Greetings.

In the past week, I've done a total of seven separate (re)installations of my operating systems: four Windows installs, three of which had failed or otherwise proven unsatisfactory; and four Linux installs, only one of which was geared towards repairing another install. That said, the reinstallation of my personal server's Linux OS had the least overall work involved, despite the vast amount of work it continues to do for me; and Windows, of course, was the gigantic royal pain it always is. Somewhere in the middle, but more near the "less work" end of the continuum, lay the Linux install for my work machine.

Regardless, it was a great week for productivity. Ubuntu 9.10, while out for a few weeks now, continues to impress me, both with its improved snappiness and more so with its functional Bluetooth. A few months ago I had purchased a USB Bluetooth adapter, only to discover that it was nonfunctional in Ubuntu 9.04. I kept it anyways, to see if the problem would resolve itself in the next cycle - or else begrudgingly use it in Windows - and behold, it works now. Flawlessly, at that.

While I could wax poetic on the joys (and tribulations) of using Linux in general, I will expand on but one more this evening. As of Ubuntu 9.10, and unknown to me at the time, GRUB2 is now the default bootloader for new installs. Being the adventurous, forward-thinking (read: ignorant idealist) fellow I am, I proceeded to botch up both my hard drive and Windows partition bootloaders. As I use Windows for a scant 1% of my time (rough estimate), that loss was no big deal, but I could also not reach my production-level Linux OS. That started to be a big deal. After a decent amount of poking, I managed to install GRUB2 properly, and could properly get back to everything sans Windows. Originally, I had intended to test a new install on a separate partition, bring it up to speed, then copy it over to the main partition. Ironically, that caused most of my headaches, as that adventure messed up the bootloader the first time, and then I discovered Windows wouldn't reinstall with more than three primary partitions present on the drive. Yikes.

Abridged version: everything is back to normal; in total, reinstalling a fresh copy of Linux _and_ bringing it to full functionality on both my server and work machines took three hours; and Windows is playing nicely again (groan). But enough idle chatter.

In all honesty, Week XIX was pretty incredible. Despite the fiascoes above, I put away a great deal of progress, and prospects are great for Week XX. Admittedly, Week XVI directives are still uncompleted, but with Week XX set aside for bugfixes and general code improvements, they are now entirely at the front.

In other news, I've opened up the Idea Pool up as a show-and-tell (mostly tell) and request board for major interface features. I realize that without any points of reference the intention may be moot, but unsolicited feedback is often the most candid Some day soon, i.e. during this week, I will be pasting some of the major focus points of the Network as they relate to the interface development.

Also, I've added another Local Point of Interest - Project Omega's Project Charter. While it has existed in some form or another since the Project's inception, it was only recently that I gathered my various scratchings and half-notes into the living document you see there. It is written targeted towards Network administrators and other insiders, but there's nothing of critical secrecy within. In fact, it may do a better job explaining Project Omega than I can at any given point in time. The watermark is abysmal, but workable...for now.

While the charter is by no means permanent, it is a lot more complete and organized than it once was. As an added bonus, I extracted a nice template for future charters from it - expect to see a similar document for Zero Hour Productions as a whole soon.

Mr. Bond, signing off.