work

Here was the plan for our weekend:

Sleep in Saturday, then Heather would go take some pictures for friends, and Hannah and I would hang out during the morning. The afternoon would be open for whatever, and then we didn’t have any plans beyond Church Sunday.

Let me tell you how things actually went:

2:00AM Hannah wakes up screaming, she was unable to explain why. One bottle and lots of rocking later, she is peacefully sleeping again. Veteran parents may have developed a system wherein both parents aren’t completely disrupted by this kind of thing. Heather and I haven’t really gotten that down. Or maybe we just forgot already. When Hannah woke up every night, we had some sort of system and I think we both felt we were sleeping ok, but now that a middle of the night wake-up is so rare we both end up being disrupted.

5:00AM The On-Call phone rings (thanks to some changes at work I am back on the roster for on-call) and a key system is throwing errors the front-line support guy doesn’t know what to do with. I did a little digging (three cheers for being able to VPN into our systems from home) and talked to the help desk guy and we decided there was a chance this was being caused because some elements of the system weren’t up from their overnight maintenance mode yet. Had I done a little more due diligence prior to heading home from work I may have been quicker to realize what was going on, but my on-call skills are a little rusty. 🙂 Back to bed by 5:45ish

6:00AM Heather and I agree that we are probably done sleeping. Somehow we have lost the sleeping in skill. I start on the traditional Saturday pancakes… right after starting a large pot of coffee. Hannah wakes up a few minutes later, and we have a little family breakfast!

6:30AM Help desk guy calls back, things are still broken. Armed with coffee, I review the error logs again and realize this must be due to an upgrade performed the night before. Queue two hours of phone calls and e-mails working to coordinate a least-downtime solution.

11ish AM Heather is taking pictures and Hannah and I are keeping busy around the house. Hannah by finding everything her little arms can reach while on her tipsy-toes and grabbing it, me by looking for quick-hit chores I can do while keeping her occupied. Wash the sheets! That’s an easy one, I will pile the blankets over here, and as an added intensive to stay out of trouble I will let Hannah play with my phone on top of the pile of blankets. That should about be her ideal distraction for a few minutes.

So, I started the wash, and sat down to see what kind of games Hannah and I could improvise. But wait, somehow Hannah managed to bury my phone deep in these blankets… Nope not in the blankets… maybe under the … nope. Not to worry I have SeekDroid setup on my phone I will just cause it to ring and know what she did with it…. “Unable to contact device” Up to this point I had been a little foggy I suppose, between the short night and the post-crisis-rush feeling I wasn’t anywhere near my sharpest. And yet, it really didn’t take too long to realize where my phone was!

You may have heard of someone who dropped their phone in some water and was able to dry it out with a bag of rice or some similar approach. Those techniques may in fact be effective, but I am willing to bet not on phones that were placed at the bottom of a running washing machine for several minutes!

And really, after that the weekend was fairly uneventful. 🙂

-Jordan

Well, maybe backlogged is a better word.

And actually, I feel like I am starting to catch back up now, but I felt pretty overloaded earlier this week… Might have had something to do with my taking so long to get this post up.

I spent the past weekend at the “No Fluff Just Stuff” conference. It was really good, but doing ten 90 minute sessions in a weekend left me feeling a little numb. The sessions were without a doubt non-fluffy. I learned a lot, but it was probably more than I could really absorb.

The last session I went to “Hacking your brain for fun and profit” while non-technical has been the easiest to start using. It covered ways to make yourself smarter/more productive. First up: getting more sleep. I don’t know if I can keep it up, but I really felt like I should try harder to stay on top of that one. The next point I tried to apply was avoiding distractions at work. I now have all my “new e-mail” sounds turned off, instant messenger can’t make noise ether, and my toolbar is set to auto hide. After nearly a week of that, I think I can tell that it is easier to focus on a task.

As sort of a byproduct of that, I found that Eclipse seems to prevent the taskbar from popping back up like it should sometimes, leading me to look into ways to improve task-switching. I hear there have been some great improvements in operating systems over the past… eight years or so, but my place of employ is still using XP so most of the cool things I initially found weren’t going to work.

Eventually I found out Microsoft labs had a product “Alt-Tab Replacement” in their Power Toys for Windows XP collection. It isn’t perfect, but it improved my situation fairly drastically.

And, that little tip is probably only useful to me… but hey the subscription was cheap right? 🙂

A (nearly) free weekend coming up, can’t wait to see what Heather and I end up filling it with!

-Jordan

Fun At Home, Or “Why You Shouldn’t Play Hide And Seek With A Phone”

My Brain Is Full!