Quite a bit has been going on lately. Enough to keep me from updating this. Life comes in waves. At the crest we are so consumed with activity that we can barely acknowledge things that we would otherwise like to. At the trough we are in such a lull that, while there is so much we could do, we waste that time trying to decide what to do. The trick with riding any wave, though, is to stay as close to center as you can. But fall off this wave, and there’s no getting on another (unless you think about it from the meta-physical sense).

To begin my tale of woe, I have to report that work is getting busy again. Despite my saying that I was going to cut back on the contract work, I’ve been flooded with bug fixes and feature enhancements from one particular client this last two weeks. I’ve managed to close out the largest of them, but I’m still looking at several days work before that’s off my plate again. I then have a second project that I’m supposed to help estimate and split up the work on, but it’s desperately lacking fully-defined requirements, so any estimate I could give would vary wildly based on what they really need. And finally I got a lead on a fun little contract. It’s a difficult task of image processing/filtering and optical character recognition (ocr), but right up my alley. If that one comes though, that’ll be another few weeks of work. All of this, and Ditto is getting busy. We’re still planning to move the office, and working through the paperwork and red tape to move five T1 lines. There are several new projects coming up that are going to take some time and they keep hinting at wanting us to work ten-hour days.

Another Semi-Os meeting this week, and I still don’t have my story, Temperament, cleaned up enough to submit it. I finished the first draft what seems like months ago, and I’m slowly working through it, rewriting and editing. Once I do manage to finish this draft and submit it, I am going to go back to an earlier story I submitted to group, make one more pass and clean it up, and then send it out. Once these two fantasy stories are out of the way, I’m going to spend some time on more modern, speculative stories. I’ve been reading some different styles of writing lately, most notably some of William Gibson’s books and Neil Gaiman’s 
American Gods. I had so much fun with the Jambalaya story that I want to experiment some fantasy and science fiction in a much more modern setting.

Spring is slowly beginning to show itself. Sunrise was at 6:11 a.m. this morning and my previous pattern of waking with the sun is holding true. As soon as the sky lightens up my body starts to wake me up. This morning it was 5:55 am, and that will only get earlier as the new season takes hold. I’m trying to take advantage of the extra time in the morning to write. If I can work for an hour in the wee hours of the morning, and another at lunch, then I should be on a good pace again.

In the end, there is no one to blame for my lack of time but myself. Like the surfer riding a wave, we each must take hold of the reigns and ride life to its fullest.

I’ve been really busy the last week or so and haven’t been as diligent in updating this as I should. I’m going to just braindump a bit to get it out of my system.

Ditto has been keeping me fairly busy. We’re preparing to move into a new office. We’ll be in the same building, in a much bigger and nicer office. The task of coordinating the transition of the T1 lines, network, hardware, air conditioning and electricity for the server room. To top it off, I had to rush into work Saturday morning for a minor emergency. Luckily it turned out to be something simple.

I’m disappointed in myself. I have been working on Temperament for two months now, and I’m still working on cleaning up the first draft enough to submit to the group. I’ve got a clear idea of what I need to do to finish it, I just neeed to make the time.

I’m now writing regularly for Ars Technica. I’ve been doing the occasional review or news post, and I’ll now be doing some feature articles. I’m aiming to finish one article per month. I’ll be writing on a variety of technical articles, which will be right up my alley.

I often get distracted while writing on my primary laptop. It’s the same machine I use for work, and the availablity of my development tools, games, and email tend to have a negative effect on my word count. To that end, I picked up a shiny new iBook today. It’s ultra-portable and light, weighing in at 4.7 pounds. It has a five-hour battery life, perfect for escaping to some dark corner to write in solitude. I got a nice discount on a copy of Office X with it, so I’m totally set to write without distractions. I’m quite excited about it.

I’ve been fairly busy the last few days and haven’t done a good job of keeping things updated. I’ve updated the site to the latest version of MoveableType, and I’m working on a new bookmark site that I think will be fun (as well as an easier way for me to sort out my bookmarks).

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on Project Orca, one of my pet projects. I’ve got a seperate development blog to keep track of the development efforts there, and for my side business.

I am managing to get some writing done, despite all of the work. I’ve been posting news to Ars Technica, where I’m now a staff writer of sorts, posting news as regularly as I can and working on some new articles.

As busy as it is, I can’t complain.