Not quite a year, but it's been a while since I posted here. Let's see...

I've been taking classes for a year now. I've got a 4.0 (across 3 classes... I'm not exactly moving quickly), and I finally did all of the work to apply for admission as a graduate student this past semester. I have a professor ready to be my advisor, a potential thesis topic, and excellent (as in, "top 1%" excellent if I can brag for a moment) GRE scores. I'm pretty sure I'll get in, but I'm not doing the normal thing (in particular, Colorado State doesn't normally let remote/online students pursue the research degree plan), so I won't really know until I know. I am grateful for the summer off, though.

I've started brewing beer, and I'm on my second batch (a Belgian wit with coriander and orange peel) sitting in a fermenter that I'll be bottling this weekend. Even cutting a lot of corners, I'm getting great results, and I think the biggest corner to avoid cutting is paranoid sterilization.

I started a new job in October, and it's been going very well; not much else to report on that front.

And finally... well, we're expecting a baby this winter. Getting ready for that is a harrowing process, but so far I'm reasonably optimistic. I have a mohawk again, and I'm looking forward to being a freaky dad. :-)

I guess I don't talk much about anything but school here these days. I don't really want to talk about work, and between the two there's not a whole lot else to talk about. It's a busy life. :-)

This Fall I am taking a course on parallel programming - I am also trying to figure out how best to do the whole degree thing: it reads like a logic puzzle.

As I've mentioned before, I am currently enrolled in classes but not actually accepted into the program, a situation with which the university is fine - up to a point. At most three classes taken before graduate acceptance can apply toward the degree, and (presumably) I will hit that limit in the Spring. If I then apply for admission, I will get an answer over the summer and be accepted (hopefully) for the Fall - forcing me to skip the summer session.

If I apply now, for admission in the Spring, I'll be fine - accept that I will have fewer classes under my belt, won't have taken the GRE (which is not required but strongly recommended), and will generally be a weaker candidate. It's also a hell of a lot of paperwork to get done in the next couple of months, including recommendations...

I think I'm going to shoot for admission next Fall session, and plan on skipping the Summer session next year. If I take two classes that Fall session, and two more the 2012 Fall session, I'll have everything I need as well as the opportunity to take all the classes I want (rather than taking more of what look like fairly uninteresting classes).

Frustratingly, classes offered for the Fall session are prerequisites for other courses throughout the year, as well as being where most of the most interesting classes are. If I don't double down at some point, it will take a lot longer to graduate; if I don't do it during the Fall, my options for classes I care about drops significantly as well.

My summer class is done, I did pretty well. Now I'm trying to decide between taking one class this fall, or pushing it and doing two. There's a lot more to that decision than I really want to talk about right now, and not just because I'm lazy... :-P

Regardless, though, I feel pretty committed to doing this Master's degree thing, even if I'm just scratching the surface of what will be required to complete it.

I had to install a bunch of extra packages, but I can participate in online classwork and listen to lectures on my laptop running Ubuntu. Colorado State's online course website runs on a mix of Java and Silverlight (honestly, not a mix I ever expected). For Linux, Moonlight isn't complete or perfect but I can hear the lecture audio and see the slides; the fact that I can't see the lecture doesn't seem that big a deal.

Actually, it would seem like a big deal, since slides + audio doesn't cover (for instance) whiteboard scribblings... except that they've got a pretty neat setup in the classroom that's being recorded. The professor has some kind of touchscreen with a stylus in front of him. He has PowerPoint slides, but can also annotate the screen with the stylus, or switch off the slides entirely and write on the screen like a whiteboard. Whatever happens on that screen gets projected in front of the class, and captured separately as a slideshow: that's the part I can see on my laptop. So I can't see the professor walking around on the screen, but it doesn't really matter.

I would like to be able to participate in the lecture as it happens, but of course the whole reason I'm doing this online is that I can't be there at 11am or whenever - so I could have nothing, or I can have this. This isn't bad.

Landlord at the old place is doing a walkthrough this afternoon; we are done and done over there.

We have unpacked maybe five boxes at the new house, and don't have Internet access yet.

Not much else to say... very little free time, and I'm spending too much of it at bars. Going to correct my course and keep unpacking. Whee. :-)

I was reminded, when the hub-bub about Google Buzz started (particularly, the ways in which it ignored personal privacy), how happy I am to avoid Google services for private information. It's one of the reasons I run my own server for mail and web stuff rather than rely on them. At the same time, some of their services to store and comb over and maybe later publish your personal data - like Google Calendars - aren't all that easy to replace. I own an iPhone, which would happily integrate with (and, effectively, be backed up by) their calendar, and Google makes it easy to share calendars between people too.

After a lot of digging and researching in my [copious] free time, I've finally hit upon eGroupWare as a pretty decent replacement. My calendar is stored on my server (which is backed up very basically at the moment¹), and is accessible via a halfway decent web application, my iPhone, and even Thunderbird (via the Lightning plugin). Similarly, I hope to have SyncML sorted out, so that my iPhone contacts are synchronized with eGroupWare², and then accessible also through the web and in Thunderbird (I'm still looking at options here).

There are some bugs with eGroupWare for sure: there seem to be some serious inconsistencies in the way timezones are handled, SyncML has been a complete failure so far, and the integrated mail client is much less user-friendly than RoundCube (which I've been using for quite a while). However, it's got potential and I think I can work through the bugs with enough free time.

