So, I received my W-2 form for my taxes on Saturday. I’d received everything else in the past week or two, too. My tax guy actually died back in October, so I couldn’t go to him…but he’d caused me some problems over the years, so that’s just as well. However, my Dad has used TaxSlayer.com for years now and has always had great things to say. TaxSlayer sends your tax data to the IRS electronically, AND they send summaries of W-2s and all other forms you received, so you don’t even have to mail anything in to the Federal Government or your state government! It sounded too good to be true…

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted, so here I am. As you may know, my wedding is only a few weeks away, so we’ve been busy with last minute planning and such for that. I’m ready for the cruise, though. I picked up the documentation on it yesterday, and we have a room with a balcony! So, that’s pretty cool. I need a vacation. New York’s finally been hit with winter, after the longest time without snow for like…100+ years. Still, though, I’m looking forward to getting out of here in the coming months. We’re planning a house hunting trip down to Atlanta during the first week of April, so that’s the big thing to tackle post-wedding. We got pre-approved for a mortgage and all, so we’re all set on the house front…more or less.

It’s been a while since I’ve written, so I figured the holidays were a good reason to fire up the ol’ WordPress admin. Nothing new here; things at Schematic are great, as usual. I’m home in Kansas City for the holidays, but Felicia’s coming out after Christmas. Only another few weeks ’till the wedding, too…sweet. But just saying “Hello” to the like…one reader of my blog, so happy holidays, everyone!

I’m now a Zend PHP 5 Certified as of today, but it didn’t come easily! 1:59 PM: Dear Brian DeShong, Thank you for taking the Zend PHP Certification exam but unfortunately you did not pass. …. Sincerely, Dhwani Vahia Shocked, I immediately replied because something seemed to be amiss. I studied for that thing and knocked a number of practice tests out of the park in the days leading up to the exam. I couldn’t have possibly failed!

Well, day three of the conference was short and sweet. Andrei’s 8:30 talk on PHP 6 and Unicode was good, especially given that I’m not the master of internationalization. Next up was Sebastian Bergmann’s talk on PHPUnit 3, which is totally going to rock…it’ll be out in 2-3 weeks! His talk ran over about 15 minutes (and nobody stopped him). John Coggeshall was up next on the Zend Framework and how to build a basic blog application with it…but he got cut short due to Sebastian’s overrun. After John, I grabbed my stuff and headed to the airport. It was a great conference, though…was nice to meet some of the people from #phpc on Freenode.