Happy New Year!

Enjoy your federally sanctioned holiday of terror.

Yesterday's search terms:

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2012 Wrap-Up

• F 12/21: Took off work a day early for good behaviour. Made steaks for dinner and watched Love Actually with women (and Marc). The steaks made it more manly.


• S 12/22: Rebecca went out with Elizabeth for a pedicure and returned with a deer sausage.


• S 12/23: Went in to D.C. with Annie and Marc to see various Christmas trees and eat beef (with extra Moist) at Hill Country.


• M 12/24: Watched Anna Karenininina with Rebecca's parents, ate an early Eve dinner at Applebee's, and went to a Presby service in the evening.


• T 12/25: Put on "Fireplace Classics starring Fireplace" from Amazon Prime and had a Christmas at home with Rebecca. Chased Booty around the house with a horse head and made Cornish Game Hen for dinner.


• W 12/26: Played several games of Settlers of Catan and listened to Christmas CDs.


• H 12/27: Went to my parents house to have another Christmas, along with my sister's family. Played LASER CHESS and ate cheeses.


• F 12/28: Tried hiking in West Virginia but were thwarted by a snowy parking lot. Had a mini hike at Algonquian and then had Brian and Emily over for more stuffed peppers.


• S 12/29: Played a lot of video games while Rebecca was social.


• S 12/30: Puttered around the house.


• M 12/31: Washed the floors, and learned the C major scale on the electric bass. Watched Liberal Arts and went to bed at 11:16.

2014 Day

I slept straight through the local fireworks and gun-firing, but do remember my first dream of 2014:

I was in a kitchen and passed by an open-faced cupboard. In the cupboard were two sandwiches, of the variety that you might find at a really bad work luncheon -- American cheese and some ham smushed between two globs of hamburger bun bread. I decided to close the cupboard to keep the sandwiches fresh, and pulled the cover shut, like a garage door or an old rolltop desk. At this point, a wasp flew out of the cupboard and started stinging me on the face. This is when I woke up.

Happy New Year.

New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year! To kick off this inchoate year of eternal bliss, here are the things I plan to accomplish this year. I should have slightly better luck with these than the resolutions I've made in the past:

1. Eat a bagel.


2. Publish a new version of DDMSence.


3. Kill a basilisk.


4. Steam clean the carpet so the ghostly clean Oxi-clean memorials to cat vomit aren't discernable.


5. Listen to a hiphop band from Australia.


6. Wrestle a lion.


7. Play a high C on the trumpet (left dormant since the flu took over).


8. Sustain a 10 MPH pace for one minute.


9. Get 1000 wins in Hearthstone.


10. Go on a date with my wife.

What are yours?

2015 Wrap-up

Happy New Year!

December 2015 was a particularly relaxing month for me, especially since I've been off of work since Friday the 11th. Because Thanksgiving was hectic with proposal stuff at work, I took an extended Christmas break to get under the "use or lose" cap on leave. Of course within my tech career, I have the first world problem of still having 3.75 weeks of leave in the bank as 2016 rolls in.

After kicking things off in high gear with a Holiday Potluck and a fun trip up to Rhode Island, I still had two weeks of leave left. The first week, I spent recovering from a Rhode Island bug, pre-writing most of my blog posts, and reading and viewing lots of decent-to-great books, movies, and shows.

On Christmas Eve, I picked up two growlers of a Belgian Specialty Ale from Old Ox Brewery and we toured the local, famous Christmas lights on Juniper Avenue. The experience was a little incongruous, as the temperature was up around 70 degrees (I wore short sleeves), and most people were opting for a drive-by experience with air conditioners operating at full force. We then did an annual watching of Love Actually (which is about the only Christmas movie I can tolerate anymore) and Rebecca made it two full hours in before falling asleep!

We had two Christmases, one with Rebecca's mom's family out in Linden, and the other on the following day with Rebecca's dad and stepmom in Falls Church. My parents were up north making their own pilgrimage to Rhode Island, so they missed out on our company and the small stack of presents still under our tree.

For the final week of my vacation, I did absolutely nothing beyond playing Fallout 4 and watching Better Call Saul. We rang in the New Year at a party thrown by one of Rebecca's yoga friends, Michelle, near Lake Anne and are now off to our favourite B&B in Sperryville for a quick overnight trip.

