Rui CarmoPublic Notice: This post is preceded by a minor rant, somewhat pared down to comply with my current Disclaimer. Susceptible readers are advised to jump straight to the bulleted list, which has absolutely no ranting whatsoever, some interesting news and only a mild expression of disgust. Thank you.
I'm swamped with work and getting extremely annoyed with it, to the point where I have started making it extremely plain that the Dilbert cartoon plastered atop my desk isn't just for laughs:
Oddly enough, my foreign colleagues have been a lot more helpful to me than the local ones (with notable exceptions), and I blame it all on the cultural aspects. It's not lack of organization, it's the complete and utter lack of a culture of organization, due process and peer review that can only stem from a national root cause.
So, yes, although I'm not considering relocation (at least not of my own free will), pfig will be very happy to see me write that the bloody native culture is again grating on my nerves and that I would much rather work in a civilized nation such as the UK - provided they had decent weather.
As to the overload per se, the best way out at the moment would be cloning myself (which would raise a number of objections, mostly budgetary) or learning new, less politically-minded ways of saying "no".
GTD-foo isn't helping - and it can't help when you're not allowed the time to get your priorities sorted out.
That said (and this outburst should keep me tied over for the next couple of months), I'll stick to the more salient points of what I picked up on the news, open a VPN connection back to the office and try to make sense of what lies ahead of me the next couple of days (which is likely to be hiding myself away in some obscure corner of the building, tapping away at my laptop where nobody can interrupt me).
The salient bits, then:
- The news is swarming with reports of Xbox360 crashes (so many that it's worth linking to the news as it develops).
- Fedora Core 5 Test 1 is out - no time (and no machines) to test it on, but I'll be keeping track of it.
- The Mac OS X GTK port has been committed to Gnome CVS - sadly, it looks like it will support the hideous GTK themes and not be an Aqua-only affair.
- Vista will ship with IPv6 enabled by default, which will give rise to a lot of interesting issues. I guess we'll start seeing mass-market ISPs move (slowly) to IPv6 services in a couple of years... Maybe.
- Finally, a decent, informative post on what the MIT $100 laptop actually is (never mind that it's colored lime green, the thing could be my perfect PDA).