From my horoscope today:

"You thought you knew what you wanted, so why is it so hard to make up your mind? If you seem to be veering between multiple personalities, it's only the Stars pushing your buttons."

Well, that fits well. I am being torn in a million different directions right now. My eldest daughter has just left to head back to college. It was great to see her, and I am so pleased about how school is going for her. However, I worry about how to continue to pay for her education, the education of her sisters, keep the house, etc. etc.

If I were earning the sort of money I was making five years ago on Wall Street, everything would be fine. Or would it?

Yesterday, I received my membership to Investigative Reporters and Editors. They accept bloggers as members, and this fits very well with my current discussions about Investigative Blogging. I need to spend some time exploring their resources. It is pretty exciting.

My daughter talked about how saying, 'My dad is an investigative blogger' sure beats saying, 'My dad works on Wall Street', to her classmates. And, afterall, being cool in the eyes of your teenage offspring is worth a lot.

I also received an email about Blog Torrent. Blog Torrent is a very simple way of setting up a Bittorrent tracker. It makes it very simple for anyone to share large files (particularly audio or video), in a peer to peer manner. Right now, it is at version 0.8 and only works for Windows users. Even that has a few glitches, but it is pretty interesting to check out.

I also got IMed about a site I have admin rights on that has been spammed with porn. Unfortunately, it is an old Drupal based site which doesn't have a quick and easy de-spammer. I will probably have to roll my own.

Yesterday, the replacement camera came in the mail. A month or so ago, I leaned on my digital camera in such a way that it broke the digital display. We contacted Canon and they said they would repair it for us (for a price). For a slightly higher price, they would send the next newer version. The new version does a lot of the stuff that I always wished the old one did. Much greater control. I want to spend some time out playing with that.

On the backburner is spending more time with CivicSpace and MediaWiki. I've gotten MediaWiki running on one of my test servers. It is pretty nice, but has a bit of a learning curve. I need to upgrade my CivicSpace test environment to Version 0.8.1 which came out the day before Thanksgiving. I have a few prototype sites I want to set up for that, particularly in the realms of philanthropy and investigative blogging. I have a lot of thoughts about how CivicSpace can interact with MediaWiki, Blog Torrent and several fun projects I have.

Back to my horoscope, it ended off with 'Right now the best cure for too much thinking is physical activity.'

So, I need to read some blogs, catch up on email, test Blog Torrent, play with the new digital camera, do some work on some websites, particularly testing working with CivicSpace and MediaWiki. But maybe I should just go take a walk.