Long Time, No Blog

So, it's been about a month since my last post here, and man has it been busy. The first month at any new job is a big adjustment, and Google, if anything, has been even more so than other companies I've worked at.

In addition to working at a new company I'm also making the transition from a job where I worked from home to one where I work in an office, one which brings with it a non-trivial commute. This is, needless to say, a bit of a change. The commute is taking some getting used to, but so far so good. I'm actually enjoying taking the train in to Cambridge every day, I mean sure it sucks to have to get out of bed way earlier than I used to, but it also means I've got a chunk of time at the beginning and end of every day to sit there, zone out, read a book, etc. I'm working my way through the Baroque Cycle again at the moment, and it's nice to get a chance to read other than when I end up sitting on a plane for a few hours.

On top of all of this there's the holidays. This is the first December that Joanna and I are really spending as a couple (well, technically there was last year, but we'd only been dating for a month or so at the time, so it's not really the same thing). This means spending a bunch of time driving back and forth between our house, her parents house and my parents house, but in the end it was worth it. Spending the holidays with both of our families was a lot of fun, even if it did leave us pretty exhausted.

Anyway, the holidays are coming to a close today and tomorrow, and then we'll be back into full fledged wedding planning. We decided to take the holidays off, which was great but now there's the ever present feeling of being behind schedule. I mean we're not, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel that way ;-)

Ok, now we should be up to date. Hopefully I'll get into the habit of keeping things a little more up to date in the future, but who knows how well that's going to work...

Brief Period Of Unemployment

A lot of you probably already heard this one way or another, but I figure I should blog about it for the people who I haven't seen in person over the last couple of weeks.

Yesterday was my last day working for Joost. Tomorrow I'm flying out to California and Monday morning I'll start my new job at Google. Don't worry, I'll only be in California for two weeks, then I'll be working from the Google office in Cambridge.

Just to be clear, I left Joost on the best of terms. I fully enjoyed my time with the company, I met some great people, learned a lot, and got to work on some awesome things, a number of which have not yet seen the light of day but trust me, they're very cool. I expect nothing but great things from the company going forward, and I wish my former coworkers nothing but the best of luck.

If things were so peachy why did I jump ship for Google? Well, the primary reason was simply one of work environment. I've been working from home for a while now, and largely because of the way my living situation has changed over the past year it had become clear that I wasn't going to be able to do it forever. Working from home when you are living with a couple of roommates who are in and out fairly regularly is one thing. Doing it when you're living with a fiancee who's gone all day is rather different. Human interaction (on a face-to-face basis, not just online) is important, and I could see that sooner or later the need to actually hang out with other engineers on a daily basis was going to be a problem.

Yes, it turns out that actually having an office to go to can be a big benefit. I never thought I'd say it, but I'm actually looking forward to having a commute again. We'll see how well that holds up after I've actually had my first week or two riding the commuter rail in to South Station, followed up by a short T ride out to Kendall Square...

So, that's the position I was in when I heard from a Google recruiter, and I figured I might as well investigate the possibility. If I was going to be in a position where sometime in the next 6-12 months I'd be looking for a job with a company that had a local office I might as well take advantage of the fact that a really great company with a local office was actually knocking on my door. A few months later everything has worked its way through the Google hiring process and here we are.

It was a very difficult decision to make, and I suspect I won't know for at least a year or so if it was the right one, but with all the options in front of me taking the job at Google seemed like the best choice for me right now.

And yes, for the thousandth time, I'm sure a picture of me in the Noogler beanie will be making the rounds sooner or later, as Joanna says I'm not allowed to spend two weeks out in Mountain View unless she gets to see one.

Sounds Familiar...

Great article in today's Globe about what happens when really dedicated fans watch a Red Sox game:

Sometimes, when she's watching the Red Sox, Elena Tate said, she feels "like I'm going to die." She'll get dizzy. Her palms will sweat. She'll hold her breath. "It's a lot of physiological and psychological stress," she said. "Sometimes, I feel like I can't stand it."

Yeah, that's pretty much what it's like at our house. At least when the channel hasn't been preemptively changed because of impending doom. Check out the rest of the article, it's pretty damn amusing.

Yeah, They Really Have No Clue.

