Long time no write

I have been hideously busy, mostly in good ways, sometimes in stressful ways, and as a result I've posted nothing for quite a while now. Figured I should at least say hi and mention that I'm alive.

All the work projects that I were mentioning were going to heat up have heated up, and this week my primary task is being available to ensure that projects don't get stalled. Any work that I get done in addition I'm considering an unexpected bonus. Hopefully by this weekend and even more so by next week, things will slow down and calm down a bit.

Debian Policy 3.7.0 is out (including changes from a proposal I wrote, which is a neat feeling even though I may propose another amendment to clean up some details). Tonight, after making an Ikea run and paying way too much for delivery of two more seven foot shelves that wouldn't fit in my friend's Jeep, I implemented in lintian checks for the major changes for Policy 3.7.0, fixed a few other bugs, and proposed an upload on Friday.

The other big news is that I read another time management book, this time a more mainstream, corporate-speak one entitled Getting Things Done (by David Allen). I'm becoming addicted to these already; I picked up a ton of great ideas after getting past the initial off-putting "management speak" tone. I never really felt like the target audience, and yet (largely thanks to Time Management for System Administrators) I now understand the problem space well enough to adapt the ideas to my own work.

Getting Things Done tackled exactly the problem that I had with Time Management, namely what to do about the tasks that I didn't want to just accumulate on ever-growing, ever-shifting daily to-do lists. Allen laid out a great system for managing tasks that will be around for longer periods, and last night I did a fairly decent implementation of his system in Roundup. I'm still ironing out the bugs, but I loaded it this morning with 180-odd tasks and 45 or so projects and have started using it today. There are a few things that I need to make more efficient, but so far, so good. I think this will really help, perhaps not as much as the leap I got from Time Management, but definitely a noticable additional jump of productivity and comprehensive tracking.

Unfortunately, with everything else that's going on, fiction reading is really suffering. I'm still hoping to finish A Clash of Kings this month, but it's getting more and more iffy. Ah well, there will always be time to read books and getting all the Hugo nominees read before Baycon isn't exactly necessary.