Jay McGavren’s Journal

So the program blew up when we tried to install it Monday. Now I have to worry about fixing the bugs, whether they’ll can the project, and whether they’ll lay me off if they do so. I can’t sit down and think about it because I’ve also got last minute shopping and preparations for the trip to worry about. I didn’t get to sleep until 2 AM for the last two nights in a row. I am not happy.

Evidently Salvation Army bell-ringers in Arizona can now take donations by credit card. They’ve got little machines with them they can use to ring you up.

Monetary Endangered Species List:
-Personal checks
-$100 and $50 bills
-Dollar coins
-Cash in general (Added Dec. 2004)

Did anyone else realize you could close a tab in FireFox just by middle-clicking it? That may not seem like a big deal, but it’s gonna make my browsing experience a whole lot better all by itself… Bless you, Mozilla Foundation!

God, I love Amon Tobin. His music is just so WICKED.

(By the way, Drum and Bass and caffeine are a very dangerous combination.)

I’ve got one of the tunes from Lenny’s stupid (stupid, stupid, stupid!) cell phone toy in my head… It consists of the synthesized voice of a cat, meowing out “Pop Goes the Weasel”.

Do you think that if I stuck a red hot poker in the right part of my brain, I could burn away all memory of that song?

Wish I’d seen this quote a long time ago:

There is always more to do than there is time to do it, especially in an environment of so much possibility. We all want to be acknowledged; we all want our work to be meaningful. And in an attempt to achieve that goal, we all keep letting stuff enter our lives.

The problem, of course, is that we also want to finish what we start. Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.

Here’s the interview it’s from.

I need to figure out a top priority project, drop everything else, and just freaking do it. I think I’ll be a much happier person once I do.

Thanks to furl.net’s popular links, I’m finding a great many people talking about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s basically a set of principles for keeping your life organized, and though a lot of it is stuff I discovered on my own, it really fills in the blanks. I’m probably going to grab this book and see how much of it I can (readily) implement.

Four different developers are taking my translator model from an old project of mine and adapting it to a new hotel brand. They’re whipping through the code in no time.

I’ve always worked solo, so I was never sure how my code would hold up when someone else was maintaining/extending it. It’s a huge relief to see that others can actually grok it.

A conference call I was on this morning between like 25 people in Scottsdale, Dallas, and the U.K. was taken completely offline when one of the participants (we still don’t know who) put the conference call on hold. The muzak was so loud that no one could hear anyone else, so everyone had to scramble to switch to another conference bridge. :)

Wow - one of our VPs who I knew pretty well from Omaha just left our company, and I thought I’d never hear from him again. I just now got a call from him, though, and it turns out he’s at one of our business partners. He was looking to sell new services back to my company. :)

He’s hardly the first - virtually everyone who left Omaha after the layoffs wound up at business partners or competitors, doing work virtually identical to their previous jobs.

I guess your job never changes, only who writes your paycheck.