So I have less than two hours until my vacation starts. And I’m totally out of motivation to accomplish things. I was supposed to have a meeting now, but it was canceled… thus furthering my unmotivatedness.

And there are still like, a million things to do when I get home… again, not helping the “get things done now” motivation. *sigh*

I think I’m finally done Christmas shopping. For the most part. I *think*. Sheesh. I don’t think it’s quite Christmas in my head yet, despite the fact that I’ve sung the Christmas Tree song to the tree every time Chad has turned it on (and Chad is counting the days until he can ban that song for another 11 months). I’m hoping I’ll feel more like Christmas when I get back to Memphis/Huntsville, where it’s cold, and everyone is wearing sweaters and stuff. “Going home” for Christmas kind of helps set it apart from the rest of the year… there’s something about pulling into the driveway after a long trip when it’s dark and freezing cold, and being greeted by family and (warm!) food that always makes me feel like Christmas.

And then, you know, the family drama catches up with you, and then it *really* feels like Christmas. You know what I mean. You can’t have a family gathering without at least a strong undercurrent of this kind of drama. And since I only come home a couple of times a year…. it all hits at once.

So what did I accomplish this year, from my family’s perspective?

1. I once again failed to produce grandchildren for my parents (through lack of trying on my part, which makes them sad).
2. I left school, which is probably good, since I was getting too educated for my own good (or something like that). In any case, they’re pretty sure this should hasten the arrival of grandchildren.
3. I sold out to the corporate man, and work for the devil. Which might not hasten the arrival of grandchildren. Since I’m now a “career woman”. And stuff.

In all seriousness, I think my parents are more or less proud of me. But they make no secret of the fact that they would be *prouder* if they had pictures of grandchildren to show off. Because that’s what it’s all about, in the end. Or something.

Lessons for the day (more for archival benefit than because you guys will be interested…):

1. You can’t use relative path names for images that you want to load from jars. You have to use a ClassLoader to getResource().
2. It takes about 3 hours to determine this, if you forget that you can see the console output *if you run the jar from the command line* instead of trying to load it through Java WebStart.
3. It takes about 10 minutes to fix this problem, thanks to Find/Replace.
4. You cannot load files into a File object by their filename (even if you use getResource) if they are stored in a jar. Apparently, jarring them cause them to not be files any more (I know, it makes no sense to me either, but that’s the best answer I could come up with from the forums). You need to use ClassLoader.getResourceAsStream() to put the jarred file directly into an input stream, skippign hte file object all together.
5. It takes another three hours of [Run the program in Eclipse. See that it works. Jar the project. Sign the jar. Run the jar through WebStart. See that it's broken.] repeated, ad nauseum, and googling various variations on the theme of “jar read from file” before you remember that you can run the jar from the command line. And get the exception output, with the error name, and google that.
6. It takes about 30 seconds to fix this problem, once you know how.

And, if you spend all day debugging all this stuff… you get no real quantifiable work accomplished.

All day long. This song has been in my head. I haven’t played Katamari in months. Months, I tell you!

It’s one of those random songs that gets stuck in your head, and you have to fight to keep from singing it… it’s actually kind of funny.

At least I know all the words. I’m just sayin’.

In case you wondered, Rock Band is awesome. I’m so gonna sneak down to the living room and play while Chad’s asleep. And I’m gonna play as the singer. And no one will be there to laugh at me. Ha.

So we now have an XBox 360. So someday (when I get it), I’ll be able to play Beautiful Katamari. And that makes me happy.

And the quote of the day:
You can’t squeegie a gorilla!