State of the Nation

I haven’t been writing much, so here’s why, in the by-now-traditional sets of five bullet points.

1. Dropbox has been handling the entire contents of this site pretty damn near flawlessly, so wherever I sit I can just open a file and start typing away, either to add a new entry or to edit old ones.
2. In one of those half-hour coding sprints that sometimes you just need to do to relax and clear your mind, I built a “little helper” that grabs my Google Reader notes and gives me a nice, Ajaxy page with them formatted in Textile markup syntax, ready to cut and paste into the umpteen resource tables I maintain on this site whenever required (next up I’ll be extending that to doing the actual insertion, but right now I prefer manual control).
3. I’ve been catching up on TV and movies (trying to rest and watch something at least once a week while the kid’s asleep) – this is alternating with books, although Autumn is always a time where I put aside reading to some extent and focus on sitting snugly in front of this age’s equivalent of a fireplace, watching great tales unfold among flickers of light.
4. Some of my friends have been great company (although I haven’t really spent any time with them – or the ones I don’t see that often – outside work, which sucks).
5. I’m moving to a new job (or, rather, a new position inside the organization) that has to do with (go figure) social networking on the mobile (and more).

1. I feel tired as hell (can’t get enough sleep or proper rest, let alone exercise).
2. Can’t spend enough time with my kid (and it shows – the most I’ve spent with him is when he has nightmares and wakes us up in the middle of the night).
3. Have been feeling somewhat sick (all of it stress-related aches and pains).
4. Haven’t been able to rebuild our family photo archive (backups are good, but it still takes time to rebuild the setup I had and I have three months’ worth of photos to go through yet).
5. My old job still needs to be taken care of until a replacement is found, so I now have two jobs – which means I’m not doing either of them up to what I would consider a decent standard. This is, of course, a cardinal factor for stress, since the thing that annoys me the most is not doing things properly, regardless of deadlines and whatever other folk are responsible for.

So I hereby classify my attempt at stepping offline and relaxing a mixed failure (but a failure nonetheless, unlike Aaron’s), and promise to have another go at it soon.