Done

Yesterday I posted the evaluation of the new Big Eight management system over the past five months and a personal goodbye to news.groups. It's still really surprising to me how hard that was. Intellectually, anything that I've put that much time and effort into would logically have that kind of hold, but for some reason I never internalized that. The emotions leading up to this have been very interesting, and at times hard to deal with.

Now, I mostly feel a sense of relief, of getting something over with, and a focus shift to getting the things done I need to get done for my annual long vacation (which is coming up fast). But today was still a bit of an emotional backlash day. I sorted through paper mail for the first time in a while, but otherwise didn't get much done (other than venting my spleen a bit at the latest step in LJ's inevitable slide into becoming just another soulless corporation, with special bonus screwing over your co-workers by turning them into public scapegoats).

There are considerably more cool things in the world than I have time to take in and appreciate. I've been feeling that about books for some time now (and video games for nearly as long, particularly since appreciating them has almost completely stalled for me), but I'm now feeling the same thing about The Teaching Company's courses. I save all of their catalogs and magazines until I have a chance to read through them with a notepad handy to record which courses I want to get, and every time I find four or five more that I really want to listen to. I have, since April, managed to listen to only one and a third.

This is yet another thing that I can't do anything about until after vacation, since I don't want to order courses and leave them sitting on my porch for weeks.

I'm down to the last actual work week before vacation. Next week doesn't count; I am determined to hold it open to do comprehensive catch-up and an attempt to dispose of every mail message in one way or another before I go. Agenda for this week is to add examine, enable, and disable support to the kadmind proxy we'll be running on our K4 servers, installing and testing that, finishing converting all of the scripts for our internal mail mangling system to Postfix from assuming qmail, and testing and uploading Shibboleth SP packages for Debian if OpenSAML makes it through NEW. I thought I was going to get a head-start on some of that yesterday or today. Given that I was also posting the Usenet documents, that was rather silly of me to expect.