Michael “Dowbrigade” Feldman wrote:

Sometimes the Dowbrigade feels stumped for subjects to Blog on. It’s not that your faithful correspondent lacks for ideas, rants or motivation. Rather, it is that so many fecund fields are off-limits to our free-ranging interest.

We cannot blog about our place of full-time employment, after an unfortunate incident last semester in which only our wicked wit saved us from untimely termination…

…We cannot blog about the intimate details of our married life, as we know Norma Yvonne reads the Dowbrigade, and its a bad idea to share a bed with one of your expository subjects…

…In fact, we cannot blog about women, since if experience has taught us anything, it is that we understand less than nothing about the opposite sex. That is, much of what we thought we understood about them has been proven disastrously wrong…

…We are reduced to meta-blogging like this, and reprinting amusing minutiae and telling details from the media pool in which we tread water, waiting for good fortune or bad to deliver us from this literary purgatory

Well, I feel his pain; sometimes there’s much happening, but very often it’s not a subject.

However, I’m pleased to report that some marginally bloggable stuff is actually happening inside the twisty, little passages of XRay 2’s code. I stopped worrying about the UI for a couple of months and became obsessed with writing the Ultimate File Item Browser Cache Background Engine. (You should be glad I’m not writing this in German, where this would be one huge compound substantive. )

Anyway, most of it is actually working well enough now, and once I get some weird interactions with volume mount points working, the U.F.I.B.C.B.E. will be pronounced “good enough for a beta”, and I’ll get back to work on the actual file browser frontend(s) it is supposed to be the backend for.

In order to do so most efficiently we (meaning my wife) decreed that a working vacation is called for, where we’ll be away from normal life and mostly offline for a full month. We’ll leave in a few days – details will be posted soon – and proceed to Northern Italy, where two nearly consecutive mediterranean cruises are scheduled. More as it happens!