In the past two months I had a huge bump in busy-ness. I have had a hard time finding free time for some things I used to do, and had my remaining free time soaked up by new things. One of the things on the way out is reading gratuitous amounts of weblogs. (I _was_ up to about 500.)

I have a system for managing my weblog reading volume, as this has happened before. I divide developer web logs (of which I read more than any other category) into A, B, C, and D. I "have to" read the A's, the B's less so, the C's even less, the D's when I'm really bored. I also have about 10 other categories, including comics (Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbs, etc.), finance, and local news.

I used to get through at least the developer A's, Comics, Local News, and Finance News every day (except the occasional day off.) Over the past 2 months, I have only gotten through Developer A's once and even then, only by marking things for follow up.

I am finding that I lack the attention span to really enjoy it like I used to (constantly thinking, "OK, I've got 20 minutes left...let's make this count. Only read really profound stuff!") I am afraid to open my RSS Reader.

I don't think the great reset trick (mark everything read, delete all Cs and Ds, move some As to Bs and some Bs to Cs) will work this time. This whole thing is just not working. When I first started reading RSS feeds, they were a great way for me to find out about new things in my areas of interest, but in the mean time, the feeds that I read have grown more diverse, into subjects too diverse for me to possibly maintain interest (and a job, and a family) in. Example: Maybe one time I was working on something to do with Sharepoint, so I subscribed to a really great blog about Sharepoint development...then I lost interest...then the guy writing it started writing about something else...then I never read it - it's just an annoying number of unread posts in my RSS Reader. Multiply this by x 300. I don't feel so good...

RSS was a good cure for a certain information flow problem - I could subscribe to things I was interested in - instead of searching or discovering by accident, I could monitor. Now I need something better. What comes next? Is it summary blogs like Jason Haley's or The Daily Grind? Is it "portal" monitor sites like DotNetKicks? Some new technology that tells me who the best writer on subject X and pushes me all that content? I don't know, but I hope it gets here soon. I am starting to feel dumb not being able to digest all the content there is.

Long time since I last posted. Need less to say, I have been a little busy. I hope to resume most of my regular life soon, but here are a few highlights (to be followed with further posts later) of what I've been up to:

• Julie and Allie came back from a month long trip to Taiwan, to visit Julie's mom. Allie got her second hair cut - the last was when she was 1. She went from waste length hair to just past the shoulders. She made amazing progress in Chinese. Before this trip, she had a bad accent and very limited vocabulary. Hanging around with two cousins she adores, as well as dozens of other extended family members willing to spend time doing things with and talking to her made a huge difference.
• At the beginning of November, I was invited to participate in a week long training session my company puts on - not for developers, but for analysts. It was a really neat experience and I think it speaks highly of our management - that they get the need to keep developers as up to speed as anyone else on how the business works. I learned a ton of stuff, and go to spend time with top minds in the industry (and bug them with questions.) In addition, I met a bunch of cool people from our offices all over the world. We have a lot of work to do on the technology front to improve our organization, but I have now doubt that we're going to do it. This company will grow amazingly over the coming years, and I am glad to be here to take part in that.
• We were going to go to our friends Monique and Dominique's house, in Portland, for Thanksgiving, but ended up inviting a few people over. More people got invited. Then a few more. In the end, I think 19 people showed up. We had a blast, but it was a lot of work to get ready and clean up.

Enough personal stuff...

• I enjoyed the final day of the Seattle Code Camp. I got a chance to talk to two of my agile heroes, Brad Wilson, and Peter Provost. I also got to talk to Stuart Celarier, and was introduced to the Seattle XP Group. Too bad their meetings are the same day as South Sound .NET - which I haven't gone to either in several months. Argg...
• Speaking of user groups: Some co-workers finally got me excited enough to form an in house Developers Group. I had the good fortune of getting to know someone in our company that is one of those "do-er" kinds of people - the kind that can organize a teleconference on 3 continents with 100 people, in under an hour, without batting an eye. I kind of bashfully asked if there was any way we could use one of our company's fancier meeting/conference rooms after hours for around 20 people. She basically said, "Go for it!" and I found that it was actually as easy as inviting the room to our conference. I could even invite coffee and his friends pizza and sandwiches from the cafeteria downstairs if my boss was willing to pay for them (hmm...haven't asked about that...) We got a sweet conference room on the twelfth floor, with an awesome view of the Puget sound, a massive projector and computer, fancy mood lighting, comfy chairs, a mezzanine level - the whole nine yards. I hope about 10 people will show up, which we will try to grow to 20 or 30 as time passes. Thanks Wei, Michael, and Ariel for finally pushing me over the edge on this!
• I've been learning SSIS. It's been kind of frustrating, kind of fun. Mostly, it's only fun when it works. It was really painful to get to the "works" stage with my first couple of projects, but aside from a few gripes, I see how powerful and useful it could be going forward.
• Our development team at work feels like it's getting tighter. Inspired by Brad and Peter, we spent more energy trying to do pair programming and share code better. I think we are good, but we could be a lot better. We only have one project we are doing right now that is truly owned by all developers on the team. The other 4 projects we actively work on all have code owners, and we are working to abolish that.
• My boss said I was a "hippy coder" at a recent team meeting held down the street, in an...umm...off site meeting facility with fermented beverages. I was a little shocked. I try to be open minded, but compared to most of the other developers in our organization, I think I am _more_ disciplined - I use TDD, automated builds, normalized database schemas, consistent names, etc., in comparison with the local standard, which is to say "good enough" a lot. I guess I was just kind of shocked about this, but my boss has a history of making startling observations about me, which give me great cause for self reflection - which is a good thing.
• I installed Vista...like it...not the stuff of dreams, but lots of little things I like (parental controls especially.)
• I finally checked out the "Baroque Cycle" from the local library. What a read. Lots of history. Lots of math and science. Heavy. Sucked up a lot of time.
• I have been working on something kind of neat, integrating SQL Server, our applications, and OLAP. For a taste, here's a paper a colleague wrote several years ago, about doing almost the same thing, just using SAS for the application part (where I would be using .NET.)

Anyway, I hope to blog more now. Later!