A number of folk have displayed some concern over my absence from all things PHP for the last month or more, something excacerbated by my lax attention to incoming emails.

To fill in the why, I recently lost a close friend to cancer after he endured a four year battle with the disease. Following this loss I haven’t had much in the way of enthusiasm for open source or writing hobbies and the path to renewed vigour for plaguing you all with articles, critical posts, and my usual rambling on random topics has been a long one. I’ve continued to work away on Eve Online which has been one of the few sources of distracting fun these days…and not much else online outside the 9-5 job.

C’est la vie.

My friend always had a few things going for him. He was incredibly courageous in facing the inevitable. He remained intensely faithful to God, an all too rare display for young people these days when I count myself as one of the few under-thirties to attend local church in my community, and one of the fewer who consider it not just another boring pointless practice. And I have never once witnessed him act out of anger or unkindness.

He was one of those bright lights in a person’s life that leaves a horribly empty void behind when they are no longer with you.

Rest in peace my friend.

In my absence I’ve turned away from a few opportunities in PHP I would ordinarily have been overjoyed to have. Chances are I’ll look into how salvagable some of those are but I’m not too anxious about them to be honest. I’m looking towards the blank slate of the next few months if they’re not retrievable and wondering what to fill them with. PHPSpec/PHPMock and the mailing list (I’ll catch up on the last few emails soon) goes without saying. The book I was considering is more than likely a lost cause unless the author position remains unfilled – no recent emails there so that appears possible. Well, more time to freelance a few articles ;) . Maybe I’ll poke around the ZF mailing list to see if I missed anything interesting and get some of those Microformat proposals moving.

For now I’m going to nip into Eve and figure out whether I really want to train Heavy Missiles V. Once that’s done I’m going to hit my usual PHP train of activity and pick up the pieces from the last month. All the usual haunts will once again see Maugrim The Reaper putting in an appearance and finding someone to argue over something with ;) .