Wow, what a busy holiday season that was! Always is this time of year, Christmas, the New Year, my birthday and anniversary all within a two week span. There was so much going on that it is all very overwhelming and exhausting. Even after the holidays it felt like no matter how hard I worked nothing seemed to get done.

Finally I have been able to start digging myself out from underneath the pile. Many of the things that have been on my todo list for months have suddenly been completed, plus many more recent items. Here’s the plan I have been following to keep it going:

• Keep a detailed list of everything that I need to do
• Get rid of anything on the list that doesn’t actually matter
• Finish things before I move on to the next, don’t leave items @ 90% complete
• When something is finished, put it away so that it’s out of my mind
• Re-prioritize my to do list often in achievable chunks, starting the whole process over again

The results have been good, as I get caught up, my head feels more clear and I’m actually able to get things done even faster. This week I’ve scratched 3 times as much stuff off of my lists as I have in previous weeks, and we all know how good it feels to get out that marker and cross something off our list. I no longer feel like I’m buried under a pile of stuff.

So give it a try if you like, let me know how you make out.

I’m not even sure how they did it, but Apple is definitely doing something right. I have always been against Apple and their Macs because of application compatibility and the fact that being a .Net programmer, the Mac platform isn’t really available to me.

Lately though, I’ve been finding myself more and more interested in what Apple is doing and some of the new products they are releasing. I even watched the Developer Conference keynote awhile back and found myself getting very excited about what they will be offering, much in the way that I did when I started seeing Vista webcasts.

Even more scary, I find myself seriously considering getting a Macbook Pro or a Mac Pro for my next notebook/laptop. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I can run Windows / Linux etc. on it, I don’t know…

So, kudos to you guys Apple, you’ve caught my attention.

For my birthday this year my girlfriend said she was going to take me to see the Lord of the Rings musical playing in Toronto. She checked for tickets every couple of weeks during the year, we wanted decent seats but they always seemed to be so expensive. Luckily, one week in June when she was checking the site, she stumbled across this deal where you get a 3 course dinner and ‘Premium Seats’ for the bargain price of $89! She called right away and was able to reserve us both DD (4th row) seats, which actually end up being 2nd row seats due to the space alloted for the conductor.

Our dinner was at The Strip House just around the corner from the theatre and was absolutely fantastic, I would highly recommend it to anybody looking for a new place to try.

Being a huge fan of the original books and the movies and after the lackluster reviews I was a bit skeptical about how the show would be. Needless to say, I was amazed. The sets and effects were brilliant and overall they interpretted the story very well. Those who only saw the movies may find the end a bit confusing as it does not end with Frodo going to the West, instead, the story of Saruman returning to the Shire is told, a great surprise that had many in the theatre wondering what was going on. For me, the most memorable scene was the Bridge of Khazad-dum, the stage was lit to appear as though it was on fire, then suddenly there was a huge blast of air whipping past us with pieces of tissue paper as ash. It felt like and earthquake was happenening beneath our seats. All of this was compounded by our proximity to the stage.

Overall I thought the show was very well done, my only disappointment was that the voice of the actor who played Gandalf was very weak, almost to the point of sounding scared most of the time. Mind you, he had very large shoes to fill after the example set by Sir Ian McKellen.

If you get a chance to see it before it closes on Sept. 3rd, I highly recommend it.

So I’m officially on the path to getting my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer certification. I’ve purchased the recently released Self-Paced training kit for exam 70-536 (.NET 2.0 Application Development Foundation) from Chapters and it just arrived at the office today.

My plan is to maintain a log of sorts of my progress through the whole ordeal so that others can learn from my experience. I’ve already made my way through the first chapter of the text so I’ll be posting about that soon, check back for all the gory details.