A relaxing weekend

2013-11-11T06:00:00Z

So, another lovely weekend has come and gone. It ended up being more productive than I expected, mainly because SMWM and EDM spent the weekend in a hotel or relatives. As a "gift," I was given some alone time which usually means obsessing about various projects.

Maintenance

The first part of the weekend resulted in me doing a lot of maintenance: mostly helping other people with their websites, shuffling some things around, and generally patching websites and fixing bugs. That took quite a few hours (about a day and a half), but things are now in pretty good shape for everyone I'm helping.

Writing

I also managed to get in two stories (1.5k words and 5k words) and worked on a third. I also sent in a submission for a shorter piece. I feel pretty good about writing at this point, almost like a writer.

Programming

I got my first merge request for one of the OSS projects I've adopted (docbook2odt). That was awesome, mainly because I've never had a merge request before. I botched it, of course, but I learned a lot more about handling merges with Github. And insisting that pull requests are completely isolated.

I also figured out one of the nasty bugs for my work with the Pidgin Twitter client (prpltwtr). I stumbled on the fix while attempting to write some debugging code, but apparently the JSON print routine makes a copy of the nodes... which is exactly what I needed to do. So, I found a clean way of fixing it and it "mostly" works. Probably leaks memory, but at least it runs without crashing.

Movies

I got to watch movies, though it reminded me that I really should keep up with writing about female characters in sci-fi fantasy.

Promethus: Pretty fun despite everyone being obviously stupid. The whole med-bay thing was pretty viseral and fantastic, liked it a lot.
Running Man: This held up nicely, still an awesome movie.
Predators: I feel in love with this movie quiet nicely.
Ratatollie: Still liked it, watched it with EDM.
Puss in Boots: Corny but fun. EDM actually asked for it by name, which was awesome.
The Croods: I despise how the movie went from a girl learning about the world to a hard switch about the dad. Love the flame scene with the birds (the first one).
Armageddon: Like this movie a lot. Most of the sound bite lines I didn't care for, but the music is lovely and I still like the tension.

I also watched five episodes of the first season of True Blood.

When I'm writing alone, this is pretty much how I work. A lot of movies and TV shows while writing steadily. And somehow, in all that, I managed to do dishes twice, three loads of laundry, clean, and play parent for a night.

This Week

Next week is ICON 38 and I'm presenting a few chapters of Sand and Love to the writing group on Thursday. So, this means nothing serious on the weekend and I have a lot of critiquing to do since I've submitted some chapters of Sand and Blood to the writing workshop.

End of a relaxing weekend

2013-11-04T06:00:00Z

This weekend, I didn't work. It doesn't sound like much, but for the previous three, I was putting in 20+ hours over the weekend to keep up with some estimating mistakes I made at work due to imperfect understanding. I dislike making mistakes, which is why I put in the hours to correct it. But, it also meant that death march drive that sucks the life out of you and prevents anything else from going forward.

So, I got a chance to rest, recover, and let go enough that I could dream again and maybe write. So, got some house cleaning done, a bit of shopping and laundry, wrote a 5k word short story, a little bit of programming, and a few hours of raking leaves. I also read a book (gasp), well a third of a book but I only took about an hour over three days while interrupting myself to talk to SMWM.

Normally, my life is organized in sprints. They start on Monday and end on Sunday. I usually know my major focus by then and it seems to give some order and organization. I haven't been able to do that recently, which meant I didn't really get anything done since I was trying to do everything.

This week, I have two goals. The first is to finish critiques. Normally, I have 2-3 submissions for the writing group to go through, but I also have ICON 38 coming up and I've submitted the first five chapters of Sand and Blood to the group. It also means I won't go to the benefactor's breakfast (pout) and won't be able to chat up some of my role models, but trying to improve my writing takes precedence.

The other is prpltwtr. Some months ago, I realized that I really dislike Trillian's interface (again, for the fourth time) and I wanted my Pidgin back. But, no one appears to have stepped up and switched over either microblog-purple or prpltwtr to Twitter's new JSON API. So, I decided to take a shot at it.

Working in code designed by someone else is never easy. Working on a plugin for an API I don't entirely understand makes it hard. Not having anyone to ask questions is even harder. I'm mostly taking pot shots in the dark, slowly getting success, but I need to really dive into it to figure out the last of the bugs I have left. The nested callback system is brutal for debugging and I'm not entirely sure where anything goes. But, I got the basics working over the last month so I just think a week (or two) will get me toward the finish line.

Author Intrusion is on the back burner until after ICON, though if I finish the critiques, I'll probably jump over there since I have no Internet connectivity in the lunch room (and working on a Twitter client kind of requires connectivity).

Other than that, SMWM has a doctor's visit on Friday that I've been requested/begged to go to and the usual work, family, sleep that happily consumes 80% of my days.