Several people have asked me what I’ve been doing with all my spare time now that I’ve stepped down from being a manager (I returned to a strictly engineering role)… Well, I’ve been spending more time with my wife (and our two dogs), eating dinner at a reasonable time and going to sleep at semi-reasonable times. I’ve also been spending a lot of time working with OpenSolaris (my new favorite x86 OS). ZFS and DTrace just plain rock. I’ve also been tinkering with Django. If you don’t know, Django is a dominant python framework for cranking out dominant web sites. I’ve been enjoying spending time working with it simply because it’s the exact opposite of some of the J2EE stuff I’ve been working with the past few years. I don’t need 1 or 2 GBs of RAM to edit a Django project nor do I need 4GB of RAM to run/debug it. I’ve finally decided that that all of my personal stuff is going to be done in just python. I’m going to be converting rockthefatknot.com over to Django in the coming months. I’m also going to be switching up from subversion to Mercurial (because it’s cool and also because it’s implemented in Python!)  After all, Python is the official language of The Markovian Powerhouse (Alex Markov).  Don’t worry — I’ll still be posting Fat Knots.  In fact, I’ve got a special treat coming soon:  Fat Knot Flashbacks…