Hivemindering

Hivemindered, adj. Having your life be completely and efficiently organized by using Hiveminder.

Seriously folks, I'm on the path to organizational nirvana, and it's name is Hiveminder. I wasn't properly utilizing it for a while, but as I get more and more of my life in there, I almost can't remember how I lived without it. Every Wednesday I'm getting a reminder to write a blog post. What did I do before, decide to post randomly? Not write anything for days and weeks because I forgot? I've got about 4 or 5 blogs that I'm actively involved with, and every now and then some of them would get terribly neglected because I get so overwhelmingly busy that I just don't remember.

And I am pretty overwhelmingly busy. I do it to myself, and I'm definitely not complaining about it, but I have got a lot of things on my plate. At least I won't be accused of not taking good opportunities when they come across my path. Prime example: I've been thinking about writing a book about Wikibooks for some time now. In fact, the book has been in planning for damn near two years now. Yesterday, I finally wrote up a proposal and sent it in to a publisher for consideration. Wouldn't you know it? But I got a reply right back expressing interest, asking questions, and offering suggestions. Even if this book project never gets off the ground (and I have plenty of reasons to think now that it will), at least I can't ever say that I didn't try.

Wikibooks has been eating up a lot of my time, in a good way. I've been getting back into regular writing, and I've been creating and editing book "collections" for use with our new print-on-demand service. People, listen closely: You can write books at Wikibooks, get a community of people to help review and edit it, and publish it through PediaPress.com. I've heard from our publisher that we can write books and have them subsidized for shipping to impoverished places like rural India for rediculously cheap. You can help write a book that could end up in classrooms in India, Africa, South America. With print-on-demand and world-wide shipping, we can get free or crazy-inexpensive books to the people who need them the most, and I find that amazingly empowering. That's the kind of thing that keeps me motivated. That, and the fact that I've scheduled my Wiki-work in hiveminder!!

Parrot is going well but slowly. I'm digging around in the function-calling code now, trying to simplify some of the calling conventions and algorithms that Parrot uses. It's very tricky stuff, and I can't say I understand all of it, but I am making steady progress (with some help from my colleagues when I need it!). I joke sometimes that I do more programming at home then I do at work, and I'm a software engineer! Actually, it's not really a joke, just the irony of a poorly-designed business card. I have a lot of trouble saying that the VB.NET stuff I do at work is really "programming" anyway.

Hiveminder says my next post here is scheduled on Wednesday, but I may post before that if I have news.