Ah, goodness. So working long hours at home alone was not a very good idea. As a direct result of this revelation, I've scaled back my work with Scout a bit and will be pursuing other jobs that can give me more time interacting directly with and around people. It's amazing how my productivity and happiness levels just shoot through the roof when people are around: I went into the city for a day to chill with the Scout folks and ended up coding a good chunk of their intranet. =)

It looks like the money situation is hopefully now nicely taken care of: my mother managed to bail me out on summer rent and I got three checks in the mail for consulting work and articles. Some of my work for Casio & MyPlay should pay nicely (MyPlay even promised me a car by the end of the summer!) and I will hopefully sign my book contract at some point to get me a few bucks. All this just means that now I can buy groceries again. I was seriously going hungry for a while there, munching some Ramen on the sly. Ech. A man can only take so much of that stuff, you know?

The book is now the longest continuous piece of English that I've ever written at just over 9100 words. And to think that it's just getting started! [gulp] I sure hope I can keep it up. I may need to do a bunch more research to stay on top of things. There's a lot of things that I'm going to need to address in the book that I don't yet know the answers to myself! It will be interesting to walk the fine line between making the text widely interesting and readable at the same time as being useful and appealing to a technical audience. Writing the technical bits are turning out to be hard, and I need to figure out how I'm going to do the graphics and illustrations.

It's really funny, my friend from last summer called me up: he's now the Vice President of HyperBanner, an Israli online ad banner company, and he had a very simple problem. I solved it for him and now the guy wants to fly me wherever I want to go for two weeks! Yippee! Is that cool or what?? Where should I go? I don't know!

The 4^th was real fun, I went to my roomate's grandmother's place and we hung out and ate grilled hot dogs. A very laid back day, good for thinking and music and sunshine...I think I'm a little crispy now! Okay, well, time for me to fall over. Oh, and I finally wrote a biography up on Alex Blok -- should be out tomorrow; you'll find out who this guy is!

LINK OF THE DAY: David Weekly Magazine (I have nothing to do with this site!)