Another Word for Nerd

About six months ago, I came to a great conclusion. That conclusion was, my organizational skills suck, and not being properly organized was hurting my productivity in a big way. I’d slacked along for years, getting by, but now it was time to do something about it.

For consulting work, I’m now using Alex King’s Tasks software to manage work requests and system administration duties. In effect, I’m using it as a pseudo-trouble ticket system. This has made my clients much happier, as things don’t “fall through the cracks” anymore when I have a lot of little pending “to do” items. I’ve been drooling over using Basecamp, but it’s $24/month versus the one-time cost of $30 for Tasks.

In my personal life, a lot of my clutter at home was solved by (yeah, I know, its funny) moving. When I moved from Austin to Houston, I took a good long hard look at my posessions, and threw or gave away everything that I owned that wasn’t sentimental or used on a regular basis. Instead of moving into a new home and trying to make everything fit, we moved into a mostly-empty home and bought the furniture we needed and put the few things that aren’t in “active duty” in the closets. As a result, we have plenty of storage space for things, and no “packrat clutter” filling up the garage. I’ve had to resist the urge to bring more older hardware home, but I look at it and think “I really won’t use this for more than a week or two; therefore I don’t need it.”

When it comes to my career, I’m looking at a few methods to “get my shit together” at the office. Moving from Austin to Houston and then from one office to another in Houston over the past three months did a good job of cleaning out cruft from the contents of my office. I’m currently working my way through David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and implementing some of the methods he describes. Time will tell if I can stick to it and actually Get Things Done.

Tonight I went to Office Depot and picked up a small binder/notebook and some index cards; over the next week I’ll give the Hipster PDA a try. I’ve been using a Moleskine journal for notes during meetings for the past two months, but I had the “Large” version and it just seemed unwieldy and awkward to carry around. If the index card thing doesn’t work out, I might try picking up a 3-pack of the pocket notebooks, but damn, the Moleskine stuff is expensive (and the small versions not available at the local Borders bookstore).

One thing I’m lusting after is a Fisher Space Pen, but Office Depot doesn’t carry them.

Finally got the ypldapd NIS-to-LDAP gateway software from PADL working perfect. It’s sitting on a RHEL4 box, talking to an iPlanet/Netscape/Sun Directory Server running on a Solaris machine.

Mail arrives with a subject of “Pre-Scripts w/out DR visit” and your first thought is something about “Data Recovery shell scripts?”

Using Samba on OS X as a bridge (via FTP) to access network shares from a Perl script running under Cygwin on a Windows machine.

(Cygwin has problems accessing network shares via crontab due to user permissions)

Why don’t I just run the Perl script on the OS X box? Because it depends on Win32: modules I can’t run on the Mac…

I successfully got work to approve the purchase of a Mac mini for my desktop instead of Yet Another Dell Box Running RedHat. While waiting for it to arrive, I took my personal mini in and have set it up on my desk. Of course, all of my coworkers came by to ooh and ahh over it.

Yesterday, my boss came by and dropped a 500Mhz iMac DV SE (circa 2000) on my desk. “Doctor Bill, can you do anything with this?” I pulled out the Apple service guide and said “Sure”. An hour later, we had it up on the network and updating from OSX 10.1.4 to 10.1.5. Apparently the RAM had been ripped out of it, the HD unplugged, and it had sat in a closet for three years. Today I’m installing OSX 10.3 and iLife ‘04, and giving it back to him so he can become one of the Apple Faithful.

My chainmail supplies from The Ring Lord arrived yesterday, so I’m spending the evenings learning how to make mail with the eventual goal of producing some jewelry. I’ve found that working with “raw” aluminum rings turns your hands and work surface black; I need to get a jewelry cleaner and run all of those rings through a couple of cycles.

I’m lusting over the Jewelboxing stuff for organized, indexed archives of all my movies and music. I just wish I could justify it to the accountant who runs the books at home..

The toilet in the blue bathroom sprung a high-pressure leak in the “filler pipe” just below the floater-ball shut-off valve on Saturday. Ten minutes of water spraying everywhere and flushing every 10 seconds (to keep the tank from overflowing), I managed to get the fifty-year-old cutoff valve handle moving and shut the water off. I’ll have to go to Lowes in the next couple of days to get parts to rebuild the “guts” of the tank. It seems the previous owners had left the cutoff valve wide open, providing a lot more water pressure than was needed.

A week ago, I got work to approve the purchase of a Mac mini as my new UNIX desktop system, instead of Yet Another Dell. The 512M memory module for it arrived today, but the system is backordered on Amazon. After some back-and-forth with our purchasing guy, he’s going to go to the Apple Store at the Galleria later this week and just pick one up for me in person. He rocks.

Feeling much better today than I was yesterday (at least, I’m not throwing up today).

Using Cygwin, I’ve finally managed to turn a Windows XP machine into a usable imitation of a UNIX system, for some script processing that requires a program (Event Viewer log converter) not available or create-able on a Linux box.

Got the final results of my 2004 Performance Review today. “Exceeded Expectations”, and two glowing paragraphs of praise from both of my managers. Yay!

Got back to work today, and am spending the entire day unpacking the contents of my new office (we moved buildings). I’m so tired of moving from Point A to Point B…