Holy crap, June is here! What up? We had a pretty busy May, including a packed trip home two weeks ago (Memorial Day weekend) and a pair of parties just this weekend.

Vidya games, you say? Well, I'm still working on both Chrono Trigger DS and Final Fantasy XII. I'm actually stuck--voluntarily--in the latter. There is a particular tough optional boss battle in my current dungeon, and I am being a little punk about it and refusing to proceed until I beat him, which means spending tons of time building my team's strength and abilities to make them strong enough to administer the requisite beatdown. The funny thing will be once I finish him off and my guys are suddenly about 15 levels ahead of where they should be and I breeze through the rest of the game, having earned 90% of the licenses right here. As for the former game, I have also made significant progress and gone through a serious plot turn that I never saw coming and had never even heard about in the past 15 years. I haven't had as much time as I'd like for progress in either game lately, but I do what I can. We all do what we can.

I installed a third ceiling fan last week. This one was on an especially high ceiling, so I got to enjoy some fun top-of-ladder balancing and high-over-my-head reaching, much to my shoulders' chagrin. The most annoying part is the wiring. I admire the builders for using some decent heavy gauge wire in the ceiling of my house, but that stuff is a pain in the butt to manipulate once it's been nutted (giggity) to the fan wires. But it's all good. I'm still batting 1.000 on these things: they always work the first time I throw the switch and no breakers have been tripped. The next one will probably go in the basement, perhaps before the end of the summer. One of these days I'll probably document it.

One of my exciting projects this week will be to take apart my busted camera lens in an attempt to see if I can rescue it. I don't like the incorrectly exposed photos it takes, and in true me fashion I am going to attempt to fix it myself before forking over unnecessary cash to replace it. It will be an interesting little gambit... Lens, aperture=busted: Repair. Any Final Fantasy XII fans appreciate that one? Is this thing even on?

At work, I have been fighting with the SOAP beast. I call him Soapor, and I am conquering him by shoehorning some custom marshalling logic between the incoming request and the backend logic, and the backend logic and the outgoing response. You see, if the marshaller you're using at your server end doesn't like to properly handle "any" types, fixes like this become very useful. Although I am very interested in using interesting APIs and idioms in my little home and personal projects, SOAP has never been one of them.

I think I have successfully touched on a number of completely random topics, so I will leave you now with a promise to update when the lens surgery is completed (regardless of the disposition), and also a request that you keep it real.