Ever wonder why the story about what kinds of food you're supposed to eat in order to have a healthy diet changes all the time? Why the stuff that you were supposed to eat 5 years ago turns out to be bad and the stuff you were supposed to avoid last year turns out to actually reduce the chances of some new disease? It's because the kind of studies that determine that sort of thing are pretty much always fatally flawed.

Want to know why? Here's a fantastic article in the New York Times that explains the problems. It uses hormone-replacement therapy as its core example, but it's really the same thing, as the studies used to tell you that eating more of food X causes disease Y are subject to all the same sorts of problems as the one that tells you that HRT is a good idea.

The article's really long, but it's worth reading all the way through. Just think of it as a condensed version of the kind of conversation I have with Joanna whenever one of these studies comes across her desk at work ;-)

Let the <strike>Procrastination</strike> Planning Begin!

So, I've already told a few people, and it's not like it should be a really huge surprise to anyone (come on people, we've spent the past few months looking at houses, you do the math), but for the benefit of those of you I haven't actually spoken to over the past few days, this weekend Joanna and I decided to get married.

Well, that's really not entirely accurate. We decided we were eventually going to get married a while back. This weekend we actually started buckling down and start the mechanics of the whole thing, setting dates, talking about venues, ranking our friends and family in order of who's the most likely to give us the best gifts, allowing Joanna's elderly relatives to breathe a little easier about the fact that we're moving in together, etc.

Anyway, the event itself will be sometime in late March or early April, somewhere in the Boston area. We're thinking a reasonably small guest list (which starts to sound way less small once you take into account that just the bare minimum required family members already brings you to 30 people, and that doesn't even count our friends), and we're going to make a concerted effort to NOT turn into one of those couples whose life becomes completely and totally centered around planning what is in the end after all just a fairly large party.

Now I just have to get used to the idea of referring to Joanna as my fiance instead of my girlfriend. I suppose I'll get used to that just in time to start getting used to the idea of referring to her as my wife ;-)

No Really, This Time For Sure!

After the roller coaster ride we went through with the last house we made an offer on Joanna and I were a bit more careful this time. She started bringing a flashlight to houses we were looking at, and we spent a lot of time looking at the deep dark corners of the basement and other similar locations that our home inspector had seemed to enjoy pointing out problems. Fortunately, this payed off, and the house we decided on had far less trouble with the inspection than the first one did. I'm not saying it was perfect, but lets just say Mike was orders of magnitude more positive in his report with this house than he was with the other.

So yes, this means we've found a house and we're through the inspection process completely. Paperwork has been signed and we'll be moving in on November 1st.

We decided on a lease to own agreement, which means that we put a small percentage of the purchase price down as a deposit, and then lease the house for a year with a percentage of our monthly rent going towards the eventual down payment. At the end of the year we decide if we want to buy or not. If we do buy we get the house at the price we agreed on now, and we've got the added bonus of having already lived there so we know what we're getting into. If we don't buy then we only walk away from a few thousand dollars worth of down payment, which is a nice option to have in the event that the housing market nose dives or we end up hating the place for one reason or another.

Some details on the house. It's in Dedham near the West Roxbury line. That means we're close to Joanna's office, near commuter rail lines to get into Boston if either of us ever needs to do that for work, about half an hour from Joanna's parents and about an hour from mine. The house itself is a 3 bedroom 2.5 bath colonial that was almost totally rebuilt 9 years ago (meaning it was torn down and a new second floor and a completely remodeled first floor was put on top of an existing foundation). The kitchen is awesome, the living room and dining room have these great cathedral ceilings, there's a wrap around farmer's porch in the front and a nice deck off the back overlooking a reasonably large back yard. Upstairs there's a master suite with a loft overlooking it (a spiral staircase provides access) and an office off of the loft.

I'll post some more pictures once we're there. There are some more from the listing, but honestly they don't give you a good idea of what the place is really like, as most of them are designed to show off individual features, not the whole place.

Anyway, we're extremely excited about the whole thing and just can't wait to move in. The house seems perfect for us, and now we're counting the days until November 1st...

Keeping These Tickets

I'm sure 98% of the bloggers who care about the Red Sox have posted something about Saturday night's game, so I'll just say it was a heck of a night, I've never seen the fans at Fenway park cheer quite so loudly for quite so long, and I'm glad Justin decided to overpay for a ticket so he could be there.

