I was up bright and early at 6am, which is still officially dark o’clock here on the eastern seaboard of .au courtesy of the Commonwealth Games. I managed the normal morning routine, did the dishes and cleaned the shower and was all ready to head for work by 7:10am. I didn’t feel like heading out while it was still dark(!), so I checked out MetaFilter and BoingBoing after starting my desktop box. Apparently there was a power outage overnight. I forgot the work DSL router needed to be tickled back into life (it loses its mind if the power goes off for only a short time) so my DNS is off and work email is broken today. A UPS is on my list of work related purchases, as is auto-reboot of my desktop and MythTV server.
Work is busy, so I’m doing this while I have lunch at my desk. I’m a little weary, but I think that might have more to do with not eating for 7 hours. If I’m going to do this on a regular basis, I’ll need to remember to snack around mid-morning to keep my energy levels constant. Yesterday I had a couple of muesli bars to keep me going, but I neglected to bring any today.
I’m pretty happy with how things are going. I managed to kick myself into gear when I got home last night and got a lot more done than usual. I’ve still got a lot of conflicting tasks to do of an evening, but I’m sure I can work something out.
The work I’m doing at the moment is definitely getting in the way of doing something I enjoy, though. I’m learning a lot about the sort of thing I actually want to work on rather than what I can do. I had a ball coding seafelt last night and felt a real sense of achievement when I got things to work. My day job doesn’t have enough of a payoff involved. I seem to need a regular payoff of something that is actually complete, rather than a seemingly endless treadmill of tasks that don’t seem to achieve anything tangible. The trick will be finding something that gives me at least some sense of achievement, but still lets me pay my mortgage. Speaking of which, hopefully I can do a quick bit of debugging pie charts before my next meeting.