Well, I haven’t exactly blogged much of anything in the past couple weeks, mostly because I’ve been side-tracked with a couple projects, such as the new website for the Keyboard-Failure IRC network (http://www.kbfail.net- or point your IRC client of choice to irc://irc.kbfail.net). You can see the new theme (which I think is a major improvement over the pink-background, black-text spawned by the lack of any desire to work to give KBFail a real theme/system. What can I say? We’re all lazy.) by going to the development page: http://minalien.dynalias.net/kbfail/. Guess when I get around to working on it, I’m going to install the newest Release Candidate of SMF for development/testing of the new site, and I’ll probably get around to rebuilding my old mod to integrate Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter (which I use on this blog) sometime soon, too. Gods, I wish SMF were object-oriented. :P

It seems that I do actually have somebody paying attention to the Direct3D Pong tutorial series I’ve been writing. I kind of shrugged off doing much more work on the project because I didn’t think anybody was bothering to read it, but a recent tweet shows me that there is at least one person reading it. That, for me, is plenty – so @Ogreman, you can look forward to the next tutorial in the series to come along (hopefully) by the end of this weekend.

I’ve been going through some.. personal issues. Anybody familiar with my past will probably know what I’m talking about, so I’ll just kinda leave the details at that. Suffice to say that life is a pain in the ass, but I’m (uncharacteristically) looking toward the brighter side of things and moving forward with life. On the lighter side of things, my plans to visit Erin in Phoenix are going through, so I’ll be blissfully free of work and hanging out with a friend. I’ve been acting very out-of-character for me, recently. I mean, social activity? Something seriously has to be wrong with me. I think I broke my head. D:

Recently renewed my subscription to Safari Books Online – I pay for the $40-ish unlimited subscription, but they’ve got a $20-ish (monthly) ten-books-per-month plan. Very useful, and I highly recommend it for anybody who deals with technology on a hobby basis. Large collection of full books on there, ready for you to read on your computer at home, or even in mobile-optimized forms on your iPhone or (if you’re one of the cool kids, like me) Android or other smartphone. Anyway, I’ve been reading up and studying for the CCNA certifications, which I’m hoping I will be able to take on-base without first going through the “NCO” courses. In the worst case scenario, I’ll just find somewhere closeby off-base, probably in Los Angeles, to take it on my own. They’ve got a full collection of Cisco networking books, programming (including game programming) books for a large selection of languages (Obj-C, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Java, HTML/XHTML, PHP, ASP.NET.. you name it, it’s there). For those who can afford it and will use it, it’s much cheaper than buying each of the books separately, and much more legal (and less of a pain in the ass for searching) than downloading the books on your favorite torrent client.