We started last year searching for a house, and I ended it lounging in newly purchased house with the first actual week off from work I’ve had in years. Over the summer, we took a road trip to Las Vegas with the girls I finally quit my ridiculously part time job at Wizards of the Coast (moved away from Renton).

In any case, let me see if I can at least write out 12 bullet points:

• Jan: started the home search
• Feb: ???
• Mar: Found the house, signed the papers!
• Apr: We started refinishing the floors while the house was still empty.
• May: Started moving our stuff in, and cleaning up the old house we were renting.
• Jun: First official month actually living in the new house.
• Jul: Niki’s 9th birthday!
• Aug: Road trip to Vegas (started in July, to be honest), and my brother’s wedding.
• Sep: Surgery to fix my sinus issue.
• Oct: Maeby’s 5th birthday!
• Nov: My first official year at Substantial
• Dec: Took an actual week off!

It’s amazing how much time the new home claimed and maybe someone can fill in the ???, but I’m satisfied with 2011 nevertheless.

Today, I went in to see the doc again and he felt I had gotten a lot worse than the last time I saw him, and noticed how bad my ears looked. In fact, he recommended an immediate myringotomy to keep me from temporarily losing my hearing. I nearly canceled² but now that I’ve gone through it, I can tell how bad my right ear congested.

He also cleared out my sinuses so he could poke around and see what’s going on in my skull. First he stuffed my sinuses with cottonballs soaked in local anesthesia (ridiculously uncomfortable). He followed that with a good vacuuming. The tubing was clear. Was clear. Oh god, it was terrible. Once he got it all cleared out he stuck an endoscope in and took a look around.

Ultimately, he suspects a type of nasal polyp, that will most likely need to be removed surgically. I’ve scheduled a CT scan for Wednesday to confirm, and then I’ll possibly have to schedule a surgery. Either way, I’m hoping to get my sense of smell and taste back soon. My hearing’s half way back!

Of course now I’m leaking fluids out of my nose and ear, so you’ll have to excusemewhileiruntothebathroom

With help from family, it’s all done though and we no longer have any ties to our old place. Normally when we move I’m filled with a sense of melancholy as we pull out of the drive way that one last time, but this time? After two months of moving? After a year of packing and storing and living in what was functionally a real estate show room? As the tow truck pulled away with me in the passenger seat, I don’t even think I looked back.

In time since I last posted, Nicole and I managed to not only find a house for sale, but we also bought it. We’ve started renovating it preparing for our move with happens in a couple days. We’ve even started a blog about the process.

I’m still working at the awesome Substantial, though at the rate they’re growing, it feels like I haven’t met even half the people that now work there. I’m also still working for Wizards of the Coast, albeit even less than I was previously, as I’ve requested to be put on the back burner while we work on the house and try to get moved in. I’m also still doing work for Nology Media at times, and their growth rate is probably double that of Substantial’s. In any case, all that adds up to me being incredibly busy. Any free time I have lately is filled now with playing Black Ops, usually for an hour or so, just to get me away from a keyboard and mouse (Magic Trackpad, actually, but you get my point).

Because of how busy I am, many of my side projects are suffering greatly:

• TweetMe.TV has barely left the planning stage¹.
• TweetMe.me has been in barely maintenance mode.
• Prototype Apps barely has a working alpha, and I’ve already considered switching technology.
• Seek and Destroy is also undergoing a technology change.
• Validate on Save has had more work done by contributors than myself lately (yay open source!)
• and there’s a bunch more (probably on my github that I haven’t touched in a long while.

Ah well, maybe I’ll be able to get to some of those this summer².

In other news: I started drinking this Peanut Passion smoothie from Emerald City Smoothies for lunch. They’re ridiculously good. Nicole put together a recipe so I could make them at home. It goes something like:

• 1 banana
• 1 half pint of strawberry yogurt
• 1 half pint of milk
• 2 tablespoons of smooth peanut butter
• 2 tablespoons of granola or cereal

Blend together until smooth. The measurements aren’t exact, you could practically use any amount you want, it will most likely come out good. I usually throw in a tablespoon of grape or strawberry jelly as well. A coworker at Substantial, Shawn, suggested we get a hand immersion blender; we did that, and we basically just toss everything into a large enough cup and blend away.

In any case, I got this sent to my comcast.net email address this morning:

Dear MATTHEW AUAYAN,

Our records show that you recently changed the email password on your account. If you did not authorize this change, please call Comcast at 1-800-COMCAST and we’ll be happy to assist in any way we can.

Your security is top priority at Comcast! To learn more, visit our FAQs at www.comcast.com.

