I’m technically on vacation, but that just means I’m working about half as much as usual. I spent about three days on an upgrade of nwtekno.org, which is a forums site that I manage the tech side of. Or rather, I manage it pretty badly, since this is the first time I’ve paid it any attention since 2001. It’s got over two million posts and will be ten years old soon, so it was due. Unsurprisingly, many of the users are upset about the changes, but what you can’t please everyone. Luckily the day-to-day stuff is handled by Kim, the site’s founder, and now she has the tools to make it what it should be.

Another old freelance project of mine has come back to life like some kind of zombie, so I’ve been working on that too. Luckily it’s not too time consuming.

I’m not a big holiday person, so I’ve been kind of grumpy lately. The snow madness we had in Seattle was nice for a bit but quickly got old. New Year’s Eve involved a great dinner and some friends and some dancing, but lots of people left town for the holiday so that kind of brought the mood down. Now it’s just very cold and the city seems lethargic. I’m ready to get back to real work on Monday.

So much for the latest attempt at keeping a regularly-updated blog. I’ll try to get back on the wagon.

Things have been busy at work and extremely dull otherwise. Since my last real post, we’ve started and finished a little Silverlight thing for MSN. We got some very silly content, very little direction, and very little time, and made something pretty cool out of it. It’s a pretty good example of how the team comes together. Should launch before Christmas.

Now I’m ramping up on a much larger and less silly Silverlight thing, as well as some other Surface experiments.

Last week I attended the “Silverlight Partner Summit” in Redmond, which was fun because I ran into some friends and colleagues, and also because we got a bunch of details on Silverlight 3, which is looking to be pretty exciting. I started using Silverlight because I was being paid to, and that’s changed some with v2, but I think v3 will be the one that really gets me to prefer it over Flash for most projects. I think I won’t be the only one.

After that I went straight to the airport to head to the SF office for the Stimulant holiday party. Nathan took some pictures, but I kept my camera in my pocket as usual. My job was to set up Surface to be party friendly — removing most of the SDK apps and adding our stuff to the launcher, including ToneGrid, Xray (demo video to come, someday), and the photo booth app that Darren made just for the party. Surface was a big hit, as were the Stimulant-green cocktails served throughout the night.

Now I’m back in Seattle, where everyone’s panicking about cold weather and snow, and I’m trying to get my head around the wacky math required to do anything interesting with Deep Zoom.