It’s now 2006 and there are mere hours left in my vacation. I’ve accomplished about 50% of the things I had planned to do. I suppose that’s better nothing. To be honest, my full TODO list is so long it’d take me most of 2006 to finish anyway, even if I didn’t have to go back to work.

My biggest accomplishment over the holidays was getting this blog set up. I am getting close to happy with my layout, having made about 1000 changes to the theme I started with (one reason I’ve been a bum about posting over the last few days).

These past two weeks I’ve had a crash course in figuring out WordPress and PHP and I think it’s starting to pay off. I might even start working on some themes to give back to the WP community in a while and figure out how to make my own plugins.

Working with PHP is like a flashback to my pre-.Net ASP days with the in-line scripting and lack of strongly typed variables. I’m not really sure why many people prefer it over the nice, clean, code-behind, pre-compiled ASP.Net. I guess it must just be an anti-Microsoft thing, but maybe someone can enlighten me if I’ve missed something. I still vastly prefer ASP.Net for my general web programming needs but it’s always good to learn a new language, if, for no other reason, just to be able to talk intelligently with the “guys in the other camp”. In any case, it’s what Wordpress is built on so I’ll have to learn it to be competant under the hood of my blog.

So I guess it’s back to the daily grind tomorrow. It will actually be nice to get back into normal routines again. Let’s hope I can implement one of my top resolutions this year: “Write something useful in my blog every day!”.

Happy 2006!