The payoff, though, is being able to share calendars and contacts with misphit, have it all backed up relentlessly, and be able to access it from anywhere on every device I want. In other words... all the promises Google makes for using their services, but without having my personal information held hostage and potentially (ab)used for purposes I'm not comfortable with³.

I just have to get the contacts part working now.

1. I do nightly backups of my server, but store the dump files on a spare disk in the server - not offline, and definitely not off-site backups. Another small project of mine is to automate encrypting dump files and storing them on Amazon S3, as well as write a script (stored in that same S3 bucket) to do restores from there.

2. Unlike my calendar, which I'm okay with storing on the server and accessing on my phone via CalDAV, I want contacts to be available on my phone when GPRS, 3G, and WiFi are unavailable. So they'll be stored in both places but synchronized.

3. They have plenty of information on me already, like most people, and I don't mind that so much (and can't really do anything about it). Still, there's a line, and I don't trust them to stay on the "not evil" side of it.

Yeah, sorry, it's been over a month since I've posted. I've averaged about one Facebook status update a week in that time, too, we've just been really busy.

After crossing ever t and dotting every i twice, we finally closed on our house last Wednesday. Then we leased the house back to the seller until Friday, and then we started painting on Saturday. Now we've got just one more room to paint before we starting moving crap in; I didn't think it was going to be a huge job, but two vaulted ceilings (and all the nooks and crannies and edges in the kitchen) made it much bigger.

This whole time, I've also been putting in overtime at work when I could, because... well, a lot of crap has to get done. In a few weeks when I'm feeling a bit more settled in the house (and done with the place we're still renting for March) I'll probably put in a few extra days at the office, we'll see how that goes.

I am really happy with the house; it's a lot more space, and a big chunk of that extra space is in the kitchen and bathroom. To be honest, the master bathroom is swanky, with a big tub and separate shower, two sinks, and a little toilet room. What's really notable, though, is that the toilet room is about the size of the "master bathroom" in our rental. I know we don't need that much space in the bathroom, but after 6 years of banging both elbows into opposite walls when I towel dry, I felt like... we need to see the other extreme.

The last few days, to escape thinking about house buying (we found four houses we really like in the neighborhoods and price range we want, and are probably going to send some initial offers out later today), I've been thinking about another sink of time and effort... a graduate degree.

In particular, I've been poking around at places that offer online, part-time Masters' degrees in computer science. Although I'm fine learning on my own and on the job, I enjoy challenging classes, and being exposed to things I wouldn't otherwise see¹. On top of that, my employer offers education assistance, so if the class (or the degree) is related to work, I can probably manage to take classes at near-zero net cost.

Someone asked me yesterday if I wanted the degree to learn, or to make more money. Both, really, although not quite in the way my interrogator meant it: I think knowing more, and having more intellectual tools available, will help me earn raises and promotions more easily. A Master's - particularly one taken after I had a lot of experience, rather than fresh from an undergraduate education - could also make me look more attractive for more senior jobs in the future.

But doing even minor due diligence suggests I should really only do it if I want the education itself: my BS in math seems, in large part, to have already gotten me as far as an MCS would get me. Further, degrees are not a particularly big deal in the game industry, and there is definitely a strong anti-academic bias (although 3D graphics is one area that seems to enjoy a better relationship between industry and academia, I dunno how true that is these days and it's not particularly an interest of mine).

I'm also hampered by an atrocious undergraduate GPA. Some universities allow pretty much anyone to enroll in the online graduate CS courses they offer without accepting them into the program, though. I would hope that taking a few courses - which is to say, about a year's worth, at one course per semester - and doing well would demonstrate enough academic ability and focus that I could then be accepted into the program proper. Without knowing for sure, though, I would definitely need to make sure the initial courses were worth my time without the degree too, of course.

I don't have any decision yet. Even if it doesn't help me make more money, it might help me stay employable for longer², or help me retire from games into the regular software industry in 10-15 years. I've solicited feedback from a few people who will read this separately, but I'm curious what my wider reading audience thinks.

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1. The classes in college on art history were a real joy for me, and far removed from anything I would have set out to study myself. In fact, they're kind of the silver lining to how drawn out my undergraduate career was, because every time I thought I was done with my general education requirements, I discovered I needed three more credits in some weird subject that art history matched nicely.
2. I have a long-standing fear that as a programmer, and particularly as a programmer who hasn't hitched his wagon to any one company for an extended career, I will be largely unemployable when I hit 50. I've just seen it too many times, and although I hope attitudes will have changed in this regard in 20 years, I'm not very confident it will, so I am trying to prepare now.

misphit and I are taking steps toward home ownership. We have been speaking, off and on, with a mortgage broker since last August(-ish), but thankfully didn't move past "talking" before I was laid off last October. Between changing our budget to more aggressively save, and the rather short period I was unemployed (and shorter than the approximate time-value of my severance), we are at a point now of actually talking to a real estate agent. We've already solicited some recommendations, and have a few people we're talking to.

We've been pre-approved for a reasonable loan, have found some properties online with which to start our search, and are moving along toward this goal. Granted, I work in an unstable industry, so it's a little scary, but I think it's a manageable risk and the plan is definitely not to pour all our pennies into this (although, yes, a fair number of them).

Also, not get fired or laid off. But that was kinda already the plan.