August 2008 Update

I can't believe it's only 4 months until Christmas! 2008 has flown by.

It's been a while since I've posted anything on a 'personal' level in a while, but after coming home from work with a migraine induced by stress, lack of sleep and lack of a quiet workplace these days, I found myself quite unable to sleep with everything going on around me. One of the things I hate most about myself is my complete inability to fall asleep with something on my mind. I could run a marathon (figuratively speaking) and be utterly physically exhausted, but lie awake for hours if something haunts me.

It's not without good reason, of course. Our baby is due to arrive anytime starting about a month from now (due date is October 9th, but baby could be early). I still feel like I have a long list of pet projects to complete before the baby comes, but at the same time I know that I need to "clear my plate" of things and focus solely on family and work once the baby arrives.

I've put my Freerunner development on hold, I've pretty much let the forums at http://blackjack2.info take care of themselves, I seem to be making barely enough on my blog ads to cover my hosting costs, and I've halted work on pretty much all of my freelance work, save for a few very minor things for two friends.

It'll be interesting to see how life will change when the baby arrives. I'm more likely to branch into a tech/personal dual-blog setup again, and after seeing a web site of Jorge's friend Fuzzymonk, I think having a central wiki-style repository of programming tips might be worthwhile too. I'm debating just moving everything back to a simpler CMS engine, like WordPress, since Drupal already feels pretty "heavy" and updating it is nowhere as friendly as a cPanel-Fantastico upgrade. We'll see.

As for my open source programming, well, the SpamAssassin trainer is still working just fine. I had planned a few features for a new release back in April as well as a PHP version for easier implementation, but I decided not to bother. Now that my dedicated server is running cPanel, I have a slight interest in building my training script into a cPanel module, but no promises. w98podfetch still suits me well, but frankly, my "commute" of a 7-minute walk to work hardly warrants downloading podcasts any more, so I haven't touched that code in ages. I should probably look at making the configuration non-XML based though, make it easier to configure.

It's funny how news of my "headhunter nightmares" gets around -- I've actually had recruiters who find me on LinkedIn arrive at my site to check me out, read my "nightmares" posts, and still call me, usually starting with "Hey, I read your blog posts and wanted to let you know I'm not like that..." So I decided to change my 'resume' page to say that I'm not currently looking for work. I've been promoted to a team lead position and while I struggle to get organized and doing paperwork as well as my regular job, I enjoy where I am IMMENSELY and have no intention of leaving. It's always great to work in an environment where others are as passionate about their jobs as you are.