It’s been quite since I’ve written anything remotely journal-like for this site. This isn’t for lack of ideas of what to write about, however.

The last four or five months have been some of the busiest ever. Everything has been a crazed flurry of running around, and screaming, and gnashing of teeth, and moments of stressed-out, involuntary buttock clenching, and laughing out loud with just a teensy sliver of mania present, and a lot of swooning in damp, dark rooms with a moist towelette on the forehead like Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel, but a hell of a lot less elegantly.

A big part of this was my involvement for the past five months on the redesign of the Globe and Mail, which finally launched a few weeks ago. It was a huge job with six of us working full-time to build out and integrate the new design (by G&M newspaper designer Adrian Norris) with the Globe’s somewhat antiquated content management system.

The new site won’t win any design awards, but it’s a huge improvement over the previous design and we worked our geeky asses off on it. It only has two validation errors on the homepage (both ads-related), and it’s an all-CSS, semantic layout that’ll hopefully garner some poindexter cred with the too-cool pocket protector crowd.

Sporadic victories aside, it’s been a crazy time. I massively over-committed myself to too many projects and have been teetering on the verge of burn-out more than a couple of times - something I promised myself I would be more careful to avoid. The industry is just hopping these days, though, and it’s sometimes hard to say no when big, high-profile projects somehow manage to plop onto the dance card.

I don’t know if it’s something in the air in Toronto, but something about this city brings the workaholic out in me, and I don’t like it. I’ve been so busy lately that my social skills are starting to resemble rotting eggplant. Come to think of it, I’m not smelling so great, either.

The good news is that SXSW 2006 is rapidly approaching, and if that doesn’t knock me hard on my ass in the best way possible, nothing will. I’m heading back down with James McNally, the Zen Master General himself, and I expect to play swing-eights and slam dunk the moon more than a few times. I can’t wait.