Entries Tagged 'Housekeeping' ↓

Recently, I needed to cancel some leave to get a jump start on some requirements gathering and design work over the holiday season. It wasn’t a real problem as I had not made any real plans — in fact, I had planned specifically not to schedule any activities or tasks for myself so as to allow me to take some down time.

I haven’t taken more that a week of in a single stretch for almost three years now, so I was looking forward to a solid four weeks away from software development. I thought to myself that postponing that break by a month or so was no big deal.

Boy, was I wrong!

While it was absolutely the right decision at the time (for a set of very real commercial considerations), I have found that my effectiveness has plummeted over this period. I don’t know how much of it was just burn-out and how much was related to the last-minute change of plans, but the effect has been very real and very noticeable. I wake in the morning and just can’t be bothered going in to the office. I can’t get excited about what is going on. I can’t even be bothered to go out and socialise with our friends.

I was already a little off my game, which was why I had planned to take the time off, but in the month or so since I postponed that leave I am sure that my performance has steadily declined. It’s hard to quantify, but if I take a wild guess that I was at 90% effectiveness in mid-December, I am probably now at 60% (in late January). At this rate, if I don’t take the time to recharge, I’ll go into negative effectiveness sometime in March or April…

So, I will definitely be taking time off in February, probably the whole month.

And who knows, I might even get back to doing some more regular blog postings.  

After a bit of playing around, I found that I needed a few more features than Wordpress provided, so the site was transferred to Drupal. This CMS requires a bit more work to get going, but boy does it have functionality. If you are a web master, you really should check it out.

I can’t believe that it has been over three months since the last post. I’ve been really busy, and done a few cool things, but did not stop to write about them. I’ll fix that over the next few weeks, and take the time to write down some of my current thinking.

In the meantime, you might like to look at a site I am setting up for the Central District of the United Grand Lodge of Victoria at www.centraldistrictvic.org.  I am using Wordpress (the same software that powers this blog) as the entire CMS for that site, forgoing PmWiki. I am impressed with just how powerful that software is, and while it does not have the flexibility of a Wiki, it is probably easier to use for non-technical users.

More soon…

The wiki is now online at http://www.jimako.com/wiki, where I hope to maintain more of a presence than I have in this blog. The bottom line is that, most of the time, I am just too busy to journal what I am up to in the blog, and most of my ramblings are probably not terribly interesting to most people.

So, if you do want to keep in touch, check out the wiki, which will probably be updated more frequently than this blog.

What I would really love to see is more of an integration between the blog and the wiki. I have tried to tinker with the PmWiki software to see if I can get a blog-like experience from it, but while you can do SOME sort of blog-like activities, it is just not designed for that. If someone could skin Wordpress to look like my wiki, well, that would be just too cool.

I got here after fooling around on Google and thought — what the heck, I’ll create a ‘blog. Maybe this time I’ll start using it. I was surprised to find that the user name “karabatsos” was taken — maybe Joanna had created it? Hmmm. How long has this blogger thing been going? Could it have been me and I had forgotten? Sure enough, I tried a few of my old passwords and bingo! I was in. The first and only post dated back to 2001! So much for blogging…

I am still not sure that I will follow up with this, but I will make an effort to post regularly for at least a little while to see if it helps me at all, or helps anyone else, I guess, although I don’t really see how this would interest anyone else.

If I really get interested, I might create a few special-topic blogs that might be a kind of virtual publication. I would love to resurrect the AVDF community, but more focussed on the types of applications that I (and most programmers I deal with) develop nowadays: Java web apps.

That’s all for the first post. It’s late and I have an early start tomorrow.

Added later — I added a photo here so I can link to it from the profile.