Okay, the worst thing about working on long-term projects? That would be the fact that you never have fun things to announce or share, no matter how hard you seem to work on the projects. And that's both the beauty and curse, I suppose, of doing a full "Getting Things Done" implementation in my life this year, the result of a New Year's resolution, is that I am slowly chugging away on a number of really large projects, and do expect to have them eventually done by the deadlines set in my GTD yearly schedule, even though I rarely have small good day-to-day news about them anymore to share here at the site.

For example, I've been busily working on my latest travel book recently, Ach Du Heilige Scheisse!, and am fully expecting all nine versions to be finished by the March 5th release goal I've set for myself (which happens to also be my birthday). But, you know, it tends to be a group of pages finished on this version, or a chapter done on that version, or a new map designed that I'm happy with, but no actual projectcs finished to completion and ready to be released. Which is how such a project has to work, frankly, because a change to one manuscript will affect all nine versions being compiled, but is not very fun when it comes to announcing small victories.

I will say this, though, that I'm extremely glad I took the time last year to switch over to Adobe's InDesign, CS2 edition (or even that I had the chance to in the first place - thanks again, TGS, for the new computer and all the great software last year); this is the program, in fact, that I'll be using to design all future books and publications, not only for GAD but for my upcoming arts center as well. Which yeah, might sound surprising, coming from someone who's been a Quark XPress religious fanatic since way back in 1991; but what can I say? Adobe really did listen to all us large-document designers when creating InDesign, didn't just make it a glorified form of Pagemaker, and as a result it is just this all-fucking-powerful and amazing tool for generating the kinds of standalone books I've been publishing now for 15 years. Plus it ties seamlessly into not only all the other Adobe programs in Creative Suite 2 (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge and others), but Microsoft Word as well, plus OSX's smoov new user interface, which means that in many cases you can now just drag and drop files from one program to another, and have InDesign automatically understand what to do with them. Oh, and lots of new keyboard shortcuts for fitting content into frames, and fitting frames around content, and a new greatly expanded palette system for word wrapping, paragraph details, glyphs, styles, colors, and the like, that works better than Quark ever did. So I'm a believer, and a switcher as well.

Don't forget, by the way, that Scheisse will be coming in nine (count 'em, nine) formats when published, a first for me: PDF versions for sending to both American and European laserprinters; an "Enhanced PDF" featuring embedded navigation buttons, live hyperlinks to online content, and embedded audio files; a PDF version specifically for printing, cutting in half and binding, so as to mimic the look and feel of a paperback, again for both American and European printers; and then versions for PalmOS as well, Windows Mobile, OpenReader and Sony Reader. And so that will hopefully make some of you really happy, and will make up for the book taking a year longer than I was expecting to get published.

And then there's this pretty major news - that it's looking almost certain at this point that I will finally be gaining a broadband internet connection for the desktop in my apartment. And this is because I've recently agreed to accept a part-time marketing position with a friend of mine in Chicago who runs a small business, not for a paycheck but in return for him paying for a DSL snaking into my apartment. He's not ready to announce the company yet, becuase of some last-minute work that's been done on the redesigned website; which means that I'm not ready to announce who he is yet either, or what I'll be doing for him.

I can say this, though, that all you readers ought to be thanking your lucky stars, once this all actually gets set up, because it's going to mean all kinds of changes to my website: journal entries published in single blog posts again, instead of in half; complete categorizations for those entries in place from the start as well; the rapid addition of caetgories to all old entries; the rapid importation of the 10,000 old and archived files and entries produced before the site redesign. And this will also mean, for example, updates at Flickr that are daily instead of monthly, which will be a nice thing indeed, and a chance for other increased online activity, like greater interaction at Friendster or Yahoo 360, for example. Oh, and even the chance to release some new technology for the site, like Jason Pettus widgets for MacOS and Yahoo, or a customized button for Google Desktop.

But then this is good news for fans of my writing as well, because for the first time it'll let me delve into all those online topics that only desktop users can, and be able to finally have opinions about them and to share my thoughts, recommendations, etc - thoughts about podcasts, Rocketboom, viral marketing campaigns, video-sharing services, BitTorrent, AJAX-fueled sites, Flash projects, new movie trailers, just all kinds of fun new stuff. And this is good news to my friends and family as well, because it means I'll have chat capabilities up and running all the time, and Google Talk, and a Skype account and all the rest, plus will be able to receive email attachments for the first time too. Plus I'll be able to send emails with attachments in real time as well, which will make job-hunting go a fuck of a lot faster.

And so that means the first chance in years of maybe finally getting all caught up on my email, and finally getting my Hotmail site shut down and everything switched to my Gmail account, which would be great. Oh, and either good or bad news for other bloggers, however you want to look at it, because for the first time I'll be able to leave a profound more amount of comments at other places, and participate in wikis for the first time. Look out blogosphere, jeez. So I promise, much more on this once we're ready to announce the company publicly.