Work: Holiday party cancelled. 10 officers sacked (not that we have a shortage), all from my former company. Voluntary retirement incentive announced. Poor earnings declared (but not from the services of what was my old company, apparently) so bonuses are expected to be similarly poor. 10-15% staff cuts predicted in January 2002 by CEO. Mind-bogglingly confused time tracking system rolled out involving Excel spreadsheets and two-thousand-odd category codes. Attended over the past months a mish-mash of meetings where clueless managers make declarations about "standards" and "processes" for development but their people haven't cranked out any production-ready code in 24 months. On a brighter note, I've been experimenting with Apache SOAP and working on rewriting some of our existing code to take advantage of the web services model. So there is some fun.

Play: Been away or occupied every weekend for nearly two months. Haven't been on the motorcycle since September 30th and I'm going to have to set aside a day to prep it for winter- add fuel stabilizer to the gas, pull the battery and put it on a maintanence charger, get the tires off the ground. The recent events and the resulting changes to commuting- disabled tracks, packed subway cars, disrupted service- have helped sway Maria to consider my idea of a 125cc or larger scooter for beating around the city. I would love to get this 2002 Honda Silver Wing or their Reflex, but both are a little out of my current price range. She even plans to get her operators license so we can share it. I'd prefer a 600cc dual-sport bike like the XL600R, DR650, KLR650, or even a Honda Transalp for around here but it's a start. We did get all our holiday gift shopping done in one fourteen hour day at the outlets in Maine and I'll get the remainder online. While idling, I ran across discussions and implementations of NTLM Authentication in Squid, by Innovation.ch, and one in Python. So I might get around to steal^H^H^H^H^Hderiving from their work and adding that to my own proxy in Perl.