The Goldfish Chronicles

As the baby enters the life, various things have to be pushed out.

The week of the birth put me behind a fair bit on email. I think I’m mostly up to date now, with only a couple of emails I need to reply to still sitting there. The server problems means that all my email goes into one folder, so very spammy; but gmail means that many of the lists go there and are easy to manage when gmail.com is responding.

Finding time to play computer games is very easy; it’s easy to hold a baby in a sling and play a game. Star Wars Battleground, Fifa 2005 and Halo 2 on the X-Box are all fun. Crusader Kings on the PC uses a lot of time too.

Draft reviewing for publishers is out now though. I can’t guarentee the periods of time needed to do that kind of thing. Fortunately, apart from a last draft review of Jakarta Commons in Action (Manning/Vikram Goyal), I was all finished on these things anyway.

Time spent reading is surprisingly increased. Hardbacks are hard to read, though this is the time of year when Salvatore, Feist and Pratchett all release new books. Stephenson’s is out too. However, I’d just subscribed to Sci-Fi magazines: Asimovs and Analog. A very good move, these are perfectly shaped to be read while holding a baby in a sling. Incidentally, the sling rocks and is from Kangaroo Korner.

ASF community management time is still there. Recently finished the long running process of getting a Clover license for all of the ASF. Next up is the December Jakarta report for the board, and to continue pestering upwards about finding a way to let ASF code import LGPL’d code.

ASF coding is less so. Lang and IO both want new releases and could do with my time.

OSJava coding is also on the downside. I did get into an old idea called ‘reportrunner’ for a week and have it nicely coded. Create an xml file with a bunch of reports and it gives you a user-interface to run the reports against databases, show them prettily etc. Might use this at work, so able to use work time on it too. Currently bogged down in abstracting databases/resources.

The servers always need time. Backups are largely happening again though, which is the main worry. Machines at home have taken a bit of time too. Setting a box up in the living room for use there (basement will be too cold for a baby…too cold for me if I’m honest with myself). Wireless printer as well (HP 5850).

Oh, and blogging stopped too.

Getting into work is hard when the family could just cuddle up for the morning and sleep.

It’s the only time when he’ll actually settle down.