Jen and I spent the Christmas holiday in Deptford, New Jersey with her family. While her mother is still a little Christmas crazy (and passed it on to Jen), she has definitely calmed down from a couple years ago. However, she still made so many Christmas cookies and chocolate dipped things. I think I probably gained several pounds over the week I spent there. All in all, it was a fine Christmas.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the trip was that I gathered yet more evidence that I am allergic to latex rubber products (but fortunately, not LaTeX). Over the last several months, my skin has been really acting up. After months and many many visits to a dermatologist, I think I'm just about ready to conclude that contact dermatitis from latex is to blame. I had a patch test where they put a blotter of 24 different common allergens on my back for 3 days, which showed I was allergic to thimerisol and carba mix, which includes chemicals in many rubber products. While in New Jersey, I applied a latex bandaid to my finger for a minor cut, and within 24 hours I had a very noticeable allergic reaction right underneath the bandaid. Fairly conclusive, I think. I also noticed that several of the itchy areas correspond to elastic bands in my clothing, so I ordered some latex-free underwear online. We'll see if it helps any.

From New Jersey, we drove to Cape Cod for a fantastic New Year's party in a giant mansion. I had some time to play around with the 17-55 2.8 IS lens I have rented right now. It is definitely a very good general purpose lens for 1.6x cameras, although I do wish it got a bit longer. That said I'm not sure I'd want to buy one just yet. I'm not sure it gives me enough advantage over my current 10-22 and 28-135. Also, I hear a replacement for the 5D is coming out soon, so I'm probably going to hold of buying a new lens until I decide I can't afford a new body.

The party on the Cape also featured Rock Band. Jen liked it so much that we bought it. Since buying it on Wednesday, people have already come over to rock out twice, and more scheduled for Sunday. I'm really not very good at it. I've never had much musical aptitude, and although Rock Band doesn't map perfectly to real musical skill, I'm still bad at it.

After the Cape we drove on to Boston for work and a wedding. The wedding was at St James's Episcopal Church on Mass Ave. The lighting in the church was so amazingly horrible for photography, and I failed to get an aisle seat, so I don't really have an pictures from the ceremony. The reception was much better lit, and had a nice low ceiling for bounce flash, so I did at least get a few good photos.

And now I'm finally back home. While we were gone we put our cat in a Feline Bed and Breakfast. When I went to pick him up, he seemed pretty happy, and he recovered from the experience remarkably quickly. If you absolutely have to board your cat in the Bay Area, I recommend them highly.

Much of my free time in the last few months has been devoted to being sick. I've been to the doctor's office more times than I can count, and they are still not sure what the fuck is wrong with me. I'm due for a "patch test" in which they stick a bunch of allergens on my back and don't let me shower for four days. However, I'm told not to have too high hopes for this test.

I've also spent a lot of time on "research" into November Games. I've been working on this on and off for several years now, and I finally finished enough to publish a version. I'm still working on it, so expect more improvements in the next few years. You can download the paper at:
http://www.nimlabs.org/~nim/nov/report.pdf

Now that November is over, I'm trying to pick up some of my other hobbies that have fallen by the wayside. I'm refreshing my sourdough starter which miraculously isn't dead yet, despite months of neglect in the fridge. Yeasts are hardy critters. I'll probably just bake a few loaves before putting it back in storage, just to remind myself that I can.

Another hobby to pick up is ham radio. I'm pretty sure what I need is an auto-tuner. Although the Buddipole can be hand tuned, I'm not very good at it and the VSWR meter on the FT-817 is pretty shitty. I suspect I'll buy the LDG Z-100 or maybe the Z-11 Pro.

And finally, photography. Since my last post, I've been to a wedding in Boston and gone ballooning in Sonoma. I'll be shooting another wedding (they are dropping like flies!!) in a week, this time as the official photographer! I'm not actually a wedding photographer, I'm just doing this as a favor for a couple of good friends. It does mean I need to clean my sensor (you can see a couple persistent specks in the ballooning photos), and I think I may rent a lens, the Canon 70-200 F2.8 L IS, which is very popular with wedding photographers.

Yet another big time sink has been our TV system. I recently purchased a new 32" LCD HDTV and got rid of our old and hugely shitty 21" CRT. And of course, being the geek I am, I decided now that I had an HD display, I needed to make our MythTV machine record broadcast HD programming. So I bought a pcHDTV 5500 card and stuck it in the machine. Of course, with the new HD workload, the machine wasn't quite performing up to my demaning specifications, so I upgraded the CPU and disks, and spent many hours rebuilding kernels, reconfiguring X, and generally improving performance. Although the machine is now an unmaintainable mess, it seems to perform acceptably. Victory, or something.

Well, thats all for now. Hopefully future posts will be a little more frequent.

First off, the Kitty destroyed my thermarest. It now has a large number of small claw shaped slits in it, and thus does a very poor job of being airtight. For some reason, cat attacks don't seem to be covered by the thermarest lifetime warranty, either. I could get a Z-rest to replace it since that would not have this problem (this is already the second thermarest I've had to replace due to leaking), but for some reason I really prefer the extra padding of inflatable pads.

I was already pretty pissed off by having to replace my sleeping pad, when to make matters worse, my beloved fleece jacket died in the dryer. The main zipper exploded; now it doesn't have a handle and it only goes up unless you use a small pointy object to depress a little lever which unlocks the ratchet mechanism. This is probably reparable, but the jacket is already in pretty sorry shape. I've had it for at least 8 years, maybe closer to 10, and it has accompanied me on a wide range of adventures. I loved that fleece dearly, but it is time to let go. I'll probably buy a new one at REI or something, although I just know they won't have an exact replacement.

In related news, I bought a new camera bag for this trip: the Lowepro Nova 3. Its main feature is that it has belt loops that fit on the hip strap of my pack, so I can carry it on my waist. Hopefully this will be better than attaching a bag to the side of my pack like I did last time.

In the process I've learned a lot about pyblosxom and CSS. Overall, I'm pretty happy with pyblosxom, although it does require a certain level of OCD. It gives you the bare minimum rope you might need to implement a blog, and little else. Fortunately, it is very tasteful rope, and many people have contributed modules to do common things (like, say, prev/next buttons for when there are too many articles for one page. Or the 'categories' and 'archives' style navigation on the right. Those are all plugins.)

Of course, I'm still pretty inexperienced at this whole newfangled CSS stuff, so the page probably has lots of problems. If you notice anything, or it just looks crappy in your browser, please do let me know. Here at Nimlabs, Ink., we value your feedback!