Decided to clean up the extraneous sections of this website. My portfolio was way too out of date, so I completely got rid of it, and with the Presidential Election now over, there's no point in having a Politics section either.

I should probably get going on that CSS part, though.

My contract work looks like it will be picking up again.  The major reason there was so little work done in November was because almost every member of the team (there are only about 5 or 6 of us) went on a 2 or 3 week vacation. December should be back to normal.

I've got a couple of side projects going on as well. The wife of my brother-in-law's friend (had to think about that for a second) is opening up a wedding service company, so a website is being completed by both Nadia and myself. My contract with the Region I Chapter of the VPPPA (www.vppregion1.com) is bringing in some work in the realm of a new design, and added functionality. Fortunately, this means I won't be entirely broke for Christmas. Unfortunately this means that things like reading the Feynman Lectures, brushing up on PHP, and learning Ruby on Rails and Python will have to be moved to that friendly old backburner.

In my last post I mentioned I'll be heading home to Massachusetts for Christmas. This is now confirmed, and I can also confirm that Nadia will be joining me! Last year she wasn't able to accompany me due to work restrictions, but we have got around that this year.

That's all folks!

Alright, this is getting a bit absurd. I realize a lot of friends from Canada visit this page, but 50% of the votes in my Presidential Election poll is "I'm Canadian!" C'mon, people from the United States need to represent!!! And I just used three exclamation points there too, so now you have to.

Go! Vote! And then go vote on November 4th!

After a day or two of thinking that I want to start posting my thoughts on the 2008 Presidential Election, I realized that it probably would not be a good idea to do it on this website, and that a new, seperate website would have to be made so that these two worlds can co-exist peacefully.

Thus I have created: brianirish.com/POLITICS

I’m going to try to stay as neutral as possible while posting to that blog, as to not try to influence one candidate over another. I’ll be referencing facts from factcheck.org, a non-partisan website.

Feel free to voice your own opinion in the comments of the new blog, but please try to keep it quasi-civilized!

Just completed a bit of house cleaning on the website here... removed my pitiful About page, and added a bit of information to my Portfolio page. I've also added a placeholder page for some CSS code I want to publish later on.

On the right hand side, underneath the links to other websites, there's a (totally voluntary) poll that you can feel free to participate in. I've started off with a political question, because of my interest in politics, and because I'd like to see how my visitor's will vote in the upcoming election. It's absolutely anonymous, there's no way for me to see how you have voted, so vote away! I'll be adding more in the future.

Have an idea for a poll I should conduct in the future? Write it in the comments!

At the top of the page, you'll notice a new link titled "Repertoire." (Yes, I had to look up how to spell it correctly.) This page is going to help motivate me in learning new recipes to cook for my wonderful new wife, so that I can further hypnotize her into staying with me forever.

Feel free to laugh at my awful, terrible skills. I'm probably not giving myself enough credit with what I can make, but that's honestly all I can think of right now.

The big day was Saturday May 3rd, 2008. Now to commit that date to memory for anniversaries... haha. Nadia and I are both very happy, it was everything we could have asked for (except the weather)! Photos coming soon...

This is also a step in Phase III of Operation Canada, so an update for that is coming soon as well!

I've now included a new portfolio demonstrating my work in websites. So far, web design and code has been a hobby of mine, but I hope to progress further with a new job in the industry. You may view my portfolio by clicking on the Portfolio button at the top of any page.