For starters: I’ve left my day job and gone back to consulting. As is my policy, I’m not going to reveal clients here, but they’re an interesting cross-section of business verticals and projects, and one prospective client in particular already has me in touch with people on at least 3 continents, all from my desk in Kew Gardens. I’m feeling very much like one of those digital nomads that the post-Web-2.0 techno-hypesters like to talk about. And liking it.

I also have a part-time, on-site gig in a very trendy New York neighborhood. On some evenings, there is a truck vending “artisanal ice cream” parked outside this client’s offices. (I have not yet seen it move, nor heard it play an endless loop of 8 bars of “Pop Goes the Weasel”.) It’s little details like that that keep the New York experience refreshingly weird.

Also – and I should have posted about this ages ago, but you know how it is – the Rails Rumble 2008 was a blast, and I know more in my bones about building complex messaging systems than I did before the Rumble. Our entry was a multi-player word game, and you may play the Rumble incarnation of it here. We’ll be blogging about Rumble lessons and putting up an update of the game in the next few weeks.

And speaking of “we”, Gabe, Abel and I have added a whimsical name to our hacker cabal; blog posts about the Rumble experience will be posted over at Kickass Labs. (Note to Abel: Get a site up already so I can link to you properly. A one-pager will do.)

In other news: When I’m not hustling paying work or hacking w/ the KAL crew, I have plenty of my own projects to work on. To wit: I have a goal to fix a minor bug in GuitarCardio this week, I will probably take down Rewardist for the time being, and I’m currently investigating solutions to data representation issues in my super-top-secret Hadoop project.

And that’s enough blogging. Back to work.

Of course, in my rare spare minute, I’m still working on added features for GuitarCardio.com – I think mode-based drills will be next.

Of course, I put more effort into studying quantum mechanics. And maybe there’s some similarity here – once you learn a few hairy rules and what they really mean, the weird results make sense.

That was more gripe-y than educational. I’ll post something meatier next time.