Being sick over the last few days has given me some time for quiet reflection, some reading, and a little bit of catching up on personal correspondence. Ying was away in NY, and the fluid in my ears has also really muted my hearing, so everything seemed really peaceful and calm in the apartment. It's intriguing the effect that something as simple as noise-level has on my mood. I think I'm going to get some noise-cancelling headphones today.

That's right: it's July 4, and to celebrate I am going to sit in perfect silence.

I have rarely been so overcommitted in my life. I've made a truly embarrassing number of apologies for unfinished favors and missed meetings this week. It seems everything's coming due.

I've been on the road for days. I have a few days in one place now, while I'll be working, and then again on this weekend I head back to NY for a small family reunion.

I remember when I was younger it seemed like I have lots of spare time. There were rare occasions when I felt some pressing deadline looming over me, but they were predictable and relatively far between.

These days I feel like every day is a battle over hours. Any moments for doing "extra" activities - such as writing this blog post - are stolen from sleep. I understand that I have generally less time, but the way things are going right now seems pretty extreme. I don't know how to get organized when I have so much to do and not enough time. Anyone in a startup situation actually figured out how to have a life?

Goodness I am just full of things to talk about today.

I have long suspected that my current router/access point, a Netgear MR814v2 is a little buggy. It seems to have some subtle problems with UDP, which I notice sometimes when I have trouble with voice-over-IP applications. Overall I've been happy with it, except for having to update the firmware when I purchased it (it didn't work with my Powerbook out of the box).

After a bit of browsing around, I've selected another Netgear, the WGT634U to replace it. Since I didn't want to spend another $50 to just maybe, possibly fix this one problem I've been having, I wanted to add a little extra cost justification (and okay, maybe a little extra cost) by getting some "toy" features too. The model that I've selected here has a built-in USB port which can be used to attach a USB disk to its internal file and web server. It's surprisingly hard to find networking gadgets with any fun features. I've been looking around and it seems that everything is "enterprise" scale, which means it's waaaaay too expensive, noisy, and heat-producing for me to get just for personal use.

Anybody have a suggestion for me? I'm open to building something myself as long as it's small, quiet, and fairly low-hassle. (No, buying individual hardware components, assembling them, and building my own embedded linux distribution from scratch is not "low-hassle".)

Recently I purchased a keyboard like the one I had when I was but a wee tyke. It can't be a coincidence that shortly afterwards, I found a descendant of the first programming language I wrote actual code in.

Although I can't find a complete history, Runtime Revolution appears to be a direct derivative of SuperCard. I was amazed to find the XTalk language community still limping along; even moreso that SC itself is still being actively developed! I guess proprietary development environments can still survive a harsh economic winter sometimes.

Does anyone still have a copy of ... dare I say it ... "Elemental Knowledge" on some ancient media that we could dust off and update for the new millennium? (How about New Zork City? I think I have a floppy disk here with something on it, but I doubt that it's physically survived, and I don't have a drive that can read it handy.)