Akatombo Web Log
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Incremental Progress on many fronts
My decision to cut down the amount of media I take in yesterday only translated into a partial shift in actual practice today. I spent very little time surfing the Internet today, and almost no time in my RSS reader, but I spent a lot of time with podcast playing in the background while I worked on other things, which is probably keeping me from working at peak efficiency. Tomorrow I will limit my podcast listening time to the commute to and from the office (about an hour) and the trip to and from the dentist (another half hour); that should be enough podcast listening time anyway.
Today my attention was spread over work on a lot of things, and though I didn’t make huge progress in any one thing, I knocked quite a few things off of my to do list. We are preparing a more powerful server to take over for the server that is currently hosting all of our websites so I have slowly been getting it ready to go. It will run on FreeBSD 6 and I already had that installed. Today I finished up installing all the ports that I need and did some planning for the data and configuration migration that will need to take place before things are ready to go. I hope to get the server up and going over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays so I’m not spending many large blocks of time on it.
I came much closer to finishing a client project that involves translation, web design, and programming work. I just have four more items on my list of things I need to do on it before I can hand it over to the client so I hope to have it done tomorrow if all goes well. I keep finding little ways that the site could function more smoothly, so I have been doing quite a bit of complimentary programming work to fix little annoyances in the underlying content management system. I always try to throw a little bit extra in for free, but this particular client was very patient when the illustrator he hired didn’t get things done in time to meet the deadline for getting the project finished before we had to start on the CEATEC JAPAN 2005 website, a project that pretty much monopolizes our time for a good portion of the year.
I also did quite a bit of work on organizing the tools we use to manage our work-flow—trying to consolidate where our information is kept so that we minimize the number of repositories we need to keep an eye on. Finally on the personal side I did some updating on a wiki that my girlfriend and I are maintaining containing information related to our house hunt (we are working on buying a new house, remodelling an old one, or buying some land and building a new one). Well, I’m sure that I am the only one that could possibly be interested in this, and it is getting pretty late so I’ll wrap it up here.