I’ve been quiet here for a while. Mostly I’ve just been busy, but the reason I’ve been so busy is that the summer was one disaster after another.

OK, that’s not quite fair. There was a lot of good stuff this summer (including RailsConf and OSCON, which were both terrific), and sometimes I went for several days at a stretch without anything bad happening. But it did seem that every time I turned around, there was some new setback.

  • I started the summer with a recurrence of a strange networking problem on my laptop that had plagued me earlier in the year. This time I finally found the cause: Salling Clicker, left running in a state where it was searching for my phone. Apparently Bluetooth and AirPort share enough of the networking stack that one can really interfere with the other. But I lost a couple days to messing around with this before I finally figured things out and got it fixed.
  • In early July, my wife’s grandmother died. She was a wonderful lady, and very dear to me; of course, that week was difficult for the whole family.
  • Two weeks later, I got hit hard by a strep infection. I nearly had to cancel my appearance at the Des Moines NFJS, but started feeling better just in time. (I would have hated canceling, because I’d already had to skip the Austin show due to the funeral.)
  • But then again, maybe I should’ve canceled, because just as I stood up to give my first talk in Des Moines, my hard drive crashed. It was fun getting through five talks without a laptop! (Eitan Suez and a couple of the attendees lent me their laptops for three of the talks, which helped a lot.) Due to my travel schedule, my backups were a bit out of date, so I lost about 4 weeks of email.
  • I just barely got the new drive installed, and the restore completed, before I had to take off for OSCON. And when I got back, my DSL service was out. It was out for 16 days! Needless to say, a change in ISP is in the works.
  • Two weeks ago, I came down with strep again. Because I’d had strep so recently, this time they gave me a really powerful antibiotic, which makes sense, and I felt better pretty quickly. Unfortunately, they didn’t really warn me about that, so I didn’t take some necessary precautions, bringing us to:
  • Now I have thrush. Yucko.

Oh well … I’ll stop complaining now, and I’ll start writing about more pleasant things soon. :-)