Oh, and it's a good thing Joanna and I still have the tickets, so we'll have some proof that we were there to see an actual no hitter.

The Internet is a Strange Place

I just got a truly strange message in my Flickr inbox.

Apparently one of the pictures I took during our trip to Chicago a few months back (the one of the Budweiser billboard painted right on a rooftop in sight of Wrigley Field) is going to be used in an exhibition on "Man and Product" that's being put together by the Department of Architectural and Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy for the middle and high schools of Torino and Piemonte. That is both totally random and completely awesome.

Glad to see someone's taking advantage of the Creative Commons Attribution license I use for my photos ;-)

Easy Come, Easy Go

So, naturally right after we got all excited about having an accepted offer on the house in Natick everything went directly to hell. The building inspector found all sorts of problems ranging from a roof that was going to need to be replaced years earlier than expected to a patio that had settled in such a way that water and ice pooled directly next to the side of the house. Perhaps worse was a general feeling that much of the house was constructed in a less than high quality manner.

Anyway, so we asked the owners for money off of the purchase price to fix the problems, they didn't want to give. Since the numbers they were balking at were far less than any suitable repairs would have come to and we knew from the initial negotiations that they were rather unrealistic about the value of their house we walked away without bothering to get some contractors to come in and tell us what the real bill would come to. Life is too short to spend it dealing with crazy people anyway.

On the bright side, we now have a truly awesome home inspector who I'd gladly use again for any house we might want to buy in the future. He went over the place with a fine toothed comb and found all sorts of problems that we wouldn't have even thought to look for. Hopefully we'll be able to use him again soon, as we are still looking...

Next time though I'll probably refrain from blogging about it until we've had the inspection ;-)

An Accepted Offer

Yesterday was the first Sunday in quite some time where Joanna and I didn't go out house hunting. The reason, happily, is that last week we made an offer on a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath contemporary style split level in Natick and this weekend we found out that it was accepted by the current owners. We've now started down that fun filled path to home ownership. Next step is the home inspection, which should happen some time this week.

Back from Chicago

A more motivated person than me would probably write a blog post about all the stuff Joanna and I did in Chicago over the weekend. I am not that motivated. Instead of writing that blog post I sorted through the hundreds of pictures I took and came up with these. They don't cover all the stuff we saw, but they certainly hit the high points. Enjoy.

A Lot Of Fun, A Little Rain

Thanks to Rob's father being out of town on business I managed to snag a ticket to the USA v. El Salvador Gold Cup match tonight. Actually, it was a double header, with the second match being Trinidad & Tobago v. Guatemala, but when the rain started to come down hard just as the USA crushed El Salvador 4 to 0 we decided it was time to call it a night.

This was the first time I'd actually been to a professional soccer match, and I've got to say it was quite a bit more fun than I'd expected. The game is fun to watch, there's practically no down time, and the fans are totally insane, way more into it than any sporting event I've ever been to.

I'm going to have to look into seeing some MLS games later this summer, I mean if they're even half as fun as this was they're totally worth it, with the added bonus that you can actually get tickets, unlike some other professional sports we've got around here...

mod_wsgi

So last night I happened to run across mod_wsgi. Very slick stuff.

Looks like a great way to get a simple python web app up and running with less overhead than mod_python. The documentation is quite comprehensive, the code is short and well commented, and there's an awful lot of interesting functionality here.

One thing that struck me as particularly interesting was the code for managing a fastcgi-like pool of daemon processes to do the actual work. It's an optional feature for mod_wsgi, but the code seems to be reasonably well fleshed out, and if any of us ever get back to working on mod_proxy_fcgi we'll have to track down the mod_wsgi author and see if he'd be willing to let us base our daemon support on his code.

Anyway, just something to file under "neat stuff to look at when I get the time"...

Progressing slowly towards fish

I'm happy to report that my roommate Jessica has managed to secure a heater for her fish tank. We are now one step closer to aquatic friends living under the stairs. Note, however, that she's been working on this project since we moved in to the apartment in September, and only sometime in the past few months did the tank manage to acquire water. My money's on us needing to either renew the lease or move before she gets around to, you know, actually acquiring a fish.

A Wet Week

So, this weekend (and much of the past week) has revolved largely around rain.

