Oddball Update

What is it, Thursday already? It’s been nothing short of a ridiculous week from start to finish. I’ve worked until after 11:00 p.m. every day thus far. One night I went to bed with a headache severe enough to blur my vision. Tonight I paced back and forth in my office for nearly an hour, hashing through the apocalypse running through my brain. Tomorrow I’m expecting a sidework client to review the completed work I sent him last night, but assuming he doesn’t drop a bombshell on me, I might actually be looking at a fairly quiet Friday night…and even a quiet weekend.

This particular client doesn’t have a habit of dropping bombshells — quite the opposite, actually — so I think I’m safe. Probably.

Most of this week’s frustration, however, came from a project with a somewhat tight deadline that I signed on for, and which progressively became more and more difficult to deliver on as further and more detailed requirements streamed in. It recently reached the point at which I had to take a serious look at the way things were going and be brutally honest with myself: Did I have any hope of meeting the requirements given the time and resources I have available to me? I spent literally hours hashing this question out, trying to find a formula that would produce an answer of “Yes,” but in the end, I could not.

I still don’t know where that project is going to go from here, but I couldn’t continue to watch it spiral further and further out of control (if it was ever within control, a thing of which I am doubtful). I did some research, analyzed the situation as I saw it and wrote up an honest report for the client. Not much else I could do, in good conscience. Now I guess we see how it pans out.

The current state of my various jobs, however, seems to suggest that I’ll have some time to recover some sanity this weekend. I have another acupuncture appointment on Saturday afternoon, but other than that, I’m hoping to not make any plans. The only thing I might do is go see the new Transformers 2 movie, although in that case, I’d want to first watch the Blu-ray disc of the first film which has been gracing my countertop for the last month and a half. We rented it from Netflix, you see. It’s been weeks, I think, since I had time to watch anything from Netflix. (In the interim, Apple has been going crazy renting Korean shows, so more power to her — at least somebody’s using the service.)

I’ve also continued to enjoy my iPhone 3GS, what little time I’ve had to use it. The few calls I’ve placed or taken have sounded phenomenal, and I haven’t even bothered to look at the signal strength indicator because I never worry about it dropping a call. Slowly but surely, as well, the apps I use that were broken by the OS 3.0 upgrade (eReader chief among them) are being fixed. Now I can finally read my eBooks again. I still haven’t had an opportunity to take much in the way of interesting photos or video with it, although I did set myself up with a YouTube account so I can upload whatever I shoot directly to their service. I tested this feature once and it worked pretty well then.

Having spent next to no time on any of my own pursuits in well over a week, and only insignificantly more before then, there’s a lot of stuff stacking up around the house that needs doing. Apple’s laptop (which used to be my laptop, actually) needs a serious dose of reformatting; I’ve never seen anything run so slow. I’ve got Netflix to catch up on, a story I want to get back to, and even some minor modifications to make to this site. It’s fortunate that I’ve been feeling energized by some unknown force these last few days, otherwise I shudder to think how I might have (or not have) gotten through the week.

One last warning: I’m probably going to be switching web hosts again soon (possibly very soon) due to some email issues, so yeah, you’ve been warned.

That’s all for today, I guess. Somehow, it’s already midnight.

Topics: iPhone, work