Drinkable Chicken

Another year went by. Much has happened. … OK, maybe not that much. Still, here’s an overview.

• Health-wise, we’ve been doing relatively well. My wife’s condition is stable. Baby Amari is doing well, walks around now, talking up a storm (although nobody knows what she’s saying :-). Myself, I am pudgy as usual, and had high blood pressure for a while, but that seems to be taken care of.

• Professionally, things didn’t go so well… The 20 hours at iTrackr became none at all, after which I spent several months looking for work. Applied to a ton of places, sometimes got an interview out of it, but no success (other than a two-month contracting job for Sean McKay, which helped us staying afloat). Eventually I was re-hired by Oasis Digital, a previous employer of mine, to work on the same system that I originally wrote for them during 2002-2007. (Besides maintenance, we are going to do some more interesting stuff as well, like porting the code base to IronPython.) I actually like that a lot better than iTrackr… =/

• Family life has been chaotic as usual, but it has been improving. People still do stupid stuff, is all I will say about it here.

• Programming languages are still one of my main interests… so I dabbled in many of them, some new, some old, e.g. Clojure, Miranda, Haskell, OCaml, SML, Q, J, Io, Common Lisp, D, etc. I also wrote a few toy interpreters (see my projects page).

• I finished the Magi-Nation Search project (well, mostly). This is really more for personal use since nobody plays Magi-Nation anymore, but still. It also gave me the opportunity to get some experience with Google App Engine.

• Didn’t travel much; went to Disney, that’s about it. :-) No visit to the Netherlands this year; maybe in 2010?

• Reconnected with old friends and acquaintances on Facebook and elsewhere. (Hi, Mirella. ;-)

• Being unemployed and all, I sold some stuff on eBay so I could get new gear for work. (Lesson: 80/20 rule applies here… 20% of the items account for 80% of the money.) I had been looking at netbooks for a while, and eventually decided on getting a HP Mini 311. I like it, but that’s a topic for another post.

Everybody has been posting their lists of the decade… especially music. Here’s my list of the best albums of 2000-2009. I couldn’t even find ten that were consistently good, actually. *frown*

In no particular order:

• Styles of Beyond: Megadef
• Osdorp Posse: Tegenstrijd
• Ugly Duckling: Taste the Secret
• The Donnas: Bitchin
• Northern State: Can I keep this pen?
• Le Tigre: This Island
• 1200 Techniques: Consistency theory
• ‘t Hof van Commerce: Ezoa en niet anders

Artists that should have released albums that would be in this list, but didn’t:

• Rakim (Wat een slecht album. Rakim had dat natuurlijk gewoon met Seda en DJ Daan moeten opnemen…)
• Beastie Boys
• Clawfinger
• IAM
• Public Enemy

Honorable mentions:

• Jawat (one of the few Dutch rappers that is any good, now that the OP is gone)
• Duo Kie, Triple XXX, Keyo, Jefe de la M, Arma Blanca (Spanish rap)
• Svinkels (French rap)
• Massilia Sound System
• Nitro Microphone Underground (would be in the list, but I’m not sure if “Colaboraciones vol 1″ is a real album…)
• Jurassic 5
• Hammerfall
• Blind Guardian

But overall, I discovered *many* more pre-2000 albums (and often pre-1990) that were much better than most of what I heard in the 2000s. I guess my musical taste is firmly grounded in the 80s. But then again we *knew* that… :-)