Oh, dear -- a lot has changes in the (long) interval since my last entry.

I accepted a job north of Orlando, Florida. It's with a company with which I've worked before, under a different name (the company, not me). My wife is still "at home", until we get the house sold. My place to live is an apartment nearby. It's hard going back to living in a small place that someone else ultimately controls, from owning a fairly large house.

My new job involves (re-)learning BASIC. I'm no beginner, and it's far from all-purpose. Still, there are plenty of interesting problems around to solve; I don't own any, but I get to toss in my hat when walking past interesting discussions. I've managed to stir the status quo and break up some prejudices, and that makes me happy.

In the last month, I met Michael Piefel, a Berliner in town for a conference that had "Informatics" in the title. We found a pub downtown that he was familliar with and sampled a few beers. I'd much rather the Linux socializing meme use tea than beer, but alas....

Will Newton's clisp package is ready for another upload, but I can't seem to find the time to inspect it. Dang!

jcv decided not to attend school nearby. I'm disappointed that I won't be able to see him very often.

My friend Rochelle's mother has cancer. She supposed to have surgery soon, to remove it. I had breakfast with Rochelle and Ryan last Saturday. They caught Mary Ellen and myself leaving town. It was very nice to see them.

Speaking of cancer, it's been almost exactly two years since my own treatments started, and almost a year and a half since they stopped. I have a follow-up appointment at the end of this week. I very much hope the strange tightness in my chest is stress. I'm not sure I can do that again. No, I can do it, if I must. I will. ...but I hope I don't have to.

I haven't been kite-flying, yet. I'm too far inland to get the characteristic sea-breeze that makes kiting so much fun.

I've read with interest the discussions of document preparation in the diary logs. I'm an advocate of Docbook, and sgml in general. Anyone who looks at the source and doesn't see whatever format they want in output either doesn't have enough imagination or they don't understand the tools available to process SGMLs. DSSSL and XSLT aren't hard to learn at all. Heck, I marked-up the entire <u>The Lord of The Rings</u> into Docbook and used XSLT to distill it into source for a compiler for a PalmOS book reader, PalmReader. Easy.

Man, It's hot here in Orlando! There ought'a be a law!