Hmm, been a looooong time. I'm going to UBC for grad school. It was a tough choice between it and NYU, and if I'm being honest with myself, a lot of the decision came down to me wanting Canadian permanent residence. On that front, all my documents were mailed a couple of months ago, including the check (oops, cheque) and the medical exam. As far as I know, I'm just waiting for the final paperwork now. Of course I haven't heard anything from CIC since I sent everything out, and they are impossible to contact.

Anyway, I'm moving to Vancouver in a week! It's pretty exciting, even though the move is going to be really stressful (and I'm sure I'll miss New York quite a bit. Maybe I can get people to honk horns outside my window).

I quit my job and went to China for a couple of weeks to visit my sister (very cool, especially hearing her talking away in putonghua to various surprised locals). Now I've got some free time and I've been programming again. I did a few minor mutt patches, including SSL client side certificate support, and some icecast work: nonblocking libshout with theora support (both rewrites of initial code by the tireless Karl Heyes), and a crossfader for ices, which made me surprisingly happy considering how simple it was. After I put it in play, I discovered that a lot of my MP3s have a few seconds of silence at the end, so I wrote a little script to find out where that silence starts and trim it. It's too much of a sloppy hack to release, but I might fix it up, since googling came up with nothing that does the same thing. Why is that? It seems to be a common problem.