I had tickets to the Red Sox/Braves game on Wednesday. Amusingly, Joanna's parents also had tickets, and since they generally drive in for games we hitched a ride with them, hoping against hope that the rain would let up and we'd actually get to see a game. Naturally, the game was postponed before we even got out of the car, and it was rescheduled for the next day when neither of us was able to make it. Grr.

Fortunately, I also had tickets for the game on Friday night, so all was not lost. Of course, that game was also rained out. On the bright side we found out about it before we left for the game. With our initial plans for the evening shot we decided to head into Boston and catch a showing of Shear Madness, which while not baseball was pretty awesome.

Now in theory Saturday was already booked. There was supposed to be a birthday party during the day for a friend's kid and that night JJ and Donna were coming into town and we were all going to see the John Gorka concert in Framingham. The rain had its way with these plans though, and the party was pushed back to Sunday and the baseball game we were supposed to see on Friday night was rescheduled for Saturday night.

In practice, we ended up hanging out watching the first Red Sox game (which went quite swimmingly, Dice-K really did a number on the Braves) because the birthday party had been postponed due to rain and then spent way too long waiting for the T trying to get in to Fenway for that night's game. For some yet to be explained reason all the trains going in were single cars that were totally and completely packed, so we spent quite some time waiting at the Newton Centre T stop watching trains go bye, and then a rather uncomfortable trip in to Fenway becoming far too friendly with the portion of the baseball loving public who managed to cram themselves into that train with us.

Eventually we did make it to the game though, and despite precipitation that ranged from mist to out and out rain the game did actually happen. Of course, we'd really have preferred that it not since the Braves proceeded to crush the Red Sox. I did manage to put my new 70-300 f4-5.6 IS lens to good use, with the end result being the following flickr set. I particularly like the shots of Wally wearing his rain coat and Ortiz walking away from the plate after striking out.

On Sunday the rain did finally let up a bit, and the postponed birthday party actually happened. Let's just hope that this is the start of a week that isn't completely and totally controlled by rain!

Now that's a Ball Game!

Friday night's Red Sox game was a lot more fun to watch than the last one. Things that ruled included:

1. Actually having seats. I bought a 10 game package of seats on ebay for this year, and this is the first time we got to see them. Turns out to give a heck of a view (section 12, unobstructed view, etc), quite a bit more fun than the standing room seats.
2. The offense actually supported Wakefield, who pitched a hell of a game. This stands in stark contrast to his last game where he also pitched a hell of a game, but got screwed because the rest of the team couldn't get any runs.
3. After some slightly strange moves in the 8th put us in a bit of a sticky situation Papelbon came out and took care of things. I'd never actually seen him pitch in person, and man was it something. The crowd really went nuts, and he certainly delivered.
4. The crowd continued singing "Sweet Caroline" well past the point where the music faded out and the bottom of the 8th started. I always wonder what the opposing teams must think of that when they play in Fenway...
5. Once the bottom of the 8th yielded its 6 runs they decided not to waste Papelbon on a situation where he really wasn't needed and Timlin came in to finish things out. I definitely like the idea of using Papelbon when he's needed and pulling him out when it's clear that he's done the job.

Anyway, a great time was had by all. Next time I'm going to have to bring my camera, as those seats have a great view of home plate and a pretty decent view of the rest of the field. With any luck I'll be able to come home with some great shots.

Another Season At Fenway

Last night was the first Red Sox game we had tickets to this season. Standing room only, which sounds kind of lame until you realize that the standing room seats have pretty decent views (when some idiot isn't standing at the top of the aisle in front of you anyway). It was a bit cold though. The t-shirt, shirt, sweater, and jacket I was wearing were apparently not quite enough. Next time maybe something with a hood...

As for the game itself, we got shut out by Hernandez. Heck, it was almost a no hitter until J.D. Drew managed to get a single off of him in the 8th. I guess Joanna's technique of incessantly talking about the fact that a no-hitter was going on did work in the end. Dice-K managed to give up 3 runs, but as Rob said, if he pitches like that in every single game this year he'll win more than he loses and nobody would think of complaining. If you're going to complain about anything from last night it's gotta be about the fact that the offense couldn't get their shit together. Doesn't matter how well a pitcher does if his team doesn't score any damn runs.

