New Happenings

Well, I made it back to MN in one piece, though I had a terrible experience once I got home. I wanted to get some Taco John's, so I rolled over there from the airport. Got there just a minute before 11pm. Waited for a good two or three minutes for someone to come on the intercom, only to have them tell me they closed at 11. Ahem, I was *there* before 11. And what's more, their store hours are until like 1am! I was not a very happy Aaron. Instead, I came home and had frozen pizza -- a far cry from the best "west mex" in town.

I had a blast staying in Austin, and in another two weeks or so, I should be back down there again (for over my birthday! w00t!) Lis and I will probably do more hiking, and maybe even camping when I get down there next. :-) As you can imagine, REAL World was very fun for me as well. Thanks to everyone who came, it was a blast!

I'm currently downloading the next Vista CTP drop (the one for Feb), so we'll see how it looks. I plan on installing it today, but that means I won't be doing much of anything else. :-P If I get the chance, I'll put some more screenshots up (trying to clear putting up RB screenies since Geoff's keynote is done now).

So you may be wondering what sort of fun things I plan on working on. Or you may not. I don't really care one way or the other, cuz I'm going to tell you. ;-)

Lewis was awesome enough to give me a new serial toy to play with. I plan to start programming the little beastie, and if the protocol proves to be as easy as it looks, I may end up writing an article about it. The problem with my two serial articles is that it's tough to actually give *useful* information since everything requires hardware. So I may say "screw it" and just write an article and tell people that if they want to see the code in action, go get the hardware and see how it works. We'll see though. I'm mostly going to program the device because it's fun. :-P

The other fun thing I'm going to be working on in my spare time is a plugin. Yes, a plugin! I know, some of you are amazed right now. But I'm going to try exposing a lot of the Tablet PC SDKs via a plugin so that people who want to do tablet pc programming on Windows have an unofficial, non-supported way of doing it. I think it's going to be a fun little project though. :-)

Aside from the geek-things I'm doing, I plan to spend time making my cat recognize me again, playing cards with friends, perhaps bowling, and other fun things like that. The geek stuff will be mostly done when I get bored with other things. I'm still working on the house (dad did a ton of electrical work while I was gone!), and that's the #1 priority. Computer stuff needs to take second chair, otherwise I'll go insane and start shooting things (and not in Counter Strike, unfortunately).

I feel like I am forgetting about something, but I can't for the life of me figure out what. So whatever it is, it must not be important.

Oh, yeah! Now I recall! RBLibrary.com is looking for more authors. So if you're interested in making some money and becoming a star, please let me know where your talents lie. We've got a ton of article ideas! So many that we can't possibly load down our current authors with even more. :-)

Hope all is well with everyone. I plan to get back to a regular posting schedule this week, so hopefully you'll get regular "ramblings" fixes. :-)