So all in all, it was a successful end to the year 2015. I am now at the point where I have lost most of my programming skills, although I did check work email three times and did two code reviews on GitHub. Of particular note, this is the first year in decades where I didn't have a single migraine headache -- though root causes are difficult to pinpoint, the main delta in my life is an increase in craft beer consumption since 2012.

A final batch of new photos have been added to the Life, 2015 album.

December's Final Grade: A

2015's Final Grade: B+

Happy New Year!

We made it all the way to 12:48 AM this year!

The Tens: Decade Highlights

• 2010: Conceived and released my first open-source library, DDMSence. Saw Muse in concert. Rebecca bought her current car. Visited Puerto Rico, Spokane, San Francisco, Emerald Isle, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Rebecca stopped selling custom T-Shirts. I played Minecraft.


• 2011: We visited Arkansas and the Outer Banks. Rebecca went to Peru and started Physical Therapy school. We overhauled our entire kitchen. I played Skyrim.


• 2012: I worked on government data standards and bought a treadmill. I bought my current car. We visited Quebec and Montreal. I played Diablo 3.


• 2013: Rebecca graduated from PT school and went trapezing. We didn't go anywhere huge, but continued our spree of Bed & Breakfasts across Virginia and Maryland.


• 2014: Rebecca got her first iPhone. We visited Greenbrier Resort, French Creek State Park, the Outer Banks, and Seattle. We played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time.


• 2015: We had dual flus. I got into THE CLOUD. I built a shed with my dad. We went to Munich, Grindelwald, Montreux, and Geneva, after Rebecca hiked around Mt. Chamonix with her sculpted arm muscles.


• 2016: Got my first smartphone. Conceived and released my second open-source project, Sparkour. We visited Pittsburgh and Colorado. I played lots of Overwatch. I left my company for the commercial world.


• 2017: I overworked for a startup. I bought an Oculus Rift. Maia was born! I became a stay-at-home dad, then a work-whenever-I-want-dad at my old company.


• 2018: We visited LA and Rhode Island, as well as random rental houses around Virginia mountains. I got hooked on Advent of Code. Maia survived!


• 2019: Continued visiting random rentals for brief weekends. We got a new roof. I turned 40. We returned to Montreal for our 10th wedding anniversary. I did Advent of Code again. Maia survived!

Happy New Year!

Here's something we're looking forward to in 2021:

Maia: "I will give him this little bowl so I can share my bacon with him."
BU: "That's such a nice thing to do for your baby brother!"
Maia: "Then I can have the big bowl."

Also, 3D ultrasounds are still weird.

Planned Projects for 2024

Ongoing projects

1. Caring for this family: A cool wife, 2 cool kids, and a decrepit cat.


2. Working 30 hours per week: With health insurance!


3. Being the webmaster for Janny Wurts and Don Maitz: Probably the most constant side project I deal with right now.


4. Keeping the URI! Zone alive: Lying dormant for its inexorable return to popularity, like the 17-year cicada.


5. Being on the HOA: Monthly meetings and litter pickup.

Projects that will probably happen

1. Tune my 8 year old cloud empire: Specifically, find out why my cloud compute bills have spiked over the past 2 months with "EC2-Other" charges when nothing in the configuration has changed, rebuild my older end-of-life Linux servers with the latest versions, upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 if possible, and add more automation to my monthly backup scripts.


2. Earn another Amazon Web Services cloud certification: Probably the Security specialty cert, even though it sounds more boring than Gosford Park.


3. Buy a new couch: Both my couch and my cat turn 20 in 2024.


4. Overhaul and upgrade the Maitz and Wurts Studio Shop: This has been back-burnered for far too long, and is now holding up other server upgrades in this website architecture (Thanks, PHP 5.6!).


5. Add the final book from the Wars of Light and Shadow to the Paravia Wiki: The final book comes out in May!


6. Do Advent of Code 2024: As if doing the puzzles isn't enough of a time expenditure, I'd also like to learn some animation / graphics basics to do cool visualizations of the puzzles.

Projects that will probably slip to 2025

1. Give the URI! Zone a much needed makeover: The look and feel of this website has not evolved substantively since 2009.


2. Rip all of my old CDs onto a house-accessible NAS: Amazon Echo is the worst for music now.


3. Play the trumpet occasionally: I should have picked an instrument where embouchure maintenance was not a thing.


4. Compose new music: I finally took down all of my hopefully-configured MIDI equipment last year but it will return someday.

What do you hope to accomplish in 2024?