ye olde personal update

Last week I finished up Yet Another Tech Writing Contract, which once again went into overtime as it ended and hence prevented me from posting anything here about comic books or squid. This is my usual post-quiet warning: prepare yourself for a barrage of saved-up postings.

This week I have been cleaning my office. One would think that office-cleaning would not take three days, but my office was way way out of control. See, over the last bunch of years I have been successfully getting rid of the crap in the rest of the house. The rest of the house is pretty much clean and straight and there’s not a lot of clutter lying about. The problem is that I did it by putting all the crap into my office.

When I started on monday my office was pretty much full of crap with small narrow paths leading to my desk, to the router/mailserver, and to the printer. There were enormous stacks of paper and books on nearly every surface. Magazines. Old computer equipment. More books. Tangled ropes of cobwebs and dust hung from the ceiling and obscured the windows. Many more books. It was like some dark monster lair. A very sad nerdy monster, who likes to read. I hated working in this office, and something had to be done.

Many boxes, a trip to the computer recycling center, a full trashbin, another trip to goodwill, untold bouts of sneezing and a good vacuuming later, and I can see the floor. There’s still a lot of crap in here. I really don’t know what to do with all the books, at least a third of which appear to have been written by me. I’m going to need more boxes. But at least now there’s a great deal less dust, you can get to the printer without hurting yourself, and sunlight can penetrate into the room.

So now I am in out of work slacker downtime once again. I have only a few small goals for my unemployment this time around:

• Learn Python
• Learn PHP
• Learn Ruby
• Learn docbook
• Lose six pounds gained on last contract (too many good lunches out; not enough bicycling)
• Do a complete website overhaul
• Start publishing empire

Eh, shouldn’t take long.