Last Day of the Year

Here’s a new picture of me, on this last day of 2006 (picture taken in the wee hours of the morning.) I know this picture is a bit bizarre, but it’s nothing compared to me as a muppet with orange hair. In fact, whenever I would pull up my blog and see myself as Beaker, it freaked me out a little. To protect my self-image and prevent a tragic descent into an alternate Muppet identity, I decided to post a merely normally-odd picture of myself. Here I am at home in Maple Grove, Minnesota.

This Christmas has been blissfully uneventful–a nice break and time to relax. I got a bunch of awesome presents. Nothing excessive, but just what I needed. I read a lot, a luxury. I usually am able to afford only about 10 pages every evening, but managed to work through a couple of books over the past 10 days. I took time to indulge my addiction to P.G. Wodehouse, which I originally got from my father at an early age. (“I learned it by watching you!”) I can’t think of another author so expertly skilled in the use of the English language purely in the pursuit of mirth and frivolity. Perfect.

I’ve also started a project to gather together all of my old emails from various programs, accounts, periods of my life. I want to put them all together and print them out on actual paper. I have an idea that I periodically like to look at my old correspondence in a nostalgic way. Even if I did migrate all of these emails to a new email program, it’s really not the nicest way to walk down memory lane. Also, I can see the writing on the wall–anything that you really want to be able to see for years to come should be on paper, not on a computer. I already have files from college that I can’t read because they’re in some arcane format for some program that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sure a computer forensic expert could always read most of my emails, being mostly text, but I want pleasant, easy access to them. I’ve already written a perl script to pull out all the emails and attachments and format them in html. If I manage to make something usable then I’ll write more about it. My goal is to have “chapters” relating to all email traffic between me and each of the various people I’ve written to.

Also, if anybody knows of a program to print out all of one’s emails for browsing, I’d love to hear about it! Tell me now before I go crazy with another project. :)

Happy New Year everybody!