into was that the furnace didn't want to light this evening. So have to call some heating guy tomorrow and see about getting that fixed. Even though we're out in unincorporated Washington County, it's still a city which I could do without, but such is life. Better than in an apartment downtown somewhere.

For the actual body of Barney, things are good. Had the hernia taken care of and it's doing admirably. Still a little tender to firm pressure, but no problems moving around as I did before. My "skin rot" hasn't bothered me much this year either, though with the cold it's started to return somewhat. Ball severing (i.e. vasectomy) tomorrow to cement my "no more kids" status. I will certainly admit to being a lot less active this year, largely because I'm not riding my motorcycle to work every day and hiking down to the office from where the free parking is up the hill. I've mitigated a large part of that with evening walks, and starting next year will be back on the bike for the commute each day. Certainly not in the shape I was six years ago, but among the general population of 26 year old males, I'd say I'm doing pretty well.

Looking forward to 2007, I think it'll be a good year. More of my life is dedicated to work than sleep, so that's an important indicator of my well being, and the outlook is good. CF has really matured in the past year or two, and while it's still lacking in a lot of ways, I'm excited to get back into it. The kids will both be old enough to have a lot of fun playing this summer. Not that we didn't last summer, but Emery still wasn't walking at all, which makes outdoor activities a bit less engaging. Only time will tell, of course, but the future's looking bright.