I take it black, but for the tears

I love the lovely coffee ladies of the Rossini's and Cumberland Farms morning shifts. They always have a smile for me, and in the case of Rossini's have a tall cup of sweet black warmth poured by the time I reach the counter, for they know me. I need only nod.

They are my radiant dark angels of good mornings.

2007 ramp-up

And so 2006 glides to a close. This was an unusually homogenous year for me, especially coming after the crazy-quilt calendar of 2005. Volity dominated three-quarters of my year, though other non-blocking events happened in parallel, notably my befriending a whole group of new and excellent people (whom I think of as the dictator555 circle, met via dougo).

As the year ends I find myself staring down a whole queue of topics that (except for Volity) had been waiting since this time last year for me to come down off my Volity jag. I really need to build personal mission statements around each one. They group themselves into four categories:

* Volity
* Dating
* Video production (mostly Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade)
* Work (ITA and (hypothetically) other reliable income sources)

Air, water, fire and earth, eh? (Well, Volity's pretty fiery too, but let us not overthink my elemental shoehorning.)

Today, there is a general advance across all fronts, and I am actually quite pleased with everything. But I still need to figure out what I want to have happen in each section, and then keep that in mind over the course of the upcoming year.

I did write a little essay to myself about Volity the other night, and things are going to be all right. Here's the scene: the Andys and I have committed to feeding the project all the money it needs for the foreseeable future (mostly server-hosting costs). We will continue doing this until either something magical happens and it begins to pay for itself, or we all agree that it has become a hopeless financial drag. We cannot know when the former may happen, and we have a long way to fall before the latter occurs.

For my part, I will treat it as a hobby that happens to be incorporated as a business, and therefore holds that much wider a source of inspiration, and a target for application. Because I love it, I will continue to work on it as motivation strikes, and I expect it to strike regularly, but I won't hold myself to any guaranteed pace. This is a different way of thinking than I held when I started at ITA, when I thought my week would be divided between ITA-days and Volity-days. It eventually became clear to me that it instead fell naturally into ITA-days and jmac-days, and that this was fine, because it happens that I like to spend my time on Volity anyway... just not exclusively so.

I see good things for 2007, and I hope it will be good for you too.

Wii Portland

My field agents report visual contact with Wiis on shelves in the Portland Mall's Best Buy.

Sadly, the thought of willingly walking into a mall on Xmas eve, and then entering a store that is known to conduct bag searches on its customers (each of whom, it assumes, is likely an Oxycontin-addled thief - not a groundless assumption since this is Maine we're talking about), fills me with loathing, so I will probably give the opportunity a pass.

Still, it's interesting intel. Until now I haven't heard of Wii acquisition outside of those awarded to the first N people in that day's Wii Line, which is another phenomenon I shall have no part of.