It's summer and I have a lot of time off. For the last week or so, I've 
been getting up quite early to re-stain the deck and fences. They're 
done, which is good, because it's really starting to warm up. Prior to 
this week, it was cool and a bit rainy. I like that.

Otherwise, I've been learning a bit of python and some more bash and 
batch scripting. I know a bit of Javascript too, and there's a great 
deal of similarity among them all. I should probably challenge myself by 
turning to something really different in the future, but I'm not sure 
what. I guess that will depend on what I want to do and in what context 
(Windows for work, Linux at home).

An update on batch script GUIs: last year, I posted about easy-to-use 
dialog boxes for batch files and mentioned the Wizard's Apprentice 
(http://wizapp.sourceforge.net/). It's still the best thing that I've 
used. However, I recently found a version of Zenity compiled as a 
portable .exe for windows. You can find it at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160805170156/https://code.google.com/p/osspack32/downloads/detail?name=zenity.exe&can=2&q=

There's also a version at Github, which appears to be newer:

https://github.com/kvaps/zenity-windows