If you haven’t seen Flickr yet, it’s worth a few minutes. It’s a photo hosting service done right. I’ve been using it for a bit now and it’s much easier to manage than Gallery, which I’ve been using to manage all of my photographs. Now I’ve found Flickr Export for iPhoto, which will (as the name says) export photos from iPhoto to Flickr. It even makes it easy to drop images into my blog. Integration is the future 🙂

It also works nicely with f-spot, which I also use, especially when I’m mobile.

It’s been a pretty hectic week so I’ll be brief.

• I spent a good chunk of today working on Linux.Ars, which should be going live later tonight. I think it turned out pretty good.
• I’m trying to make preparations for Penguicon later this month. A bunch of us aren’t happy with some of the programming changes, so we’re working on some alternative programming.
• I’ve been spent a lot of hours working on contract work, but I’m learning some new software management techniques. It’s not as boring as it sounds, honestly.
• Congrats to Jorge, who’s going to Ubuntu Down Under later this month. Too bad he’ll miss Penguicon this year. We’ll miss you, whip.
• I’ve been spending a little bit of my free time helping to test and build packages for the upcoming Ubuntu Hoary release. I have officially become a contributor. Maybe one day I’ll even become a Master of the Universe.

That’s about it for now. The rest of what little free time I’ve had lately has been spend doing yardwork. My contract has some major deadlines coming up throughout the next month, so I may be a bit scarce. Busy is good.

Dena got me front row center tickets to Les Miserables for Christmas. We drove downtown yesterday and checked in to the Chicago Regency ($60 via Priceline) . We dropped off our bags and headed off to find some lunch. The show was great. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel to rest.

I made reservations for dinner at Vong’s Thai Kitchen, a few blocks northwest of the hotel.

On the way to dinner, I made Dena take me to the Lego store on Michigan Avenue:

Afterwards, we took a walk along the Chicago River:

We got up at 6am (5am before the time change) and headed home. It was a really long day but a lot of fun.

CNN.com has a disturbing story about dandruff pollution. This is a serious problem that we need to stop and think about it. As a public service, I’m going to tell every person I see today to use some Head and Shoulders so that they, too, can be gorgeous and dandruff-free.

You know what rules?

For lunch, I took the dog for a ride to the car wash and, for the first time since I’ve owned it, washed the jeep. Then I swung through Taco Bell and ordered cinnamon twists for the dog. Stopped at the walking path near the house, ate lunch and took the dog for a walk.

Now I’m sitting on the front porch, temperature in the mid-60s, and coding. The dog is on her long leash next to me, watching the neighbor (who til this day still hasn’t said a word to me since he moved in nearly two years ago despite attempts at making conversation) fertilize his lawn. When Dena gets home I’ll fire up the grill and we’ll have hamburgers and potatoes. I even found time to clean the inside of the jeep. It looked like someone had been living in it for a few weeks.

Tomorrow promises to be another gorgeous day like today. Unfortunately that will be the end of the nice weather for a few days, but that’s okay. Spring is finally here and damn does it feel good.

Yet another Spring has arrived, bringing with it allergies worse than the year before. The first few years I blamed it on coincidence or sympathy symptoms of Dena’s allergies. Nope. I’ve got ’em and they seem to be getting a little worse every year. I guess it’s time to admit it and start taking medicine before bed instead of waiting until midnight, not being able to sleep, and finally popping an antihistamine so I can get some rest.

At least I don’t have to worry about being fresh for work in the morning. That’s one benefit of self-employment. I can pick and choose my hours, for the most part. So far it’s working quite well. I typically work 9-5 downstairs in my “office” and then spend the evening on the couch working on various projects. I’m managing my deadlines quite nicely and still having time for some fun stuff as well.

Tomorrow night I’m heading out to see Andy Lester talk about crisis prevention in software development. It should be an interesting meeting, plus I’ve been wanting to meet Andy for a while now. I’ve read some of his work, mostly in Spidering Hacks, and he’s a fellow Chicagoland perl-monger.

Wednesday night I’ll be going to the Spotter Training held by the National Weather Service and the Aurora EMA. Storm Spotting and ham radio seem to go hand in hand. I’ve been meaning to make one of these classes for the past three years and this will be the first year that work hasn’t gotten in the way.

Last but not least it would be remiss of me not to mention that my return to writting has begun. This marks 35 semi-regular issues of Linux.Ars that have been published to date. We’ve adopted a bi-monthly publishing schedule for the column and I expect some good things to come out of it. It’s gotten me back into the habit of writing again. I’m ashamed to say that I let that skill slip quietly to the wayside when things got rocky at work and I had to limit my outside activities. That issue is now resolved and I have to say, like riding a bike, you may get rusty with a lack of practice but once you start riding again it all comes back do you.