This year, we broke from tradition. We didn’t make the absurdly early trip to Future Shop for their Boxing Day sale. There just wasn’t anything worth getting up at 4:30 in the morning.

We did head in at around 11am though. I picked up a 2GB thumb drive for $30 (after those damned rebates), and both my father and my father-in-law picked up a GPS. I decided that I’d save my money (and gift cards) for a new HDTV next year.

I didn’t find that there was much in the flyer this year. Maybe it’s because I have most of what they were advertising. There were a few things I was tempted to buy like hard drives and such, but I just didn’t need them.

Oh well, there’s always next year.

Hope you get lots of toys!

I’ve been playing around with Subversion for the past couple of weeks. It’s a version control system similar to CVS. I use it to keep track of the software I write. So, at any time, I can go back and check out the state of a project from any day. It’s really useful for finding bugs and such. Also, if you do development on different machines, it really helps ensure you’re working on the correct files.

There’s a really good GUI client for OS X called svnX that can connect to an svn repository via SSH.

It takes a little while to figure out what’s going on if you’re not used to it, but even for one-man operations, it’s pretty useful.

A couple of links to get you started:

OnLamp.com – Single User Subversion
Version Control with Subversion
svnX HOWTO

.::UPDATE::.
I forgot to mention that if you try to use svnX without first having installed svn on your Mac, it’ll just hang. You need to install the latest svn package from Martin Ott’s site.

When I woke up on Thursday morning I noticed that my right shoulder was feeling a bit tender. I figured I had just slept on it funny, so I ignored it. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be ignored. As the day wore on, my shoulder started to get more and more sore. By that night I was really in pain. It was my right shoulder blade, and later my right bicep.

I hadn’t done anything that I could think of to hurt myself. It had been a couple of days since I went to the gym, and I don’t remember bumping in to anything, so it couldn’t be broken although it did kind of feel that way.

By Friday night I was in so much pain, that I couldn’t sit on the couch, I couldn’t walk around, hell, I couldn’t even lay down with out this throbbing pain. Finally, Erin called the TeleHealth number and I spoke to a nurse about what I should do. Surprise, surprise, they said take some Advil and tough it out for a few days.

I have to say that Advil certainly does the trick. After about 800mg of that stuff all I could feel is a dull throb, and I could live with that. Although, if this doesn’t clear up in a few days, I’ll have to go to the hospital…my absolute favourite place in the world.

Wish me luck.

Today is officially the start of our Christmas vacation! I haven’t taken a vacation if a couple of years, so this is pretty nice. It’s especially nice because I get 10 days off, but only have to use up 1 vacation day. PQA is giving us the 3 work days between Christmas and New Year’s as paid vacation!

I’ve been all done my shopping for a couple of weeks now, so that just leaves relaxing and visiting family as the sole activities for the next week or so….except for Futureshop Day. I have no idea what I’m going to be buying this year, but I’ll bee there bright…er…dark and early as usual.

Merry Christmas!