Plugging Away

I've been keeping plenty busy this weekend. I'm still working on my new journal, and have been making great progress (or so I think). My goal is to launch it by the end of the month, simply because I feel that if I spend most of this month working on it and still haven't taken it live, then I've sort of failed. I really want to start writing content for it! I think it will be a nice step forward from GitA in technology, both for my readers and for me personally.

I'm trying not to get too bogged down in the details, because I know I can change many things later. Wordpress is really terrifically flexible, and I've barely had to look at the source code at all to do everything I want - and haven't had to modify any of it. The only things I haven't been able to get it to do are pretty minor things, "nice to have" features which I can explore adding later.

Most of my efforts have been going towards presentation, and even that I can change later, too. I'm not enthusiastic about the color scheme I've chosen, which has sort of evolved organically out of my technical efforts, but which is really kind of bland. I suspect it's the main thing that will get a major overhaul after the official launch. The main tension is that I want to have a page which is fairly bright, but my favorite colors tend to be darker shades. So that's been something of a struggle.

Fortunately I really do feel like I'm making progress and not just spinning my wheels trying to figure out how this Wordpress thing works. So that's certainly a good thing!

It's been a warm, sunny, and quiet weekend otherwise. We've run some errands, done a bunch of reading, and watched some baseball and football. The cats have been happy to have us home, I think, and to have the front room available again now that Karen's gone. (She's allergic to cats, so she closes the room off while she's here.)

Work has been, well, pretty smooth in recent weeks since WWDC. I was pretty much right in the thick of the Mac's transition to the Intel chip because people were moving en masse from Codewarrior to Xcode, and that meant they needed to be able to build their projects in Xcode, and that meant I was fixing bugs and making enhancements and providing suggestions with the main goal of getting people to that point. It made 2005 through about May of 2006 very busy and at times quite stressful for me. But I think I can now look back and say that I made it, and I'm fairly proud of the work we accomplished in that time.

That said, it is nice to be able to take a few breaths.

Along the way, I've kept intact my streak of never reporting to the same manager for a full calendar year since I started working at Apple. I don't think this is most peoples' experience at the company: I think I'm an outlier, and I don't think it has anything to do with me, I think it's just coincidence. (I could maybe even flatter myself that I'm fairly easy to get along with at work, and that all the managers want to take turns working with me! Well, maybe that's overstating it a bit!) I do like to joke that I keep working on the same stuff while the world rotates around me. Fortunately, I've had a good relationship with all of my managers - that makes a big difference.

Meanwhile, it's time for me to get back to my own little programming project. Hopefully I'll be able to make the big announcement in a couple of weeks!