Entries from May 2007 ↓

I thought of two reasons that do not explain why Mims is hot:

• Is in parked car with windows rolled up (during summer)
• Didn’t look “done” after 20 minutes, was mistakenly left in oven for remainder of dinner

Hi everyone. I’ve got a perfectly good explanation for the past month. I really do.

I got fed up at my job and started looking at alternatives. It was the kind of “fed up” where you say to yourself “I really don’t have time for Warcraft, blogging, poker, or goofing off until I get to the bottom of this.” And so I did. I brushed up on my C#/.NET development skills and hit a couple interviews. I’m leaving my job at the end of this week.

The space you’re looking at now will soon overflow with tales of my new adventures, but for now it’s enough to understand that I’m going into consulting. Lots of new jobs over the next few years, fixing what’s broken, building what needs to be built, and moving on. It’s going to be a wonderful change for me and my family. With Christie staying home with the kids for a while, I’m free to make some changes.

We’ve also been going to the YMCA three times a week. It was the end of the Summer Fitness Challenge this week, and I’m happy to report that we did it. Flip-flops (and bonus t-shirts) are ours come Monday.

Following the extremely wise advice of this person, I’ve turned off all automated email reminders, chat clients, Twitterrific, Skype, and calendar popups. They are not that much of a distraction, but they impose a real mental tax that I am glad to be free of.

I have had some of this puzzle put together for a while now: I remember years ago turning off email notifications at work (because I was okay not knowing that second if someone had emailed me), but in the time since, I have (on slow days) become an eight-hours-a-day email-checking machine, deluding myself into thinking that, because I didn’t have new mail, I didn’t have anything better to do. The machine no longer interrupted me, so I took responsibility for interrupting myself. Better in ways, but much, much worse in others.

I’m going to try to clear out email once a day, as a semi-scheduled activity. It’s going great so far. I am a little shocked to think “24 hours of not paying attention to email, and I only have 3 messages waiting?” – a sure sign that I was devoting too much time and attention to being on top of things that weren’t important, or maybe not even real.