Yesterday was an adventure - my first trip to the Artisan's Asylum for the Rubber Duck Brigade kickoff (which I still need to go and help with building, since my obligations this weekend and their build times this weekend really suck at matching up), window-shopping out at the MIT Press bookstore with Peter Robinson (who, as it turns out, is also a food geek, and who I at some point need to visit in London so he can show me jazz pubs there), bringing a pile of BBQ back to the house with Peter and pulling in Sebastian over Skype so the entire SoaS release team could talk with Lynne May at the same time (about a teacher's-eye-view of a pilot/deployment, I need to type up my notes from that).
Dropped Peter off at the airport, and then... well, I ended up thinking 'till 2am. Whoa. Still blinking. Need to take Audrey out and around the city soon as soon as I finish clearing one backlog (browser), we're previewing the route that Clayton and Quinn will take when they visit Boston in August. If only I could find my camera charger.
I'm still clearing my backlog. Expense reports will be done as soon as I make a trip to the giant office scanner (maybe tonight). I'm going through my browser-reading backlog right now. Then I have an email backlog, and then I have a personal-finances-catching-up-on backlog ($14k of expense reports is ow) and then we'll see. I've started filling my car's gas tank once a week no matter how (not) empty it is, so I don't have to worry about it... I should do the same for finances. Time-based release cycles, for some things, are more efficient than "well, when enough stuff piles up, I'll force myself to get through it" release cycles.
Via Karsten: Whoa. Windowfarms. Brilliant - the tech is nifty, the community seems active (and rapidly evolving the tech), and businesses (kits, installation services, how-to workshops) have sprung up around it. (Chumby would be awesome too - if only it didn't rely on the proprietary Flash format. I have been keeping an eye out for good FOSS business models.)
Via Ellen: All right, I take it back. I can drool over bags. (I'm a girl, I'm just a nomadic geek girl.) Specifically, the Tom Bihn Aeronaut is... no, no, I have a luggage, and I have a backpack (normal ol' backpack) and I can travel with either and that's all I need. I'm trying to get rid of stuff. This sort of thing is what I'm thinking about when either of those falls apart, though - years from now, so not anything to actually look into at the moment, just gathering specs for later when the time comes. Packing cubes. Hrm.
Via Lynne May: the Massachusetts Dept. of Education technology literacy standards are the sort of thing we can think about when working on things like Sugar. I was originally hesitant ("there are too many standards! we can't aim to meet them all!"), but Peter pointed out that if we found out any of these standards were close to what we were already doing, why not make some simple tweaks and then market them as such? They are good things to be aware of.
Continuing my acquisition of things on the "possibly work 'em into your infrastructure, Mel" queue, it's dvtm, which joins awesome, etoile, sup (+offlineimap), and a host of irssi plugins. I still need to finish writing and editing that GNOME/KDE comparison for Sumana (by the way, Sumana, your OSB talk notes are brilliant) with Ryan, and yes yes yes yes later later later. Also later later later: chemistry remix for my cousin, during which I'll finish rewriting the remix creation docs, incorporating (and understanding) the shell-script-help-fu received from my last blog post, also SLOBs discussion and okay I need to sit down and figure out what I am actually going to do when because this week I'm at a workshop, and then after July 7th life is nuts for exactly a month (when it becomes... even more nuts).
Some stuff just expires - I missed the call for Ignite talks at OSCON, but honestly, if I'm already giving 2 talks and running a BoF there (heck, might be helping with a 2nd BoF on top of that), I have enough to do. Oh yeah. Need to work on those talks again. Owe Asheesh a draft. Looking at FOSS project and activity in APAC, trying to learn more about that region. On my radar to look at: Cubrid. Also: must learn Mandarin. MUST LEARN MANDARIN!!! Pick a flashcard program, Mel. Or use the paper ones. Gah.
My head is not yet on straight, but it's getting there. I try, once in a while, to braindump the things I want to do, so I can sort out what I have to do and what I'd like to do and make sure that the former gets done and the latter I don't feel so guilty about.
Prioritization: I'm still learning how to do it. Limits: I have them, and should recognize them. If I ever want to do anything other than work, I need to figure out how much time I want to allocate for work versus other-things, and how much work I can do in the time allocated for work, and how much other-stuff I can do in the time allocated for that. I'm not sure how to do that when work + the stuff you love to do largely blend together, but there are things that are quite clearly not-work (SoaS, dancing, that rock climbing voucher I really ought to cash in now before it expires) so perhaps I can start there.
The thing about having an unstable equilibrium for a life is that you keep falling and rebalancing yourself, falling and rebalancing yourself, as the terrain shifts rapidly underneath you. I like it that way, though. So far, of all the ways I've tried, I like that best.