We have friends from Oklahoma (one of my fellow moderators over at Ars Technica) visiting for a few days. We’ve managed to keep them busy. Kurt came to work with me on Friday and then interviewed with us that afternoon. Then we took off for the day and took them to look at apartments. Saturday was a trip up to the mall (and the Apple store) and a visit with another moderator, Eric, from Ars. From there we all went to the Big Bowl, an asian noodle restaurant, and then into the city to hang out at Eric’s house. Sunday we took another trip to the city, this time by train. We decided to go to the Shedd Aquarium and caught a museum bus up to the lakefront. The aquarium was pretty impressive. I never realized from looking at it how much stuff it held. There’s an entire underground level filled with sea otters, penguins, dolphins and beluga whale. I took as many pictures as I could until the batteries ran out of juice. We finally ran out of steam and headed back home for a night of pizza and a movie. What a weekend.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the week now. In between running here and there I managed to pull off a skillful feit for work. We had a troublesome launch with Match.com last week and I spent most of Friday night working to figure out what went wrong. Somewhere around one in the morning I discovered a slight bug in a certain vendor’s code. After a three line addition, my code is now working the way it was intended when I wrote it two years ago and we should turn Match.com back on today. I expect it to go smooth and painless. The benefit of getting this new partner up and running is it helps us hire Kurt. Another pair of hands will help reduce the number of late nights I end up working and reduce the volume of projects I have just waiting for me to do.

Because of the recent excitement, I haven’t been able to get started on my next story yet. Once things settle down here tomorrow I’ll finally be able to crack open my rough draft and start expanding and rewriting. My next group is in three weeks instead of two (I’m not sure why, but I’m not going to question it since I missed the last meeting), but I don’t think I’ll have this piece ready by then. I’m beginning to realize it takes me longer than a month to finish any story of length right now. Maybe that will change the more I write, but finding more free time will be the true key.