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(UPDATE: Turns out Yahoo! is smarter than I am. Lets see if this works)

So, I figured I'd do a nice and lengthy entry, for a change. Well. Lengthy compared to my regular entries.

Where to start? Well, first, you might want to take a peak at

These disturbing images

Why did I do it? Well, a couple of reasons. First, if you take a good, close look at that ponytail you'll realize just what a mess it was. And it was, really - hard to manage, impossible to brush through, prone to tangling at the slightest provocation, prone to frizing if someone thought 'Hey! John has hair!'. Seriously.

The other reason, is that I just felt like it was time for a change. I've had progressively longer hair for four years now. Its been static, unchanging. I thought I'd mix things up a bit, and see what I looked like now with shorter hair (while I did have shorter hair four years ago, I think my body type has fairly extensively changed in the intervening time).

Thirdly, Jill got her hair cut. The rule states she can't have shorter hair than I do. :)

Granted, these weren't the only changes. The next week or two I went out and fixed my clothing situation. That is, I had none. Serious, I had one pair of pants and some crappy long-sleeved shirts. I dropped a good chunk of money at Men's Wearhouse and S&K fixing that situation. I have been told by sources close to my (hi Jill!) that I look damned good now.

Work remains work. One of my co-workers just left for four months to take care of his carpal tunnel/tendonitis/massive wrist problems. He's going through surgeries that will affect both his arms. Blech. Meanwhile, we've hired a new person (Qi Sun). He's pretty brilliant, and I'm happy to be working with him. We are looking for another new developer. If you're in Rochester and have experience doing web applications for a Microsoft platform (VB, ASP, ASP.NET using C#) than we'd be happy to take a look at your resume. I should warn that the job is about 50-50 support/new developmment.

Anyways, work is work. I've started taking on new responsibilities there: I'm doing a lot more of our design work and trying to inject actual software engineering methodologies into the mix (as in, I just wrote two of our first functional specs. I've been working there four years - isn't that sad?). I'm also trying to convince them to pick up a Bug Tracking system. Actually, they realize that we need one, now its just overcoming inertia and getting one.

I'm currently involved in all of one LARP: the Changeling LARP that Jill & I are running. We run this Saturday, 1 PM EST, at RIT's College of Science. If you can make it, I encourage you to do so: it really is a good game. Other than that, though, I haven't been doing a lot of LARPing. I will not be attending ICC, nor any other Camarilla event in the near future. I'm involved in one D&D tabletop, which is pretty fun. If I can get off my ass, I will do some writing for my own D&D game and get that started again soon.

Aikido goes well. I've managed to start attending on a regular basis again. I'm pretty sure they're going to have me test for my next belt in the next couple of months, and I'm looking forward to that. After that, I just keep pushing on towards blue belt. Which is kind of a scary test: its the first test to involve freestyle against an attacker.