Rapid-fire quarterly update

Terse bullet-point update to try and summarize the past few months...

• Job: I've been hoping to get on at Socialtext since last November, and in September they hired me on as a Software QA and QA Tools Engineer. It's awesome to work with such amazing and talented people. Doing QA is a switch-up for me from straight-up development work, but I'm really interested in what we can do in terms of controls and practices to produce the best software. Telling your developers to "code harder" doesn't work -- most of us write the best code that we can, and for the Socialtext devs that code is pretty damn good -- but bugs still get in, and we need to find ways to weed them out or make sure they never get in to begin with.
• Judo: I also started judo back in September. Before shipping out for a youth exchange to Japan in my teens, I actually tried a few judo classes at the local YMCA before my exchange-student stuff crowded them out of my life. I've been looking for something to get me out of the house and doing something physical a few times a week, and this fit the bill incredibly well. In fact, I now realize how much I missed doing it -- the scientific principles of physics and anatomy that it's based on, the geeky appeal of trying to solve a neat "puzzle" in real time, and philosophical aspects of redirecting your opponent's energy instead of meeting force with force combine to produce an art that really appeals to me.
• 日本語: my Japanese has been coming back to mind a tiny bit more lately. It's still < 1% of what I was capable of at the end of my exchange year, but I think the refreshers generated by judo, a bit of i18n work, listening to J-Pop with my daughter, and having coworkers who speak a bit of the language are having a bit of an effect.
• Espresso: for my birthday, my dear wife bought me a serious hard-core espresso machine. Well, actually, she wasn't quite sure which one to pick up, and wasn't about to make that decision on my behalf, so she gave me a budget and left me to do the research. So, by the beginning of November, I decided on a Gaggia Coffee paired up with an MDF grinder. Only one problem -- the Coffee is ridiculously backordered, and it turns out there won't be enough to meet demand until at least February. Incredibly enough, the folks at WholeLatteLove called me up last week and asked if I'd rather get a Gaggia Baby instead, for the same price, right now. Given that that's a machine that's worth $150 more and has a nice feature (3-way valve) that the Coffee lacks, it wasn't hard to make my decision. They've been having some problems charging my credit card but I think that's finally cleared up tonight -- the goods should be on their way tomorrow.
• Penguicon: I still have a fair deal of work to do on creating the restaurant & cafe locator web tool that I promised to put together before the conference. Ideally I'd like to have it ready before ConFusion, but work and family manage to fill my schedule to the brim every week. If time doesn't allow me to get it going within a reasonable timeframe, I'll use one of the commercial mapbuilding sites to hack something together, but I'd really like to put this together myself if I can find the time at all.
• Website: Finally, my own website is in dire need of an overhaul. Given that I've now moved up to a less laughable computer, I can ditch the static-page-management Perl scripts that I hacked together a few years ago and take advantage of some easy to operate system that generates pages dynamically. Specifically, I think I'm going to replace the whole kit and kaboodle with MoinMoin. That'll let me add new sections, blog entries, etc, with a lot more ease. And besides, I work for a wiki company now, so why not?