V and i signed the plethora of loan refinancing documents this morning, meaning we're in the home stretch of the process. We're due to close next Wednesday. I'm very relieved at the conclusion of this whole process. In our previous arrangement i felt like any number of situations could put us in financial turmoil. Having now halved our number of mortgages and entered into a long term fixed-rate agreement, i'm feeling much more stable. Oh man, i sound old. Next thing you know i'll be railing against those damn kids and their Myspace. Well, i am no fan of Myspace. In fact ... <self edit>

get dressed at 7, be up by 9
i'm up all night with these friends of mine
the needle drops, the stereo gives
it's never too late to learn how to live

In slightly more exciting financial news, we've already received our tax refund from the state and should be getting our more significant federal refund shortly. That's already earmarked for a nice 46" Samsung LCD HDTV. I can hardly wait to put the Xbox 360 through its paces in 1080i, let alone trying out gaming in 1080p when i finally break down and get a PS3. I've got to sort out how we'll connect all of our peripherals to our new entertainment centerpiece, but those are the kind of problems i revel in. We're also looking to replacing our refrigerator with a new one that doesn't emit loud buzzing noises constantly, but that's not so thrilling.

True to my word, i've written a couple of new album reviews covering the sophomore effort by London's Bloc Party as well as the sophomoric debut by gothabilly punks and fellow English capital residents the Horrors. I'm currently revisiting the second record by Canadian indie darling the Arcade Fire, which gets better with each listen. I wasn't blown away by their debut but this new one has layers upon layers of great songwriting, hooks, and nuance. "No Cars Go" is a brilliant realization of everything the band promised on their first album with songs like "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)".

I've continued to reverse engineer the iTunes interface in the form of my iTunes log program. I've now included a bare-bones set of controls to the iTunes player, including pause/play, fast forward, rewind, shuffle, repeat, and volume. Because i'm a stickler for detail, i also grabbed the button images from iTunes and worked them into my application. The volume control bar was a bit of a challenge but a good learning experience for me as i continue to delve into Visual Basic. I also duplicated the characteristic iTunes scrolling labels when a piece of text is bigger than the display array allotted to it. V has got me started on the slightly more useful project of rewriting my perl Excel scripts using automation in VB.

I'm currently polishing off a solicited review article at work, which (assuming its accepted, a reasonable assumption) will be the fifth paper i've published this year. With another one written and waiting to be sent off, and another two due out before summer. As Veronica delights in pointing out, that would represent a 400-700% improvement on my output from all of last year. Now to get those grants rolling in ...