That is all. Hopefully I'll start posting more in the not too distant future. I do have some things I want to talk about.

Is there anything you'd like to know about me?

Now, in the top of the right column on the main page of my site (maybe I'll move it to the individual pages too), there is a tip jar form (via PayPal) and links to two different wishlists I have in Amazon, one for personal items (e.g. novels, DVDs, and so forth) and one for professional items (e.g. books on Perl, software engineering, web applications, and such).

So, at work I managed to start this thing we're calling "group exercise." The team lead and I gave a joint presentation on program optimization last summer after we got back from OSCON 05 that seemed to go over well. We got some good feedback from the team about the content of the presentation itself, as well as the prospect of other ones.

It fizzled out a bit after that.

I finally took it upon myself to start this thing back up last December and, in January, I gave a presentation on unit testing with JUnit in Eclipse and Python's unittest module. Also got a lot of good feedback from that. I got some warm fuzzies when some of our team stopped by my desk later that day to ask about how to write test code for their particular projects. I sent out an email later that week asking for volunteers for the next few group exercises. We got one volunteer and another was beaten into submission/agreement.

The next scheduled date for a group exercise is this coming Thursday. And just today, after almost having to corner the fellow who was going to be demonstrating Rational Robot to the team, I find out (for various reasons that I won't go into) that he will be unable make his presentation this week.

So now I'm stuck. I don't want to cancel this week's presentation unless I absolutely have to, otherwise it will be harder to keep the momentum moving forward for this thing. Plenty of people get lots out of this and it's a good opportunity to get other team members who tend to stay back in the shadows up and talking in front of the group.

I was planning on doing a presentation on regular expressions next month. I could try and throw that together over the next few days, but both the lead and I agree that, with the little experience our team has with them and as important as they are, I need to spend more time getting that ready.

Originally, when I sent out the request for volunteers, I included a list of example topics, including things like functional programming/languages, perl, web development, any number of security topics (we've got another upcoming presentation on buffer overflows), dependency injection, and so on.

Basically, I'm hoping I can get some help coming up with ideas for a presentation I can throw together in a few hours over the next couple nights. Pointers to existing presentations I could borrow would be very much appreciated. I just don't know if I'll have the time to put together something to do justice to the topics I am currently considering (regular expressions or functional programming).

The big thing I'm looking for this time around is synchronizing with at least one calendar source. My work calendar is the most important, but if I can work in a personal calendar (possibly on another machine) that would be nice. Web browsing, instant messaging, ssh clients, and so forth are nice bonuses but they aren't have to haves.

The main pro for the Sidekick at the moment is that it is the cheapest option from what I have seen in my initial research. Since we are already T-Mobile customers, we can get the "upgrade" price for the Sidekick if we extend our contract another two years. And the monthly cost for the family plan plus the data service (unlimited, but that was the only option) is under $100. It's actually about the same as what we're paying right now (we're actually overpaying a bit on an older plan). Comparable plans with other providers were all over $100/month.

(And the fact that the SDK for the Sidekick seems to be easily available and Java-based, which is what I work with at my day job, might be fun if I have the time to tinker with it, like that will actually happen.)

Oh, and if you don't already read her site, Jenn's pregnant.

Once I get back into the swing of things, I'm going to do some more site reorganization and try to finish up MultiBlog 2.0 and update some of my other plugins.

The emotional pain of infertile patients is often greater than that experienced by people with cancer, he said, yet there is still a widespread assumption that they are not deserving of therapy on the NHS.

While we haven't had to deal with cancer in our lives together, I can attest to the fact that infertility has had a devastating effect on us emotionally. Two years spent waiting a couple weeks at a time, only to get yet another negative (or worse, positive, but only for a little while) has really taken its toll on us. You start to wonder what you've done wrong, what in your past was so awful and terrible to deserve such a fate. I'm sure cancer patients often have the same thoughts. And, then, of course, life decides to kick you while you're down.

Why do we keep going in the face of all the failure we have had so far? I am really not sure if I could not tell you. It's almost a habit now; the fertility center is just one of our usual hangouts these days. I can hardly remember life without it anymore.

People will try to be comforting. "It will happen." "Don't worry." "Just stop trying so hard and relax." And, of course, the always popular "Why don't you just adopt?" and "Maybe it's God's will". I'll spare you my rant on those for the moment. While we try very hard to look beyond the words themselves and see that these people have good intentions, it's not always easy. It can often be very difficult to bite back responses of "Don't you think we've already tried that?!" to the many reproductive suggestions that we have gotten.

Ultimately, while we do honestly appreciate the effort to sympathize, unless you have gone through it yourself, you truely just cannot understand what it's like.

He told The Times: “In my early days, I was doing a lot of the work that all young doctors do, which included cancer patients. It always struck me that although cancer patients were often highly distressed, they live with the hope that they might get better.

“Infertility patients don’t always have that hope. They realise that most of the time the treatment doesn’t work, or that they won’t be able to afford it. A lot of people when you really question them — both women and men — are hugely destabilised about being infertile. There is a deep-seated grief. They may not show it publicly, but it is greatly damaging.”

Anybody have any ideas/suggestions?