A month later...
So much for keeping my blog up-to-date. Of course, tracking my time is a condition of my job, and I don't even manage to do that on a regular basis, so a diary is probably a lost cause. ;-)
Work
Lots of it. One major project has been keeping me in vendor presentation meetings pretty much solidly for the last two weeks (which, of course, means no useful work has been completed in that time), and I'm the primary point of contact on two projects where it feels like I'm herding cats and generally getting in the way more than I'm contributing in a useful manner. Then there's all the backburner stuff; reexamining how we do system patchlevel auditing across all 200+ systems, making a little headway in examining all the hardware that was ordered for the QA lab project that keeps getting pushed back, and a bunch of other little things. 6 months. I've been here six months, and I'm already falling behind. Not a good sign.
Play: Geek
The harddrive on my AisleRiot computer...er...I mean, my laptop finally gave up the ghost. Not bad for an old 10GB IBM drive that's been beaten up pretty badly. I found a pretty good (for a strange definition of good) price on a 60GB replacement on PriceWatch (from GoGoCity, specifically); $73, no shipping. It's in, and the laptop is cheerfully running Red Hat 9; as I suspected, it was a huge performance improvement, and RH9 in general is performing a lot better than 8 (which is what I was running previously).
I've done no work whatsoever on Portal. It's bugging me that I put that much effort into it and haven't polished it up enough to release yet; hopefully having the laptop working again will provide a little impetus.
Play: Non-geek
I've been countering my work stress with play stress. I spent the last two weekends and most of the weeknights pulling the transmission out of my car and installing a new race clutch and aluminum flywheel. It's so nice to be able to drive the car around again, although every other stop for the last two days has included a quick clutch position adjustment. Another hundred miles or so of break-in, and I can take it to the track again and see if all this work (and blood; I can't believe how cut and bruised I ended up) made a noticable difference. Next up: timing belt change and balance shaft elimination (mmm, more engine vibration).
Miscellany
Road trip next month. I'm heading up to central Canada for my niece's wedding, so I'll be passing through some of my old stomping grounds to see what I've been missing while out here in Chicago. To everyone I usually drop in unexpectedly on: this is your one-month warning. ;-)
Am I the only one who wishes text entry boxes in Mozilla could be implemented by Vim? I keep hitting SHIFT-V to select text, and it's just not working like I expect...;-)
That's enough for now, time for lunch.