Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

« ? Blogging Brians # »

Book Plug:

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money. I think.
BSD Mall

10/6/2003 -  10/8/2003
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4/28/2003 -   5/4/2003
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11/25/2002 -  12/1/2002
11/18/2002 - 11/24/2002
11/11/2002 - 11/17/2002
11/4/2002 - 11/10/2002
10/28/2002 -  11/3/2002
10/21/2002 - 10/27/2002
10/14/2002 - 10/20/2002
10/7/2002 - 10/13/2002
9/30/2002 -  10/6/2002
9/23/2002 -  9/29/2002
9/16/2002 -  9/22/2002
  9/9/2002 -  9/15/2002
  9/2/2002 -   9/8/2002
8/26/2002 -   9/1/2002
8/19/2002 -  8/25/2002
8/12/2002 -  8/18/2002
  8/5/2002 -  8/11/2002
7/29/2002 -   8/4/2002
7/22/2002 -  7/28/2002
7/15/2002 -  7/21/2002
  7/8/2002 -  7/14/2002
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5/20/2002 -  5/26/2002
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4/29/2002 -   5/5/2002
4/22/2002 -  4/28/2002
4/15/2002 -  4/21/2002
  4/8/2002 -  4/14/2002
  4/1/2002 -   4/7/2002
3/25/2002 -  3/31/2002
3/18/2002 -  3/24/2002
3/11/2002 -  3/17/2002
  3/4/2002 -  3/10/2002
2/25/2002 -   3/3/2002
2/18/2002 -  2/24/2002
2/11/2002 -  2/17/2002
  2/4/2002 -  2/10/2002
1/28/2002 -   2/3/2002
1/21/2002 -  1/27/2002
1/14/2002 -  1/20/2002
  1/7/2002 -  1/13/2002
12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Wednesday, October 9, 2002
00:33 - I'm trying...	(top)
..."Our patience!" Yeah, I know. It's a lean time for blogging right now. I just haven't been able to devote any time to this lately. It's the same old excuses, I guess-- or possibly new ones, because it's never been quite this bad, not all at once. Covering author review for two books simultaneously, on all kinds of chapters that I hadn't originally signed on to do, has taken its toll on my weekends. Specifically, it means I've had to spend literally twelve hours each day-- each of the past two weekends-- in at work, where there's a copy of Word, from noon until after midnight, editing and reworking and arguing in embedded comments. Some chapters are taking me upwards of four hours each. And this is just the review part; this is where I'm supposed to just be rubber-stamping minor changes, not spending more time than I spent on the original writing. It'd be fine if it weren't the case that, oh, for instance, every piece of software I'd covered, from Sendmail to Tripwire, had completely changed in its implementation between the time I'd originally submitted the chapters and the time I got it back for quick-turnaround AR. Sendmail now runs two parallel queues, with an outgoing client mqueue in addition to the incoming server mqueue. Gee, thanks a lot, guys. So there's that. But why can't I just do these things after work, like I was doing two weeks ago? Why can't I just stay in for a few extra hours after the day's machinations are done, and come home exhausted but triumphant at about 9 or 10? Well, because two weeks ago we weren't taking on more concurrent simultaneous projects with such bizarrely tight deadlines as team goals than we'd ever taken to date. We're talking three releases-- patch, minor, then major-- within a period of six weeks, beginning to end. And factor in a crisis in transparency, in which we must bear the onus of delivering internal milestone visibility to a greater degree than ever before, using augmentations to the already insanely-complex testcase-tracking system I'd designed and that we'd been using for the past four years. Now we have both "explicit" and "implicit" test coverage, a visible "deliverables" section showing committed coverage figures and the current matching level, number of flagged must-test suites remaining, and number of testcases pending bug resolution, the latter two of which must dwindle to zero before any release. Like, say, Friday. It's no problem writing ever more complex infrastructural tools. It's no problem testing more intensely than usual. It's a problem, though, when both always seem to happen at once. And when there are competing edicts from on high demanding that we a) write more infrastructure as investments for future testing, and b) test more intensively and shelve the infrastructure development. At the same time. So that's, at any rate, why I'm in no mood to spend several hours writing and rewriting and wrestling with Word at the end of the day, when all's dark outside and the world comes to life for the evening. Anyway. I shouldn't complain; mine is a dream job, one that was enviable even during the inflationary phase of the bubble, and downright criminal today when thousands of qualified people don't even have jobs in this withered hulk of an IT/QA/development job market. I couldn't ask for a more rewarding thing to do with my day. It even feels as though I'm making a real, concrete difference in the world. I get that thrill through my fingertips that tells me that the products I help shape actually affect world-shaking events, in however small or behind-the-scenes a way. But it does mean that during the day I haven't had the time to keep on top of any of the blogs and news sites that shape my emotions throughout the day, whether negatively or positively-- much less to write anything about them. And in the evenings, all I've wanted to do lately is watch my Simpsons DVDs and pretend that having the directors' commentary tracks playing instead of just watching the familiar old chestnuts straight-up counts as mental activity. (Hey, it's better than some things I could be doing to my time.) I've got some things I want to write down sooner or later, but they're not time-sensitive. They can wait for real life to get out of the way. In the meantime, if the blogging seems light here, and if anyone is perspicacious enough to have noticed anyway, that's why. (Yeah, I know. All this just amounts to one of the ever-popular "Sorry for the silence, I've been too busy" posts. But, well, you know.)