There are different types of tiredness, like different types of fine wine. I'm in a comfortable-tired spot right now, the kind I like. The kind that stops my brain from buzzing and lets me think a little bit more calmly and more clearly than I usually do. (The kind that's quickly recoverable from with a 1-3 hour nap, too. Bonus!)
From Yaakov, via Adam's blog: if I were settling down, I'd love to make a LackRack coffee table. Or perhaps a sofa-side table, saving the actual coffee table for some other fun thing.
Today has been a blur. I'm starting to realize that the past couple days of "but I didn't do anything!" have actually been filled with madcap whirls of utterly unrecorded activity. Here's some of what I did today. A very, very small portion - these are the chunks large enough to put into sentences.
Admissions: Finished my duties as an application reader for the Olin class of 2014. This was a difficult job - I expected it to be - but I had a good time, and learned a little more about the workings of undergraduate education behind the scenes. It's fascinating, especially since it doesn't feel like all that long ago that I was 16 and on the flip side of the process, surreptitiously sneaking away from my grandparents' New Years party in the Philippines to frantically type application essays right before the deadline. (It was exquisitely timed. I will never do that again.) Seeing things from multiple perspectives simultaneously is one of the most fantastic parts of this "accumulating experiences" deal that comes with getting older. (Also, good luck to all the applicants!)
FADs: Housing! Budget! Equipment! Logistics! Event planning was never something I thought I'd ever do, but it turns out that I'm actually pretty good at it. I am excited by sprints. Also, being able to tell other people to figure out how to spend $900 on shiny equipment is one of the coolest feelings ever.
Fedora Insight: The "get Insight up!" baton seems to be back in motion and passing around again, thanks to Max. This is the first thing I've actually ever gotten into production, which has been... well, I'm reminded of last year when I tried to attack a Mingus piece as a total jazz piano beginner. "This can't be all that bad," I thought in the beginning. Then: "Ok, I hadn't seen that coming. But this part won't be all that bad." Then: "Well, that was hard too. But, y'know, this part, how bad can it be..." (and so forth). It's a bit like counting to 100 when you only know your numbers up to 7 and aren't initially told that numbers 8-99 exist; previously I'd counted to 6 and then gone "wait, my list says we are essentially done but we can't be done yet," then stalled in confusionland 'till that realization hit. Mm, learningness.
I'm literally forming my first notions of How To Get A Project Up And Going right now. It's a good experience, and I'm not displeased with the results so far, but I know that someone who did have that experience could have done a way better job than my best attempt as a first-time through something like this. Long-term investment in my future usefulness, though; this is a good sandbox for me to play in. (Now I just need to keep telling myself that, and keep moving this forward.)
Travel planning! So many emails sent out today about my travel this quarter - I'm starting to get the sense that the way I operate is to designate SPRINT TIMES! in my life and then spend the rest of my time making sure those sprints are going to be insanely intense and productive for as many people as possible. My Rochester/Toronto trip schedule is beginning to look like my college schedule, which will probably make any former classmates of mine gasp in horror, and makes me grin maniacally. I make sure I get proper rest before, after, and during sprints, so no worries about burnout there.
SLOBs are prepping (exhaustively) for Friday's meeting in the hopes that we can finally, finally get through the "we need a trademark usage policy" issue. I realize that every step of the journey has been necessary to get to where we are, I'm just trying to get us to walk faster. As part of this "walk-faster"ing, I started writing pseudocode for our trademark policy, whereupon Chris Ball completely made my day by responding with a patch. I wrote a longer post on this for Planet Sugar Labs, cribbed from my shout-out to iaep.
Lots of emails. Lots and lots of emails.
While taking a break tonight after dinner, I got called in for advice on tech deployment for a disaster relief medical station for the Haiti earthquake victims and going "your specs almost exactly match these open source projects (Sahana, RapidSMS, etc), here's how you get in touch with them" and generally laying the groundwork so that the route to having them interface well with open source communities can be at least potentially open. Potentially. I tend to place lots of tiny long-term bets down where I can.
After the dust cleared and I breathed a bit, I was a somewhat stunned; I usually associate that ability for madcap improv at that level, with that fluency, with... older people. Older, more experienced people who Know Stuff and feel comfortable just kinda reaching out into the world - little twitches and flicks of the fingers, placed just right, and the whole freakin' universe shifts and changes. Dunno if any portion of the universe is going to shift and change because of tonight, but I felt like I just should reach out in that way, tweak this, say that... I don't understand where this instinct comes from, or what turns it on. And I always worry I'll get cocky if it comes too frequently or lasts too long. It isn't me - it works through me.
I feel like that right now, but in a weird way - a slow way, not a clear blasting sprint like I'm used to; a slow, trickling, hidden-in-fog way. I'm doing what I should be doing, mostly, but... I can't... figure out why, and why it still feels... more... stuck. Or maybe I'm just used to moving fast and anything other than warp speed feels like stuckness, even if it's just my lack of patience talking.
...and when I start writing like that, it's really time to go to bed.