sick

I’ve been rather ill for the last few days. Violently ill. Exorcist ill. :-P

I’m on the mend now, but the weekend was a bit of a wash and I missed work yesterday, so I feel rather behind the 8-ball.

steps forward, steps back

Life seems to be a mix of those right now. I’ve been able to read more and have been improving on the Martial Arts side of the house. But at the same time that’s just making me realize how much I need to sacrifice for my own self development. Or at least focused self development in particular areas. I’ve always tried to be a Renaissance person, and with a full time job, there’s no way to do everything (especially if you want to maintain friendships, especially those over great distances). So for the moment, I need to put some things on the back burners to finish the things that I have in front of me.

My biggest goal: is to try to gain a teaching rank (Sifu) by the time I turn 30. I’m not sure if it’s possible, I’m a year and a half away from that. But I’m going to try!

grrrr blogger

I’ve made some “background” fixes (like the martial art link finally works). But everytime I update the template blogger converts all the “&” into the escape characters. Which if I’m not careful when I correct breaks the comments. Bleh. Well at least I realized it pretty quickly this time. The weekend was pretty calm. I mainly cleaned and helped Drea with the federal decision she is working on (believe it or not I was proofreading for her… really, I proof read other people’s work far, far, far better than I seem to proof my own… ain’t that always the case?).

detox

This weekend mainly consisted of sleep. That’s pretty usual for me after finishing a big project. Thankfully, I have not gotten sick yet (which usually happens as well). All and all it was also a strange weekend because for the last four years I’ve had a Mardi Gras party this weekend. But with the launch of the new kodak.com I just haven’t had time to plan it (or get the apartment ready). There will be a party, but in a month or two.

I did end up going to a Mardi Gras “party” with Drea (“party’s” in quotes, because with only 10 people there it was much more of a gathering). Anyway the morning after I woke up with a splitting headache, which seemed strange. I had not had much to drink at the party, maybe three beers over four hours. But it still felt like my frontal lobe was attempting to secede through my forehead. And then it occurred to me that this had nothing to do with alcohol, but everything to do with the after effects of the relaunch of kodak.com. I was going through caffeine withdrawal. Typically, I drink at most one cup of caffeine coffee a day and I avoid soda. Mark, my good friend and sifu, had convinced me to get off caffeine years ago. However whenever I’m involved in a crazy project my caffeine consumption goes through the roof. In past projects I would literally pop 2 Viveran in a Mountain Dew in order to keep working at 3 in the morning. While I haven’t been that bad, I was easily up to about a 12oz cup of coffee every hour and a half during the last few weeks (given I was working 10 hour days, that adds up fast). And as usual after the project is over I just stop drinking the stuff. The end result is about 48 hours later I start to get the caffiene DTs. So I’ve broken down, upped my intake a bit, and will ween myself off a little at a time. Oh C8H10O2N4, why do you punish me?

it’s finally done!

the all new, all different, pretty dynamic kodak.com went live at 3.51am this morning. If you visit the Taking Great Pictures section, our new learning content, you can see what’s been keeping me from blogging for the last few weeks. In all seriousness I’ve been working on this site (and the greater rearchitecture and design of kodak.com) since September 2001. Three laptops and 231 pages of learning content (made up of over 680 totally new content chunks and 600 totally new pictures) later here are the results.

I’d post a picture on the blog to mark the occasion but my latest laptop doesn’t even have Photoshop on it. I haven’t had time to get it installed.

It still hasn’t sunk in. That the push is over. And that I’ll have time again.