I read me a book! I read me a.. Oh, nevermind...
So I worked my way through Time Management for System Administrators from Tom Limoncelli. It was a really good read and gave me some great ideas to get things up to snuff.
Like anything I tend to come across, I’m finding that I do things half right to half ends and it’s that last little bit that needs some nudging. I’m exceptionally good at setting up routines and not clogging my brain debating which mundane task needs done first. I swap out the backup tapes and follow my backup routine each and every morning - without thought and without fail. (Why DID my backup skip Friday anyways? Add that to my ToDo list…)
I’m not so good at setting priorities or shuffling tasks to tomorrow instead of doing them just before I go home.
I’ve found a new love for my Palm Pilot. Well, it’s an old love, really, but my m125 and I have once more found an intimacy that was lacking in our relationship.. I record the crap that needs done and it endlessly nags me to actually do it. Plus I’ve found I can back it up perfectly on my Ubuntu box using JPilot. It’s helped me become more effective in that I’m (trying) to set up the Cycle as described by Tom, avoiding some of the time sinks, and I’m actually making headway for a change.
The down side, I’ve got three or five more books that were suggested reading. Find the books, order the books, read the books. Time Management for System Administrators was on my Palm Pilot for about eight months before I actually ordered it and read through it. Sure, it was really worth it, but it takes me time to get around to these things.. ;-)
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Speaking of System Administration, I noticed that Mr. Bug has been banging the drum with the poor migration plan that Zooomr tried to work through. Zooomr is a site designed to make your photos available online. Rather than just throwing a photo up and letting it loose, you have control of who gets to see it, you can add geographical information (“show me other photos taken near here”), links sound, it supports different languages, all in all it looks to be a nice promising site full of good ideas for photographers to present their shots. (Don’t look at me, I barely get around to updating photos around here. ;-)
The fact that Bug introduced me to Zooomr should be my first clue: This is something that he’s following with interest. When an upgrade gets pre-announced, takes longer than expected, and gets rolled back, us old fogeys shake our heads and start asking, “Where’s your upgrade plan?”
I’m a little bit invested in the idea myself. Babcia just did a trip down to Costa Rica. Photos, of course, went up on some commercial webpage that insisted I create an account just to LOOK at the photos they posted.
coff
Okay, I can understand if you’re running some sort of control over who gets to see the photos, but this was just pointless email address collection. No thank you.
I’m also in the “I’d love to see Zooomr work” category. Simply that I’m wasting breath on it puts me in the Rah-Rah camp. I’d much prefer to set Mom up with a Zooomr account that I feel I can trust.
Of course, I’ll be much more interested later this year once I pick up my digital SLR from Robinson’s. (I’m leaning to the FZ50, but I’m worried about some of the issues over higher ISO’s which is my primary reason for getting into a Prosumer grade camera in the first place.. My friends at Robinson’s won’t steer me wrong.)
None of which negates the fact that their upgrade wasn’t planned out and hasn’t gone as expected and a number of us are a bit disappointed.
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And speaking of disappointed, I’m back on the warpath with the Royal Bank again. Bastards.
Deposit a cheque in the ABM. Fine, they don’t know if it’s really a cheque or a poetic offering on how badly they collectively suck as a corporation. I don’t expect perfection. But apparently, if it’s deposited after 6:00 pm on a Sunday, it’s still going to take up to 48 hours to process.
Let alone, this is a government cheque and I did a “Deposit it all into chequing, transfer all but $200 to my Student Line of Credit.“ After all, it’s not like I can really do that in one transaction. And ghod forbid actually having to go to a teller and doing this during banking hours. I’m not pulling cash here. If I actually deposited an ode to how great is the evil that they propagate as a Canada’s Most Respected Corporation ™, they will track it back and they shall charge me NSF fees, ABM fees, fraud fees, doggerel fees, and presumably a fee for not paying them enough service charges. It’s not like they don’t have my credit card number, nor can I stop them from doing whatever the hell they want with my accounts to ensure they get their slice of the pie first. Honestly, I really don’t think they care I’ve been banking there 35 years!
Right… They have to charge a service fee for slicing the pie. I forgot about that one. And don’t they have a fee for banking there for an extended period of time without contributing enough to shareholder profits and an inflated CEO salary?
Two days of this and just MAYBE I’ll actually pay some money on the debt.
Lately it seems that any day that contains bitching about the Royal Bank is a good one.