I must admit though, it was pretty crazy watching Dice-K's first outing at Fenway. The stands were practically white from all the flashes during his first pitch, and I'm still trying to figure out how the guy dressed in a sumo outfit managed to avoid frostbite. The fact that one of the vendors outside the park is now advertising Sausages, Pizza and Sushi will take some getting used to though.

Next tickets are for Friday night versus the Angels. Hopefully it'll manage not to rain. Heck, hopefully it'll manage not to snow...

I'll take "Things I didn't think I needed to double check" for $500, Alex

So, is it just ridiculously outside the realm of normal expectations to assume that when you purchase a picture frame that claims on the package to be 5 inches by 7 inches in size you'd actually get a picture frame that measures 5 inches by 7 inches? Am I the only one who thinks that's a pretty basic requirement and one that you really shouldn't need to confirm before purchase?

I only ask because the 5 by 7 variant of the IKEA clips picture frame (which in all other ways is quite nice really, I'm a big fan) apparently measures 5 1/4 inches by 7 inches.

Naturally, while my printer's software (and once again, I'm more than happy with it in every other regard, it's quite lovely stuff and when combined with this printer makes some beautiful prints) is more than happy to print 5 by 7 or various other sizes that are largely a function of the paper size it totally refuses to print something as arbitrarily odd as 5 1/4 by 7.

Of course, I didn't think it would have to since, let me reiterate, THE PACKAGE SAYS THEY'RE 5 BY 7!

Required Reading: Scalable Internet Architectures

So, last week I managed to find enough free time to finish up my copy of Theo Schlossnagle's book Scalable Internet Architectures. It is, without a doubt, required reading for anyone thinking about working on a large scale internet facing web application today.

Theo is a regular speaker at various open source conferences, and much of the content from his talks made it into the book. That means you get a combination of just plain old good advice on how to make things scale up (worry about logging, think about caching, plan your upgrades), tips you might not have thought of (you can use cookies as a rather effective per-user caching system as long as it's for small amounts of data) and as might be expected from someone who went to Hopkins a hundred and one tricks you can play with the Spread group communication system.

Even if you don't build your application using the techniques that Theo specifically discusses you'll absolutely benefit from his advice on what sort of things you should be thinking about as you design your architecture, since if you don't think about them then you'll just have to do it when you rebuild it later for greater scalability.

Anyway, go grab a copy, it's worth a read.

What makes an Open Source Company?

Earlier this week Nat Torkington noted that there are an awful lot of companies out there that are calling themselves "Open Source" in some way shape or form, but aren't really all that close to what he'd consider an "Open Source Company". Alison Randal followed up with some comments about Enterprise DB, which isn't open source in the classical sense, but does make a lot of contributions back to PostgreSQL, the database engine they build their product on top of. Can they reasonably call themselves "Open Source"? Today r0ml weighed in on the subject, noting that just about any software product made today contains some sort of open source software, so by some estimations even Microsoft could be considered an "Open Source Company".

Now, personally I think both Alison and r0ml are missing the mark a bit by focusing on the code. Yes, use of open source code is bound to be a part of what makes an "Open Source Company", but it's not the most important thing. The big thing to ask yourself is how the company participates in the community around the projects they're making use of. Do they contribute changes back? Are they seen as leaders within the community? Are they just leeches that suck what they want without ever taking a second to help fix someone else's problem? These are the questions that in my opinion should be answered when taking stock of a company that claims to be "Open Source".

Lets take a look at my job history since college. I've worked at four companies, FactSet Research Systems, Ask Jeeves (now IAC Search & Media or something like that), CollabNet, and finally Joost. None of these companies, it's important to point out, are "Open Source Companies" in the sense Nat seems to be pushing for, where their entire product lines are freely available and developed in the open, presumably with some sort of support offering on top of that to make money. That said, all of them make use of and contribute to Open Source software in one way or another, and I would consider at least one and maybe two of them to be "Open Source Companies" in a very real way. Lets take them one at a time.

