Long time no write

So, as you may have noticed, I haven't been posting much lately, which is because I've been pretty much swamped.

Mostly, it's work. We've had three people resign from the group I work with at Stanford over the past four months or so, which has left us severely short-staffed given that we were down two bodies before that. I'm also trying hard to finish up a major component of the largest work project I've ever tackled (completing our migration to Kerberos v5 and turning off Kerberos v4), and after lots of testing false starts and lots of tweaks, we're finally on target to switch over our administrative master and the source of all password propagation to other environments to Kerberos v5. As you can imagine, I have a list of things to be finished and tested a mile long.

Then, last week, I finally got a much-needed vacation, during which I was planning on doing lots of things for non-work projects like Debian and during which I actually did almost nothing beyond talk to my friends, write, and read. Which was the right choice, as it always is when that happens, but which doesn't help any in getting caught up.

So, I have a ton of OpenAFS patches to apply, a new release of remctl to get out, a new release of kstart to get out, Debian Policy work that desperately needs attention, a new release of lintian that needs to go out, various non-Kerberos bits of work, five book reviews to write for things I finished on vacation, two book reviews and a magazine review already written that need to be posted, and doubtless other things that I'm forgetting. At least I now have most of that written down so that I can start prioritizing.

If all goes according to plan, that means that the activity increase will turn into a temporary flurry as I get caught up with things. I'm hoping for a very productive month. Of course, I also just got a new digital camera, and another book order just shipped.

Really, about four weekends in a row would be lovely right now. Not vacation, since that's a different-feeling sort of thing with time stretching out in front of one and an obligation to use those precious vacation days to really relax. No, I want the sort of short, quality non-work time that I get on weekends, where I get various bits of non-work work done and catch up on to-do lists. I just want four of them in a row.