Young Hands Club

1. Continue health insurance search: 3h.

3.85h, in which I ended up partly offloading it after assorted unproductive flailing. So far I’m not as satisfied with this outcome as I thought I’d be, like it’s an admission of defeat or avoidance of manly responsibilities. But at least it gets things unstuck, and “discretion is the better part of valor” i.e. choose your battles, right?

2. Keep in touch with past students + remote friends and family: 1h.

I got in some written correspondence, and a birthday visit for a local relative.

3. Continue conversation with prospective JWRD client in Vermont: 2h.

I haven’t heard anything this week and am not sure where this stands.

4. Discuss to clarify direction, focus, scope, priorities for JWRD: 2h.

Good progress was made here (though I didn’t get the time labeled separately from general YH chat). Priorities for me are writing on the blog and preparing remote training infrastructure and processes.

5. JWRD tasks as needed (eg. if documents show up to review): 2h.

3.9h – reviewed sales article draft.

1.25h – purchased domain name, ((My registrar was being a pain in the ass due to “upgraded” web site.)) configured and tested email.

.5h – misc.

Subtotal: 5.65h

6. Blog: priorities suspiciously little changed from last week at trb build system patch, gbw, gscm, router setup, differential backups. But could be anything if it gets the ink flowing. 10h.

4.12h – wrote up my TRB build system patch.

7. Continue work on human-sized differential backup tool. Remote training infrastructure setup (video conferencing, shell accounts). 5h.

6.5h – dug up an old desktop for use with Windows-based training tools: dusted, inspected hardware and BIOS, reinstalled OS and drivers, configured OS, configured restrictive external firewall.

2.3h – deep-cleaned an old keyboard. I felt a little silly spending that time compared to just picking up a new one, but it was interesting and kinda fun exploring its innards.

1.15h – installed Zoom, created account, began configuration.

Subtotal: 9.95h

8. Unexpected tasks: 6h.

Predictable but slipped my mind at planning time was assessing the situation in Panama and deciding on continuing to pay for the apartment. The owner wasn’t willing to write off the upcoming month but would accept gradual repayment if I return, so for now I’m still holding it. I also wrote up an inventory for my man on the ground of things worth saving if I ditch it. 4h.

.6h – wrote script for pasting HTML log snippets from the new tabular format.

.35h – fixed a bug in my new time reporting tool “treport”, exposed by the change of month: the sloppy typing of Awk finally bit me, wherein the string “01” works like the number 1 except when it doesn’t (in this case, array indexing).

Subtotal: 4.95h

9. Chat in #ossasepia, or otherwise engage blogs: 5h.

7.53h – Young Hands related.

1.7h – mod6 blog reading and comments re TRB “wedge”.

Subtotal: 9.23h

10. Weekly review: 2h at 16:30 UTC Friday (12:30 local).

3.2h (and that’s after I finally got started). ((Hey, apparently I’m productive enough at least to fool the outside observer! And btw, if you’re still a lurker out there reading this in your RSS feeds… what are you waiting for? We don’t bite (much). Time, on the other hand, works against you.))

11. Next week’s plan: 1h.

12. Continue TRB/bdb/boost study. It seems I didn’t quite convince myself to put this down and did a bunch more reading already. If I’m doing it anyway, I can make it more active by reporting on questions, interesting finds, or ideas that come up.

4.93h – reading TRB code and BDB manual, keeping some notes as I go. I’ve got some ideas for cleaning up the demented database code and behavior, though I’ve also had the notion of ripping it all out and replacing with SQL.

1.27h – reading Linux manuals about process group management. I think I got into this by pondering differences between threads and processes.

Subtotal: 6.2h

Total: 47.15h

A focus on writing, remote training setup, and TRB looks doable for next week.