Christmas, the Sequel

Rachael and I had our Christmas a few days ago. It was great. She bought me this Final Fantasy 8 necklace that I love and now wear 24/7. The reason for this is because she put the accompanying ring on a chain and is now wearing that as well. Kind of a couples thing, you know? Wearing metal around my neck is taking some getting used to, but I'm not complaining. Definitely a great present :)

She wasn't expecting anything from anybody but me, but my mom, little sister, and someone who wishes to remain nameless got her presents as well. She walked away with a bag full of stuff.

I bought her a sword that she's been wanting for several years, but has been unable to get ahold of. The look on her face when she saw it was worth it. I also got her the "I Love My Geek" shirt from ThinkGeek. It looks great on her :)

Angry Emu

Angry Emu, my emulator game menu, now works really well. There are some other features I want to add, but for now, it's a working game menu that looks decent and lets me see all my games, along with screenshots and title screens and cabinets and what-not. Maybe I'll release a version soon, after I finish polishing the UI.

Desktop Integration, Presence, and Related Information Gathering

I've been interested lately in the concepts around full desktop integration, presence, and related information gathering (a la Dashboard. It's a cool area, and I think a lot of improvements can be made. I'm in the process of drafting a specification for a desktop-neutral system for the aforementioned concepts. This should really be something that any application could easily plug into to provide information, and also to request and display information.

I'll speak more about this when I have some solid ideas down, so I don't get ahead of myself and say something that I realize later isn't practical.

On a related topic, Mike Hearn and I are putting together a small site that is basically similar to the Gnome Bounties pages, where they list tasks they'd like to see done for desktop work. Of course, it wouldn't be a bounty system, as we don't have that kind of money. It's essentially an idea bank. We plan to feature desktop integration, application, and packaging tasks, for the time being.

Job Hunt

I need to find myself a job. What would be perfect is something dealing with open source development, preferably in the areas I'm interested in. You know, the geek's dream job. Unfortunately, few ever get that dream job. The closest I can find are programming jobs locally for proprietary software, which I would take if they would hire me. Since I don't have a degree yet, they won't hire me as a programmer.

One company said they would if I could be full time and stop going to school, but school is a bit too important to just give up. Perhaps night school... Of course, I'd be working on Windows "dialing" software for custom wireless network connections. I don't know what they need dialing software. They use 802.11b, afterall.