I am now a PumpKing. No, not that kind of pumpking, this kind:

I stole the Perl Foundation logo and created a stencil from it using GIMP. It took me approximately 3 hours to create that pumpkin.

Happy Halloween!

So my Christmas vacation has been a hit or miss. I have spent the entire time on pins and needles because I am (still) technically on call. That means, even though the company is shut down for the holidays, I may have to go in to work. I am working on a project that is delivering and they refuse to slip the delivery, so I have to go in a fight any fires that come up during the holidays. It could be worse though; I could be one of the people who is working every day but Christmas and New Years.

The thing that’s frustrating for me is I was desperately needing a solid vacation. I get 160 hours of paid-time-off a year and I only used about 16 of them for pleasure. The rest of the time was spent studying for school. Graduate school has basically become a second job since it is so demanding of my time. I had over 60 hours of time off in November before I used about 50 of them to study for my Machine Learning class.

I did end up with some decent swag for Christmas though. Here’s a brief list of things I was gifted:

• Garmin Forerunner 205
• The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
• Contra 4
• DS Charger Grip
• Misc. DS accessories, including a bendable stylus
• Marathon by Jeff Galloway
• Galloway’s 5K/10K Running by Jeff Galloway
• Nine Inch Nails – Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D
• Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero (returned, will by the Still CD)
• Nike sweat wicking layer shirt
• $100 Visa Gift card (will get a new harddrive)
• $40 CircuitCity gift card
• Hockey wall calendar

All in all, it was a pretty sweet Christmas. I can’t complain about any of the gifts really. I’ve been working on getting this Garmin working with my Linux box and all is going well so far. I’ll make a separate dedicated post about it later because it seems the internet is devoid about information on how to do this.