FactSet is very much a proprietary software company. Its products may use Open Source Software internally, but none (to my knowledge) of them are free as in speech. Heck, none of them are free as in beer either, this is the financial industry, after all. On the other hand, there are FactSet employees who contribute to Open Source projects as part of their jobs. You can find @factset.com email addresses on the perl5-porters mailing list, and at least one FactSet engineer spent a lot of time working on the VMS port of a recent emacs version, although I have no idea if that code ever got integrated back into the main emacs tree, but that was the plan when I was there. So, here we have an example of a company that does contribute to Open Source, but not in a way that is significant enough to justify referring to it as an Open Source Company. Of course, the fact that FactSet isn't trying to bill itself as an Open Source Company is another big part of that ;-)

Ask Jeeves (and when I talk about Ask Jeeves I'm speaking largely of the Bloglines team, as that's where I worked, I don't know a whole lot about the rest of the company) is another example of a company that uses Open Source products to produce a proprietary system. There are a number of open source contributors who are employed to work on Bloglines (at least there were when I was there, and there still are some to the best of my knowledge), but contributing changes back is not a huge priority to the company, although it does happen when possible. Again we have a company that while it makes use of Open Source and does contribute from time to time really can't be considered to be an Open Source Company.

On to CollabNet, the first company I worked for that I would consider an Open Source Company. CollabNet makes huge contributions to the Subversion project, provides free hosting to a large number of Open Source projects at Tigris and over the years has had many employees that are participants in various Apache projects. Nobody would say that they're just sucking in the fruits of the Open Source community without giving back. On the other hand, the core product the company sells, while based on many open source projects is itself proprietary. Still, I think due to the way the company both makes use of and contributes back to the Open Source world it's safe to call CollabNet an Open Source Company.

Finally there's Joost. Our product is nowhere near open source, right? Well, maybe and maybe not. We employ more open source developers than any of the companies I've talked about, and we're built on top of a huge host of Open Source products, many of which we fund development on and contribute changes back to. The details are all available on our web site, but suffice it to say that despite the fact that our product itself is not Open Source (and indeed contains some very proprietary code that is never ever going to see the light of day) it's not outside the realm of possibility to call us an Open Source Company.

So what am I trying to say here? Well, just that the mere use of Open Source code in a product is a poor way to judge a company as Open Source versus Proprietary. There are other criteria (including my personal favorite, community participation) that are at least as necessary if not more so, and those really need to be taken into account. For what it's worth, that's why I'd call EnterpriseDB an Open Source Company, even though their product is proprietary.

Of course, in the end we need to also ask why we're asking this question. If it's to help Nat decide who he's going to invite to OSCON the answer is different than if it's to help figure out how we can call bullshit on a company's marketing department who really wants to call themselves Open Source despite the fact that they're not.

As far as the OSCON thing goes, my personal opinion is that as long as the company is actually participating in the community in a positive way they should be welcome, but on the other hand I'd expect the speakers from that company to be talking about something relevant to the community, not to be pitching their possibly proprietary product that just happens to be built on top of Open Source software. That's why when I was at CollabNet my conference presentations were always about Subversion, not about CollabNet Enterprise Edition, and why I wouldn't expect to see any Joost engineers at OSCON speaking about our internet-tv system, but instead about the Open Source components used to build that system and how they are helping to make those components better, both for us and for the rest of the community.

One of those days...

You ever have one of those problems where even though you find and fix any number of things that were clearly wrong it still won't work?

I mean for crying out loud, everything I've changed in the past hour or two has clearly been a step in the right direction, but it's STILL NOT WORKING.

Maybe I'd be less annoyed if it would at least not work reliably, instead of only not working maybe 1 in 10 times. Some consistency would be nice.

More interesting perhaps is how the hell this worked yesterday, considering the number of things I've fixed that were clearly wrong and the still lurking problem that's preventing it from working now...

Unix Network Programming Volume 1, How I've Missed You...

It's been a long time, but today I actually broke out my copy of Unix Network Programming Volume 1 to look some stuff up. I'd almost forgotten what a great book it is. The third edition even talks about kqueue! Exactly what I was looking for! What a great book...

I've got great references

His taste in television is as enigmatic as it is terrible.
- Rob, who seems to have forgotten his own truly wretched habit of watching the OC...

Yearly Evaluation

So, my two roommates are both saying that they didn't enjoy 2006, and are quite ready to get on with 2007. With that in mind, I'm going to swim against the current and admit that I actually rather enjoyed 2006. I moved back to the east coast, went to some cool conferences, found a great apartment with aforementioned roommates, started a fantastic new job, and last but not least started dating a truly wonderful girl. All in all, I think the year went pretty damn well, and I'm looking forward to more of the same in 2007. Well, without the moving and the changing jobs, of course ;-)