This has been a fairly eventful and mildly exhausting week, but I’m sitting here in my freshly cleaned apartment on my freshly formatted computer drinking my freshly brewed cup of tea, so I feel like my life is shifting back to order quite nicely.

Last week, in a fairly spontaneous decision, I bought a new computer. I’ve been using an aging laptop for a few years, and I felt it was time to bring my desktop back from the dead. I didn’t want to pay for another computer case, or the service charge for the store to put it together for me, so I just ordered each component and built the computer myself. Unfortunately, everything arrived last week except the CPU. I had to leave the city for a few days, so I had a half-assembled desktop waiting for me at home, calling out while I was gone. It was very hard to concentrate.

Friday morning, at the ungodly hour of 5:00am, I got in a rental van and drove to Seattle with a group of developers from work. We were there to attend the No Fluff Just Stuff Java conference. I’d never been to a software development conference before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I figured it would be a weekend of mildly interesting presentations, and that would be about it. I was very happy with the high quality of the speakers there, and the talks were very helpful. I was introduced to a few technologies I didn’t know anything about, and I learnt a lot of better programming and project management practices. I came away from the conference full of enthusiasm and as a slightly better programmer, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

On the way back from Seattle, I ditched my coworkers and went to Vancouver. A friend of mine was visiting, and she had a free ticket for The Smashing Pumpkins concert on Monday night. I was there for two days, so when we did a few touristy things: Granville Island, Stanley Park Aquarium, getting completely lost. It was a lot of fun.

The concert was great. I used to be a big Pumpkins fan in high school, but I hadn’t really listened to any of their new stuff. The two new members of the band seemed like decent musicians, but they had no stage presence at all. They just rocked back and forth and looked very uncomfortable. Also, apparently a crowd surfer died a few metres to my right during the concert, and I didn’t even notice. That’s a pretty good example of how I tend to walk through life - utterly oblivious.

When I arrived home, all the parts to my new computer were waiting here for me. It’s now together and, friends, it is glorious. Bioshock looks fantastic on it.

The last fews days, I’ve been struggling through a task at work. I’m going to finish it over this weekend. It’s something I estimated would take a day, and it’s been dragging on for a week now. Once that’s finished, I’ll really be able to relax.

Here’s a song from Zeitgeist, the new Pumpkins album. As a whole, the album is a little underwhelming. It’s decent, but it seems a little weak for a comeback album.