Mambo Taxi

This Tuesday, I"m giving a talk on Getting Things Done and the GTD software I use. The talk needs a small amount of tweaking, yet.

[And here's the finished version. Thanks for all your help, folks. It was really useful.]

If you're the kind of person who would attend a (free, 45-minute talk) on GTD...

Wanna look at my slides and notes, and make suggestions about what is unclear?
There are speaker's notes; you have to click the little head icon in the lower-right corner.

Unfortunately, it needs a google login. If you don't want to do that, I stashed a powerpoint here. You can put comments on this post.

Comments before Monday noon are appreciated; especially if you find yourself tuning out after the first few slides. That's helpful to know. :)

Thanks.

It was a good weekend.

Not too social, not to solitary.

I did some doing, did some thinking.

Plusses and minuses:

+ getting some human-interface issues thought out.
+ following a long chain of "what-if..." to come up with a good idea for an addition to software I use
+ making steps forward on a few non-work projects, with clear(er) next steps.
    -- ignoring one project for months
+ seeing 12 Angry Men with chezmax & the_infamous_j
    + great show
+ Art Walk- bought stained glass from quingawaga for the office
+ melted_snowball, just 'cause.
+ good Quaker Meeting. I spent some of the Meeting considering whether I'm still led to keep working on a project. The answer's "yes, but..."
- Public Library is closed until 1pm on Sundays. F, WT?
+ dim sum with bats22, melted_snowball, the_infamous_j & chezmax. 12 dishes was exactly right. (mmmm turnip-cake.)
+ bats22 as houseguest
+ afternoon watching melted_snowball & bats22 in the kitchen
    + apple pie
    + roast veggies and squash soup and excellent company
+ dog walk
    -/+ surprise hail?! Those were big pellets!
- wet hair on cold mornings
- waiting for MEC order to arrive

This morning I brought Harold to Giilck Auto, a mom-and-pop shop I'd gotten a recommendation for at work. While I waited, he put our car on a lift and went over the three problems the dealer found (and now I have photos of the underside of our car.) He quoted a repair for just exactly 1/10 as much as the dealer wanted for "necessary repairs". (All four sway-bar links were bad, and they were what made the clunk sound I mentioned to the dealer.) While the control arms are separating, they should still be good for a while. And the brake and fuel lines aren't great but he sprayed them with oil to hopefully retard further salt damage.)

I will say this is quite a turnaround of fortunes from last night, when we were both feeling a bit sick about likely junking Harold over a bill just under the worth of the car. I like the dealer; they were good to us when our car was under warranty. (new car computer, new blower motor, and so on.) But yeah. Here's hoping the Giilck fix is good enough.

I also got myself a doctor's note for massage therapy, and a massage appointment. Yay benefits.

And I got a proof-of-concept program working that had me stymied for part of last week. PHP seems to have much worse tools than Perl for programmatically logging into websites. I;ve had to learn a bunch of libcURL by trial and error; my error last week was assuming it kept track of cookies automatically. But no. It's so annoyingly low-level. I have the feeling I will end up writing my own framework to act something like WWW::Automate. Though that looks like an annoyingly large job, and I'm not currently taking on extra large jobs for the fun of it.

Oh, and: some of these tetrapods are really pretty. I've seen photos of them before, and wondered what the hell they were. Now I know!

I'm sure you've been eagerly anticipating the day- evidence has been mounting, and we can finally announce:



From: Graphic Services
Subject: [Fwd: PDF proof of Daniel Allen]
Date: June 3, 2008 1:22:33 PM



---

In other news, i can has bizniz cards x 250 count.
Computing Technology Specialist, yup that's me.

I can't wait to go in to work tomorrow. The stuff I'm working on is awesome. On Thursday I met with $boss for our second weekly meeting, which made me quite happy. He asked excellent questions, and we determined that my original task was actually subsidiary to a bigger task, which might make things much easier- and lo, I'm seeing about rewriting our (much maligned) inventory front-end. Rubber, meet road! I just need to get myself a decent PHP book, because I'm tired of learning PHP by experimentation. (Is there a standard dead-tree book everyone uses? Just curious.)

And on Friday, I spent a good chunk of the day essentially exit-interviewing a staff member who has been using this same inventory system for the last many years; I didn't expect our discussion to take two hours, but he had that many suggestions about things that would make the job easier (in the end, he suggested I might be automating him out of a job, which I had been thinking was the case, but that's not out of line what the facility wants to do as well). I spent some time transcribing notes and prioritizing changes, all 95 of them. Look at me! I'm a requirements engineer!

Dinner tonight was lobster, cooked by melted_snowball for his mom and for me. It was so good. And dawn_guy and catbear brought by a sugar pie that was so sweet I think I'm still on a sugar high. Hope I can sleep tonight. ;)