Andy Chase

I'm noticing a pattern in my productivity. Well, lack of productivity at the moment. There will be stretches of a month or two at a time where I'll work like gangbusters on a particular pet project, awaking eager to get in a few minutes' work in the morning and arriving home eager to pick up where I left off, staying up way too late trying to get that one last thing straightened out before bed.



Inevitably, in the course of working on such a project I'll get interested in something tangential, and start to tinker with it so as to get the hang of it.



The more things I begin to tinker with, the less I work on the main project I started on, and eventually I wind up spending a week on this, a week on that, and then a couple of days on this, a couple of days on that. Finally, I wind up in my current state... too overwhelmed by all the stuff I've started to do anything on any of it.



Even the simple blog entries have suffered; I've noticed myself not bothering to take the time to insert choice links just to get the thing done, and of course there were three days straight with no posts last week.



I was mulling this over as I walked the dog, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm pretty sure the first step is to make a list of all the crap I keep meaning to get around to, and then prioritize. Off the top of my head:

• Finish the cross-referenced photo thumbnail pages & related admin tool
• Finish the PHP-GTK blog management tool I started, and get back up to speed with PHP-GTK in general
• Fix the lingering Pholdover bug once and for all, get a private server back up, and release version 1.0 under the GPL
• Reinstall Glib and GTK+ on my Linux From Scratch partition, so that I can hopefully
• Install the ROX desktop environment and
• Perhaps start really weaning myself away from using Windows for everyday stuff.
• Rewrite this blog system from the ground up, using the existing database and really paying attention to consistency and expandability, so that I can
• Release it under the GPL like I originally intended.
• Learn Python.
• Learn Zope.
• Learn C.
• Redo my resume; not that I'm really looking for a new job, but it's been nearly a year since I looked it over.
• Start work on a site for my friend Larry's latest project.
• Finish the partial PHP class I put together at work for doing FTP operations. (Yes, PHP can be compiled with FTP functionality, but it is not thusly compiled at work. Besides, I've never done any work with raw TCP socket operations before, and it's pretty interesting.)
• Upload a lot more photos; I've still got stuff over two years old that I should put up
• Once I have ROX up and running, see about getting my Wacom tablet working with X and the GIMP - although I'm not sure how well GIMP currently supports pressure sensitivity.

Those are in no particular order, and I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting.



I would really like to get my fast, stable, minimal windowed environment running in Linux... I think the novelty of the new, cruft-free environment would go a long way towards getting me working on everything else. Hmm, I'm going to be up until at least 11:30 tonight waiting for the dryers. Maybe I'll boot back into Linux and have another go at getting ROX up and running.