We’re getting over our third bout of strep in as many months. Shabbats together haven’t been happening at all. Two family get-togethers for grownups’ birthdays had to be delayed until a health window opened. Kids’ birthday season is about to begin, and we might get to stick to the schedule if the weather changes soon too.

Our in-home weather has lately been cooler and calmer. Whether the wind is blowing one way or the other, one can always attribute the trend to many possible causes. As not-always, the current effect is more consistently pleasant time together.

I know better than to think the wind won’t change direction, but the new way things are going gives me a new (and decidedly sunnier) feeling about my chances of reestablishing myself professionally. This is helpful in absolute terms, and also relative to my new job. It’ll require a tiny bit of travel, but mostly I’ll work from the home office. I’ll say more about it once I’ve started.

In the meantime, as time permits, I’ve been doing my usual Open Source work. Somewhat unusual: I’ve been holding weekly-ish meetings for notqmail developers to rebuild momentum and ship our next release. We’re quite close.

The last couple weeks of my available technical attention have been hijacked by dealing with intended and unintended changes in Apple’s latest developer tools. I had promptly and semi-naively updated, only to find quite a lot of broken pkgsrc builds. I say “semi-naively” because as I see it, whenever I have a dependency on anything, keeping my foot on the gas is part of the deal. It doesn’t usually take a couple weeks to deal with the fallout. I’ll write a post about what I found and how I worked around it.

Compensating for this unpleasant surprise, I also got a pleasant one: ikiwiki has gained some more maintainers and we’ve shipped a new release! I had been hoping for some time that new energy for ikiwiki would appear, because my bandwidth for such things is being spent on notqmail. Et voilà!