Resurfacing

Two dogs coming out of the surf of the beach at Lincoln City, Oregon.

I feel quite a bit like those dogs. It's been around a couple of weeks since I've written anything here, mostly because I went heads-down on my big work project and hit a wonderful rhythm with it. I worked over 24 hours last week and 18 hours this week, made a huge amount of progress, and feel much more on top of everything. There should be a new releases of krb5-sync and krb5-strength coming soon that support Heimdal, along with a new release of rra-c-util, and then shortly thereafter there will be a new release of wallet.

This has been hugely energizing. At the start, I was focusing only on Heimdal work and our upcoming upgrade, submitting patches back to Heimdal, doing local packaging, and working on krb5-sync. But it's gotten me back into the rhythm of programming, and now I've started to do the needed work on pam-afs-session for the next release.

I'm both surprised and curious about how this has gone, and am now wondering to what extent I can keep control over this pattern and reproduce it. I've moved away from the strict schedule that I kept through most of January, but I don't think that was getting in the way of this sense of flow. Rather, I think it's what enabled it. I cleared the decks, got into a rhythm, and found I was able to concentrate. However, I have dropped the normal variety of things that I try to do daily and spent more time on doing just one thing, which I think is critical. I find it difficult to do that, and often hit this feeling that I'm letting things drop, so that's still something I need to work on.

Other than work and coding, it's been a fairly good past two weeks. I fought back a cold early this week, have played some video games, and have been reading regularly (if not writing reviews regularly). I even did a run of reviews at the end of January to get four done for the month. I've finished another three books (and a magazine) that are waiting for me to find time to think about the reviews.

I have one more regular week this month, and then I'm heading up to Canada for a couple of weeks to work some from there and watch the Olympics with much better coverage than we get in the US. The travel is going to be annoying, since I have to get to the airport at some ridiculous hour of the morning and deal with taking a shuttle, but once I get up there, that should be a lot of fun and quite relaxing. There are several unknowns about it (I'm staying in a different room in the place I normally stay to save some money), and I'm not looking forward to the travel, but I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

The less said about the news and the general state of US politics, the better. I'm working on ignoring it.