I’m a little late with my new year’s resolutions so I’ll just call them Jan 4′th resolutions.

Photo by katerha

Last year’s recap:
- Quit smoking: done
- Learn Turkish or Arabic: not done, moved to 2010
- I try to learn a new language every year. 2009 was C# year: as done as you can learn a language in one year

So… my resolutions for 2010 are (drum roll):
- Learn Turkish or Arabic: hopefully a new project I have in Morocco will help me learn some Arabic
- The new language for this year is Scala
- Buy a car for the wifey
- Deliver better software

I get to work. I plugin the lappy. Windows Update says “hey dude, there are some updates for you”, I’m like “Bring them on”. Bad mistake.

One of the updates was IE8, and this is the update story(unfinished):
• Windows Update downloads the “IE8 Update”
• The “IE8 Update” starts up, decompresses something in c:\<random string> and says “I have to restart your computer. It will update some stuff and then restart again. During this time you won’t be able to use screen readers, because the update will run before any user services start up”. I say “Ok, do it”
• The computer restarts, Windows boots up
• IE8 Update appears, decompressing some other stuff in c:\<random string> and then it displays a nice window saying “Dude, I will start downloading updates”
• The following window appears:

Some aspects of this window:
- it has nice colors in a modern gradient like mix-up
- it has no buttons whatsoever
- it says Downloading
- YOU CANT BLOODY CLOSE IT WITHOUT KILLING THE DAMN PROCESS, WHICH I DON’T WANT TO DO

30 minutes have passed since it begun downloading and I think it’s downloading the bloody Internet. 30 minutes is forever when you are keeping a user staring at a window that never does anything.

I’ll update this post once it finishes (or not).

UPDATE: Only took 40 minutes, restarted again and now it works

Okay, so the title is a little off…. but it really is my birthday today.

And a good day it was. A nice, short day with a lot of accomplishments.

I got my new ID card (I came out good in the photo, which is a plus), I saw my kitchen almost done (the nice colors we picked, excellent work by extraordinary workers), work was good (as opposed to the usual nasty nature of my work this year).

My wife bought me a classical guitar, which I already love, just like I love my wife (WAF +1, if you know what I’m talking about).
I’m going to learn to play by reserving 15 minutes every morning.

I hope that your day was as good as mine.

“May you live in interesting times” – Unknown

This old saying is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Sometimes, the most difficult times are the most beautiful and most rewarding. They challenge us, they test us and most often they bring out the best in us.

Well, I’m getting married tomorrow. I’ve had some crazy months, filled with a lot of work, graduating, buying a house, trying to fix it and now getting married. Wonderful, interesting, crazy, exhausting but mostly happy times.

I’ll be away for some time, in the meanwhile, I’m leaving you with an interesting book that I’ve recently read:
It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be by Paul Arden is an excellent book with a lot of good advice on how to make it in any business.

Its main focus is advertising although it is useful in any industry; it’s perfect for small flights, as it packs a lot of insight in a nicely fit package.

I’ve been having some name DNS issue the last four or five days, but my web host finally solved the problem.

My domain payment went in a day late and my domain went into “client hold”. One day later it dropped from all DNS servers .

In other news , I’ve started using BlogDesk. It’s a great piece of software at about 3.7 MB setup. It has good features and took only a couple of minutes to setup and configure with WordPress. If you have a blog, give it a try!