Best regards, The Comcast Team\r\n[EventId:60097249:/EventId]

I bet when my Comcast phone service goes out, they diligently call me on my Comcast phone line to notify me of the interruption of service¹.

After work, I played Modern Warfare 2 (on the PS3 — you can probably guess what my PSN name is) and set a personal kill streak record (22 kills!) and played a match without dying.

I reapplied thermal paste on Nicole’s MacBook. I don’t know why, but from the factory it looks like they applied thermal paste like its purpose was to insulate these chips.

Last December, my nephew accidentally bumped a table, causing a glass of water to spill right into the back vents. I took the MacBook apart completely, hunting for liquid, but I’m guessing a combination of Nicole’s quick reaction, winter’s insanely dry air, and the insanely hot wood stove at my parents’, and just taking it apart took care of it all. Of course, I didn’t have any thermal paste at the time and combine that with the incredibly thick layer that was laid down… you can imagine it wasn’t doing it’s job very efficiently.

I figured out the best thing to use to apply thermal paste is the back of a plastic spoon. While I’m at it, allow me to also give you a couple more, what the french call, le pro-tips:

• Use tape, sticky side up, to keep screws from getting lost. I also keep the screws arranged analogously to their spatial relationship of the machine I’m taking apart. Keeps me from getting lost, as well. A large magnet might work as well, but I’ve got a semi-irrational fear of large magnets in proximity to computers¹.

• Stick a small magnet on your screw driver to temporarily magnetize it, to keep the tiny little screws from falling off and into your machine. Yeah, I know what I said in the last tip. Please also note that I qualified that with “semi-irrational”.

• Backup before you do any of this. In fact, backup before you backup.

Now, I’m blogging it up while eating a bowl of ramen, as if I were some sort of nerd.

12:42 PM Dave

http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/23/redmond-pie-and-the-farmville-test/ oh man.

12:44 PM Nicole

heh

12:44 PM Nicole

i can barely run flash on my computer.. i don’t want it on my phone..

12:44 PM Nicole

ew

12:44 PM Dave

rofl

12:45 PM Dave

all the ipad haters say ‘my wife doesn’t care about how cool the ipad is, she just wants to play farvmille THIS IS WHY THE IPAD SUCKS’

12:46 PM Dave

apparently the ipad haters married idiots.

I started shopping for thermal insoles (hard to find, apparently) and came across a few patent and trademark disputes that discussed the composition of these thermal insoles. They consist of roughly 3 layers, a bottom layer (presumably made of rubber) for keeping the insoles in place, a middle layer that acts as a heat shield, and a top layer that acts as an insulator and padding for your feet.

Here’s the secret: The “heat shield” layer is basically a sheet of aluminum foil.

Naturally, after reading that, I decided i could make it myself. I picked up some new Memory Foam™ insoles (for insulation) and stuck a sheet of aluminum foil in my shoes before sticking the new insoles.

Does it work? Let me just say that before I did this, the sidewalks were covered in ice, and after making my tin foil shoes, there’s water everywhere. Coincidence?

Fast forward a few months, and I’m already getting bothered by “scratches” on my lenses, but they weren’t terrible, so I lived with them.

The Scuffle

I tried to polish it out but with no luck, so I looked online to see if “lens polishing” was a service normally offered. Considering these retail places exist to sell new lenses, I eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn’t something they would do. However, my search yielded an unexpected result: How to Fix Scratched Glasses with Minimal Effort. To sum up, he used a glass etching cream to remove the anti-reflective coating, which is where most light scratches sit. Score!

Reading through other threads about anti-reflective coating revealed that the “scratches” I first encountered were actually issues with the coating itself. Fail! You can see most of the scratches on my lenses were from the coating flaking out, with the exception of the massive abrasion.

Nicole has a huge bottle of the same glass etching cream, so as soon as I could, I tried it out. I applied it on a small corner near the frame and it came out fine, so I coated both lenses, one side at a time for 5 minutes each side.

…and voila!

Just like new!

It worked rather well and though I no longer have that anti-reflective coating, my lenses are practically as good as new.

A word of warning: do NOT try the glass etching cream on actual GLASS lenses. It will etch your lenses into a cloudy frosty mess. This “cream” is actually a hydrofluoric acid, so treat with caution. Also, if you do this, you do so at your own risk.

I thought the hardest part of all of this was pulling the lens out, but putting the one I removed BACK turned out to be even more difficult. After the ordeal of removing the first one, I decided against removing the second. I suggest trying the cream against a part of your frames to see if they’ll cause any damage. Of course, plastic frames may be okay, but test anyway.

My thumbs are hurting like I’ve been playing Contra all day. And yes, there was blood. And teeth.