Another milestone reached, my 500th journal entry. It's amazing how much mindless drivel I've written in the past year and a third or so. Looking back, I don't think my writing is getting any better. But this has been a good place to chronicle my life and write down things as I see them at that time, knowing that later on I'll have a different view of the world. Much like recording my Star Trek sessions, it's a way for me to save my past.

Financially I'm back on an even keel. At the end of this month I should have a $1000 reserve in the bank, even after the $550 Metricom yearly payment due this month. This is possible because I paid all my Social Security taxes for the year, so that's an extra $450 to cover that expense. Short term credit card is back under control now that all my Christmas shopping is done. Long term credit card is still at $4300, and will stay high for some more months. I'll move the balance to a new credit card with a low introductory interest rate or get a new credit card and use that as my regular credit card, then not pay off the charges while it's at 0% interest and use the money to pay off the long term credit card. A tricky juggling act. But I do love my PowerBook. I just have to stay off of eBay.

In terms of work, I'm staying busy. Yesterday I finally got call transfer working with a Rockwell switch. Transfer and conference are always tricky because every switch does it quite differently and you have to keep track of information as the agents change states. In any case the big problem with Rockwell transfer was that the events it was throwing were different than what we expected. So I spent a couple of days writing code to catch those events and throw the correct events. Then the events were in the wrong order which was another day to debug and fix. Then the events had one missing piece of information which took a couple of days to trace through and fix. Hopefully it'll be faster for conference, now that I have a better idea of the inner workings of our C++ bridge server.

And of course I have other things that I need to work on. Various bugs and other lower priority projects that I'm not doing today because I need to catch up a bit with my journal entries. It's been hectic the last few weeks and I don't see much of a letup until after New Year's Day (really, I should have been done last week but various other duties kept me behind so that now I'm in a "finish it up ASAP" mode, which I can't really keep up for more than a couple of days at a time. I just burn out too quickly.).

Writing of Metricom, I read last week that Merlin released a Type II PC Card Ricochet modem for the 128 kb Ricochet network. Now, that's pretty cool since that's a lot smaller than lugging the regular Ricochet modem. For a notebook computer you don't want to be lugging a bunch of accessories around, it kind of defeats the purpose. Not that I'm planning on buying it, at least not until Ricochet is in many more cities, which I doubt it will ever be. You just can't maintain that many transmitters in most rural sections of the country.

My brother got me some sort of coffee table book about penguins, for Christmas. I don't know, it's nice and all but I'm not *that* enamored with penguins. But it's the thought that counts, isn't it? I got Christopher a 128 MB RAM module, for Dad Steph and I bought him a replacement VCR, for Steph I bought her an Elph-2 camera, Mom doesn't want anything. I'll think of something. Dave I got a subscription to Analog because I feel he needs to read more science fiction. Julie the usual TV Guide subscription and I added a Reader's Digest subscription. That's it for me. I just don't need to buy that many gifts.