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Productivity KickIn retrospect, last month seemed to be a pretty blah time. This month has been going much better. Things have been humming along at work. I've been quite productive in contributing fixes and enhancements for our next release, and finally got a monkey off my back by finishing a large and complicated project which I've been working on piecemeal for quite a few months. It wasn't terribly high priority, but it helps streamline a chunk of the system I'm responsible for, and will make a number of our users happy when it's available. I've also been doing some performance analysis, which I always think will be a thankless chore, but has actually been pretty rewarding so far. Maybe because we're still at a point where there's some low-hanging fruit on the performance tree to tackle, and it's mainly a matter of devoting the time to hunting it down and picking it. Nonetheless, it's nice to work on projects which show substantial results. By the way, Apple announced new Power Macs today, all featuring dual G4 processors. Is it time for me to buy a new one? My 233 MHz beige G3 is now four and a half years old and is certainly showing its age. I haven't tried installing Mac OS X on it, and am not sure how well it would run. I want to get broadband Internet service soon, and would probably be much happier with OS X to use it. So maybe sometime this fall it will be time.
 John noted at work that I didn't comment on our marathon Bridge session last Wednesday, so he didn't know what to think about it. (I'm the arbiter of all of John's opinions, in case you didn't know.) Yes, last Wednesday a bunch of us either were on vacation or played hooky for half a day to play Bridge at Becky's, to eat guacamole and ice cream (courtesy John) and peach cobbler (courtesy Becky). It was a lot of fun, and I felt like I was playing at a higher level than I have been otherwise, even if I did stick John in a slam bid which was unmakeable due to a peculiar quirk of the particular hands. I made a tough Three Notrump contract during the day, consumed a lot of sugar and fat, and even took time out to make my weekly comic book store run. I also received the missing Jadis album last week, which had been accidentally replaced in my order with a CD I already owned. The band's merchandise folks were quite prompt in sending me a copy, and I send the extra CD back to them. They're occasionally backed up on e-mail, but otherwise I'm real happy with their service! Now, I wonder if they'll ever come do a tour in the US?
Since Saturday I've pretty much been on a productivity kick. My comic book collection finally outgrew the bookcases it's been living in; I've squeezed all the extra space into them that I could, but it was time for a new bookcase. Fortunately, the seller of my house left a couple of extra bookcases in the garage, so Saturday I hauled one up into the bedroom and rearranged all the comics to spread them out into the new space. I also decided to try a new filing scheme: Alphabetical by title within publisher, instead of just by title. This allows me to group some related titles by the same publisher together. Turns out my collection is about 30% DC comics, 25% Marvel, 8% Dark Horse, 5% First, 5% Image, and the remaining 27% divided among all the other companies (largest chunks belonging to Aardvark-Vanaheim, Cartoon, and Wildstorm). Yes, very geeky. I know. It only took me about 4 hours to do all of this, but it was spread out over most of the day, mainly because it was very hot here Friday and Saturday, with temperatures in my city nearing 100 degrees. I managed to keep it relatively cool in my house by closing windows (I'm fairly well insulated), but still it got over 80. Not great weather for physical labor. Debbi came back from her week-long working trip (her company was having its annual meeting), and I cooked dinner Saturday evening (chicken breasts with wine-and-grape sauce, and rice pilaf; the latter came out great, as always, but the sauce for the former had some problems thickening up, and the chicken breasts I used were too large by half). She was pretty exhausted for the rest of the weekend, though. Which was okay, since if she needed rest then that was the best thing for her. She napped for much of Sunday afternoon. I, meanwhile, went on another kick of productivity: I finally boxed up my audiocassettes to store in my upstairs closet, since I rarely listen to them anymore. (Of course, the box is still sitting in the hallway, as I type.) I also hooked up the switch box from my VCRs to my TV, so I can watch TV from either VCR without going through the "Line 1" switch of one of them. And I stored my extra A/V cables in the garage. Then I moved my stereo from the top of my A/V case to the lower shelves, which meant re-wiring everything after the move. Aargh. But that leaves much of the top of the case free, which is where I put my aromatic candles and incense (for the time being), and it leaves me space to put a larger TV, if I ever get around to buying one. (TVs are getting pretty cheap, so who knows?) We also went out and did some shopping in there, going to Illuminations, Know Knew Books and Cost Plus. And then Sunday evening I had my book discussion group. My productivity impetus seems to be wearing down, though, which is too bad since I have a bunch of random papers I need to put away (or shred) in my study, and I want to update my comics for sale list sometime (not to mention sign up for PayPal and join the 21st century when it comes to conducting Internet transactions). But I'm sure the bug will bite again at some point. But for now, I ain't complaining. I've gotten a lot done.
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