Well, I have my initial answer for the quilt design:

Initial reaction: it's close.  It's very close.  I have eight stars left over, thus explaining the +8 or -10.  If I want to stick with the current number of rows, I have eight spare stars.  If I want to add one more row, which I believe I do, I'm ten short. Given that I'm sitting on several fabrics I didn't use, I'm fairly certain of my answer. I'd planned to be a bit short on stars for that very reason; I didn't pick out these fabrics, so I was going to be very dependent on lucking into a good order.

Two of those red fabrics just aren't playing nicely, though. I don't want to pull them out of the quilt; I'd rather blend them better. We'll see.

Full evolution of the design is documented at http://flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157613043153779/detail/

I have little of use or consequence to say, but I'd like to note that all of the stars have been brought to the end of Stage One: Partial Assembly.

See these, down at the bottom of this photo?  All sewn now, baby:

['Soon, stars' on flickr]

Stage Two seems to involve ironing the last 70-odd stars that haven't gotten the Hot Steamy Smackdown.

Stage Three ... you know it ... brace for it ... it's TECHNOQUILTING TIME.  Yes, that great and glorious day when I set up a whiteboard, photograph all the half-sewn bits one by one, and fidget everything around in Photoshop until I've got a running order.  I realize most people use Photoshop for normal things, like graphic design and making one's boobs look bigger in photos, but I've got plenty of boobs and normal is so damned passé.

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

The tickets are booked. I will disappear for a little while in late July, and I would be lying if I did not say that the nighttime pathways of my mind have taken me more than once down the thought of sand between my toes. It's peace and quiet I'm after, both for myself and for the friend who is kind enough to host me, but there is yet much work to do before I can board that plane without undone tasks.I am the sort that is good for crusades; when it comes to code I am more stolid than gifted, as Gareth and several other true coders, whom I count among my friends, can attest.

At this point, it's just plain silliness: the cutting of a spare house key or the run to Kinko's for sixteen color copies. Or, as said to Suzan the other night: "We do all this planning ahead of time so that when we finally get on-site, we can walk away from our lives for nearly a week."

From here to central Georgia (and back) is something over four hundred miles. Four hundred miles of alterna-rock radio stations (who don't really seem to remember what they're the alternative to) and trees that stand politely out of the way of the gently-winding interstate.We are eleven days away from dragon*con, and the pie-in-the-sky battle plans are cementing themselves into plans for the weekend after next. Oompa is recovering from brown recluse bites on his legs and can't do much lifting, so Jeremy (our very own rock-steady Mr. Sulu) will be his second-in-command this year.

Ahab had his whale.
Quixote had his windmills.
I have a content management system.
But I will finish mine. 

A year ago, this was a quixotic task; something to be talked about in the realm of what-if with Jeff on a trip to Birmingham.  A movie—one or another—after all, we see many.

"What if," he said, after listening to me go on for quite some time, "you wrote something yourself?  Have you given that any thought?"

Clenched between my kneecaps was a notebook full of just that—code dreams.  In pen, in scribble, with question marks and doodles on the side.  Scribbles that, in the right slant of light, might look like the beginnings of a schema.  Dreams, translated through the medium of ink to the permanence of a printed page that no one but me would ever read.

Geof likes to remind me that all journeys begin with a single step. 

This journey:  I began coding on Quarto today.  The pseudocode is essentially done, Gareth has been kind enough to write a conversion script, and my database schema looks about as final as it's going to get.  In other words, I know what I've gotta do; now's the time to sit down and just start writing the blasted thing.Today's single step was writing the installation script.  It wasn't terribly difficult, but it did take a little longer than I thought it would.  At its most basic, these three pages are simple PHP scripts that issue commands to a database.  They create the tables that Quarto needs, set up a default site, and set up a default user…named Tenzing. 

I'm running out of excuses, really.  While I'm not exactly allowed to link to it yet, I can tell you that I got Jeff's site designed, finished, and ready to roll yesterday.  All it lacks is content.  My famed, never-ending Sites To Do list is now down to one:  the redesign of Kat's site.

Many things on my mind today.

Grocery shopping done. I got my CDs in from SecondSpin—more CDs purchased because I found music on Napster and wanted copies that I could play on the stereo and not just on my computer. Got my knives resharpened. Talked with friends.