Long time no write

Well, I see this is the first journal entry I've made in quite a while. This has, by and large, been for good reasons for a change, although there was a bit of exhaustion and stress in the middle of that.

I was at the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop for the first week of this month, which was a fantastic workshop and a good opportunity to get a ton of AFS work done. But it was also intense and very social (involving having to drive in a strange town, too), and so I came back rather exhausted. The next couple of weeks didn't exactly help: I was in a lot of meetings, on an interview panel, and dealing with a routine audit response at work.

That's one factor. Another is that I've gotten back into playing video games rather than reading or doing other things that lead me to write here. This got considerably worse when I discovered the TrueAchievements site, which is basically Ohloh for Xbox 360 players. It's full of interesting statistics and well-done use of social networking and is making me eager to go back and play a lot more of many games I'd just started. That's devoured my last couple of weekends.

There's also the World Cup, which I've been watching to the tune of two or three games a day. I can do other things while I watch (like I am right now), but it's a distraction.

But probably the strongest factor is that I've been extremely successful with time management over the past few weeks. As soon as I get back to posting book reviews, I'll get the review of Do It Tomorrow up, but the summary is that the closed list approach really works for me. I've been making lists almost daily and am now completing them reliably, and I'm getting much more done each day than I had been before and feeling more in control of the structure of the day. But the interesting side effect is that I'm also more fully utilizing my available energy, which means that when I get home at night, I'm tired. Not a bad sort of tired, but an accomplished sort of tired that pushes me towards watching TV or playing games and not towards getting on-line and writing things.

I am planning on getting back to reading and writing reviews over the next week and particularly the holiday weekend. And of course not reading hasn't kept me from buying more books. The latest round:

Jacqueline Carey — Naamah's Curse (sff)
Stieg Larsson — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (thriller)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Lavinia (sff)
Walter Jon Williams — This Is Not a Game (sff)
Robert Charles Wilson — Julian Comstock (sff)

Hopefully I'll get a chance to catch up on book reviews and read a couple more books over the next few days, although the top priority will be to get a new Lintian and Debian Policy release out.

Posted: 2010-06-24 22:08 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2014-09-14