invisible man
Man, I miss updating this blog. One month, it’s been. Yeesh. The sad part is: writing is a blast, but all my writing juices are getting sucked up by other projects.
As a way to clear the psychic decks and do a bit of early mental “spring cleaning,” let’s look at a smattering of current hot, lukewarm, and cold projects that are taking tons, some, or none of my time lately.
current projects
- Marriage and family life. This one’s my favorite project, and good thing, too, ‘cause it’s a biggie.
- A related project is the weddding reception we’re planning in March to provide a lively touch of spectacle as a follow-on to this past December’s more scaled-town courtroom ceremony.
- Two major engineering presentations at work. These take forever to write; the less that goes on the slide, the more attention has to go to the speaker notes. It’s like writing a pair of 3,000-word essays back to back, and then laboriously pairing them with punchy stock photography.
- The regular old spate of workday milestones and deliverables. Curiously enough, these exact the smallest metaphorical drain. The software is there, and I show up to dance with it.
- North By Northeast Community Health Center, a free neighborhood preventative-care clinic, has its own Web-driven software needs, and I try to address some of those between spasms of deadline guilt.
- A technical book. Stay tuned for details.
- The Oregon Bus Project provides an excuse to get out of the house and go exact political change. Web volunteering, too.
older projects that still tickle sometimes
- Software and maintenance for two environmental websites.
- QuickScores, a Web startup run by my old boss Tim, is an extremely well-done sports scheduling site. You should see the passion that went even into small details, like what to do about rain delays. Every so often, Tim sends up a cog from the program for me to tinker on.
- My first-ever Open Source project, GPIB-Tcl, is a mashup of one of the most embeddable programming languages and one of the most common types of hardware for controlling lab instruments. The irony is, I never use the thing any more. Apparently, though, 5,560 other people do, so every once in a while I need to do a little maintenance on it. And now, volunteers are packaging it anew for Debian Linux. I love the Internet!
- Even more surprising is the dark-horse file comparison tool that I wrote six years ago and still use has over 10,000 downlaods.
abandonware, or done? you decide
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Paul Valéry
- The software that drives the Helping Agencies Serving Richardson website. I’m sure one day they’re going to outgrow that sucker’s needs and go with Drupal or something, but for now it’s been humming along for nearly five years now with nary a fingerprint on its innards.
- The pet database where we kept our list of adoptable animals at the pet rescue I used to volunteer for. Unlike those half-arsed, closed-source, comprehensive “shelter management” programs, this software did exactly what we needed and nothing else. It let us update the stats, descriptions, and availability of our animals. It ran on Windows, Mac Classic, and Linux, the three platforms we had to support. And it supported nearly automatic exporting of our pet data to PetFinder and Pets911, two online adoptable animal databases.