Hi again.

Well, welcome to 2011.

First order news:  Clare and I got engaged!  More details on that to come.  It’ll be in San Diego, and we’re currently looking into three different venues in: A winery in Julian, an organic lavender farm in Valley Center, and a beautiful park just outside of Ramona.  We’ve actually had a lot of fun thinking about different ideas for food, decorations, etc.  Date set for sometime tentatively in June 2012.  Waterhouse Lavender Rose.

Now then, back to the normal news.  So, we moved back to San Diego, and we’re currently living in Julian with Clare’s parents.  I haven’t found work, and have decided to go back to school, which brings me to another happy announcement: I’ve been accepted to Cal State San Marcos for the Fall of 2011.

This is pretty great.  It’s been almost a decade since I was able to make school a priority, and in the last semester and a half I’ve been doing just that and getting straight A’s.  I’ll be switching from a CompSci degree to an InfoSys degree, which I think is more my interest right now.  Less math, more business focus.  Time to focus on some Java development, I suppose.  That’s kind of cool, though, because Chris is getting into the idea of trying to get back into coding, too.  We’ll see how that goes, hopefully we can get on the same page and work on something together.

In somewhat related news, Clare and I have been tutoring my cousins Sam and Noah in Computers/Programming and Art respectively, so I’ve actually been enjoying working with Sam on that.

What have I been up to other than that… well, I’ve been watching with hope and amazement as the Arab world comes unglued.  Memories of the failed Iranian revolution keep coming back to me.  But so far, there’s been some measure of success in Egypt and in Tunisia.  Now that the international community is getting involved, we’ll see if Libya is next.

On an entirely different note, I’ve been having a lot of fun cooking lately, again.  I made a nice thin chocolate sauce recipe, pizza dough, cinnamon raisin muffin bread, cupcakes, and a very good blueberry tart the other day.  Then I found a recipe program called Krecipes and I’ve been putting my favorite recipes into it, since Google Wave (my current recipe keeper) is going away.  Krecipes uses a SQL database backend, which seems like overkill but opens up some interesting side-applications.  For example, I’ve been thinking it might be fun to put that database online and to write an Android recipe app which pulls from the database.  Then someday, when Android tablets are free in cereal boxes, I can have one in my kitchen for my recipes.

That’s about it for now.  I’ll leave you with these:

• A cool conceptual art piece, measuring WiFi signal strength using long-exposure photography.
• A squirrel obstacle course.

And this, seen from /., a long, long time ago.
Q: How do you identify a dyslexic, agnostic insomniac?
A: They lie awake at night, wondering whether there’s a dog.