This month is gonna be brutal at work. The most significant MindTouch Deki release since Hayes, Lyons is slated for release sometime in February. As we usually do, we aimed quite high on the number of deliverable features. Just check out some of the features that are on the board - amazing what our engineering team is capable of (it's only been about three months since Kilen Woods!).

We're also going through a bunch of professional service projects that I had stalled out on at the end of December (the vacation depleted the prof services team at MindTouch, and I needed to step back into the product side). There's a huge project launch in the middle of January that is a bit stressful - let's hope we get that out without problems!

Supposedly January 5th is the most stressful day of the year, and I certainly felt that yesterday. Just getting back and having to deal with everything was hard. It wasn't so much coming back to work that was difficult, but the urgency of "Let's get things started off on the right foot." I'm starting to bring my work home more often (case in point: tonight until 1am, boo!), but it will all be worth it at the end. Just... gotta... get... through.. it (flashes of that Daniel Bedingfield song come to mind)

Anyways, I don't know what I'd do without the beaches here. There's nothing more relaxing than driving out to the beaches here and just emptying my mind of all its burdens. What *did* I do in NC? I can't even remember. Probably played Starcraft.

I foresee many beach runs this month!

. . .

So I keep giving away my digital point and shoots - I swear I've bought three or four over the past couple of years, and I keep giving them away. Anyways, I gave my Canon G5 to my parents when I was home back in October, so I've been without a digital point-and-shoot for a couple of months. I love my SLR, but I'd like to carry a smaller camera with me on a day-to-day basis for those "little moment" pictures.

I've convinced myself that I want a Ricoh GX200:

The glass looks great (24mm - 72mm, f2.5 - f 4.4), stores in RAW, it's compact, and has manual control. Plus I think the camera looks gorgeous (in that industrial, inconspicuous way).