I'm 29 Today

No, really.

This is the one birthday when everyone tends to think that you're lying about your age. For some reason, everyone wants to be 29, but not 30. I suppose I'll understand this more next year, but at the moment, it just seems silly.

First of all, I'd like to say thanks to all the people who wished me a happy birthday today. Facebook is especially scary, with no less than 54 posts to my wall. Corinne sent me a text message at 12amEST which was pretty cool, and Theresa even called me from London! It's so nice to know that I have so many friends all over the place.

I'm sitting here on the SeaWall watching boats in English Bay and evesdropping on the conversations of passersby while I write out this blog post to be uploaded later. Sadly, despite the symphony of wireless networks floating around me, not one of them is unencrypted and of a reasonable strength to connect. I suppose I could try hacking into the stronger WEP connections, but that takes too much time and I just want to blog.

So a quick update on what's happening in my life lately. I have a new roomate. Well not so much a roomate as family staying with me for a few months. My brother, aka "Butthead" has had some trouble with the girlfriend of late and so he's crashing with me for a few months so he can get his life in order. To be honest, I'm less than thrilled at the prospect of having anyone live with me (I dig the solitude) but when family needs you, you go... or in this case I guess you just give them a key.

On the work front, everything came to a head today. We deployed a big hunk of code that's almost completely dependent on some very cool kung-foo I wrote. Unfortunately, I missed a very minor detail and the whole project blew up for about 3 hours today until I found it, fixt it, and thanked the other teams involved for being patient with me. That was less than cool, but it's working now and the hiccup was documented. I really don't know how the Brass at the company feel about my work of late though -- there's an odd feeling I get when I walk into the office these past few days. My review is tomorrow though, so I guess I'll find out then.

My activism has taken a back seat to my day job over the past few months, but I intend to remedy that soon. The VPSN mapping group I'm in needs a bunch of stuff done and they need it soon, so I've promised them a working model by the 15th. Time to get my ass in gear.

On top of that, I have a new Big Idea that Melanie has convinced me to actually move on. I've documented most of how it would (theoretically) work, but I still need to do some research on practical implementation. I'll post the details soon.

As for my actual birthday, I've decided to take the evening and do close to nothing. I suppose that I should be at choir rehearsal right now, but I just don't want to socialise today. Vancouver's really quite nice when you want to "get away" actually. There are lots of places just to ride your bike to sit for a bit and enjoy the scenery. Maybe I'll go to Stanley Park later, or the Planetarium... I dunno. Does anyone else do the solo thing on their birthday? Is this odd?

Alright, sun's going down. I shall hop back on Syria and see where she takes me.