(With thanks to J. Michael Straczinski's Babylon 5 for acquainting me with the phrase.)
I have spent much time parenting the offspring young and old. But by setting aside one day a week for technical pursuits, I have accomplished most of what I set out to achieve, and discovered much more along the way.
Beginning this the last full month of my leave, looking back I have:
- Read 7 fantastic novels, numerous Linux magazines and 4 issues of Scientific American
- Learned Ruby and played with Ruby on Rails
- Learned CSS and AJAX, cleaned and spruced up the family website for XHTML1.1 compliance
- Studied RESTful web services. Built a Facebook application, and Yahoo and del.icio.us clients.
- Studied design patterns - something that definitely wasn't covered in a business-focussed Information Systems qualification.
- Built and maintained PostgreSQL databases.
- Upgraded both the OS and the RAM on WideMouthFrog, the family server
- Rescued the data from Sarah's dead disk Dell using Knoppix, recovering all the data files, email and address books, and migrating them (via iCAL, Thunderbird and Plaxo) to Evolution on WideMouthFrog which Sarah now accesses via XDMCP from an old underspecced HP machine running Fedora 4. (I may yet update this to Xubuntu 7.10 to keep up with security updates.)
- Transcoded and backed up most of my SF collection for...
- Built a Media Server for serving both the OSD via the LAN and realtime transcoding down to the N800 wirelessly.
- Secured the open ports with Denyhosts
- Joined linuxsa.org.au
All marvelous fun. (see Aristotle)
The other objective of wading through my unwatched DVD collection has not gotten as far. I've kept up with the Doctor Who and Sarah Jane releases, relived The Omega Factor, made a good start on The Avengers and rewatched some UFO and Space 1999, but Blake's 7, Angel, Twin Peaks, Dark Angel, Highlander, Press Gang, and Dilbert all remain to some extent neglected. All the while Sarah has advanced through 4 seasons of Star Trek DS9 and a lot of Top Gear.
Not to worry: DVD has not yet gone the way of the Long Playing Record. While HD-DVD and Blu-RAY fight it out for consumers waiting to surrender their rights to use what they've paid for in the name of higher resolution video, I am content in the knowledge that anything I am remotely interested in was never recorded in that detail in the first place. And as long as
Celebrity Kidney Swap* is the opiate of the TV viewing and voting masses, that will (sadly) remain true.
Yet while I can clearly see the end of my life of leisure approaching, and shortly thereafter the vanishing point of my claim to thirtysomethingness, perhaps Aristotle and I have learned something to take back to the world of Work that might just keep me on the right side of the Asylum.
*Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels, 2007
