Month: September 2021

Slinking Along

Posted on by Chewbode

A few days of extended work hours at the day job has messed up my schedule a bit. I wasn’t able to get as many things accomplished as I had hoped, but I did make some progress. We’re back on track now, though.

I’m writing a small import utility in PowerShell with a XAML UI. The software ingests Excel files and adds entries to a database. I’m running into an odd roadblock today where the specific Commandlet that performs the import is not able to properly latch into the Excel file and read its data. I need to get this tool ready before tomorrow, so this issue is really slowing me down. I’ll be in the day job’s office all day tomorrow, so my weekend won’t see many more personal projects completed.

The wooden boxes for my geeky collection of items have arrived and they’re great. They’re raw wood (sanded, but otherwise unfinished) and, other than lining the bottoms with some felt, I’m not sure yet how to decorate and/or finish them. Will likely address this next weekend.

Also, the magazine organizers arrived and I’m already starting to put them to work. All-in-all, I’m feeling excited about the office reorg.

I also had a mobile window company come out to the house today and replace the rear window of my car. Another checkbox has been checked.

Upgrading the Treasure Chests

Posted on by Chewbode

Keeping up with my scheduled chores/tasks/projects has been pretty easy. Toward the end of last week I did some adjusting, mainly due to two things: I underestimated the amount of downtime I needed this weekend, and I also had to adjust to accommodate Cari’s car issues, which I was able to fix on Saturday. I’m back on track now.

In the office cupboard, there are a couple of small, cardboard boxes that contain a bunch of geeky keepsakes of mine. The majority of these are various fun things from old Loot Crate boxes, but I also have convention programs and lanyards, stickers, pins, toys, things friends made, Kickstarter rewards, comics, and so on.

I’ve run out of space in the boxes and they’re bulging. So, I decided I wanted to transfer everything into new, wooden boxes, which I’m hoping will last forever. They’re also quite a bit larger – almost twice the height each. I ordered them today, so that should be a fun task for this weekend.

Speaking of boxes and organizing items, I’ve also had a bit of an overflow problem linked directly to the magazine subscriptions I mentioned the other day. Most of the magazines I read and then recycle, but one magazine (The MagPi) I want to hold onto as the issues are full of great projects that I may want to tackle one day. However, the pile that’s accumulated in said cupboard is unsightly, hard to move around and stack things on, and feels a bit unsafe (those suckers might tip over at some point). So, I ordered some magazine file holders. If this proved to be a good solution, I want to extend the system to also hold the Eaglemoss DeLorean magazines I get every month so that I can ditch the terrible binders they give out for free.

This weekend, I caught up on:

I also watched 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

And today, I’m reading The MagPi Issue 104 April 2021

A New Way of Organizing My Time

Posted on by Chewbode

I go long stretches of time without a ton of structure in my personal life. Sure, I have things that I like to do, and even things that I need to do. And I’ll even go so far as to make to-do lists with dates attached. These kinds of lists can prove helpful, and even fruitful at times. But, ultimately, the majority of these chores and projects just keep getting pushed weeks, or even months, and my productivity suffers.

I’ve been only periodically acknowledging this. Weeks will go by, and I’ll keep seeing the same items on the list. In the past, I’ve been successful in combatting this by breaking my days down to 30-minute intervals and blocking out time for certain projects. I’ve not done this in years, but last week it felt like it was time for me to jump back into a highly detailed schedule.

That said, today was the first day of this new schedule and it went very well. Not only was I a lot more productive, but I literally crossed more to-dos off my list in one day that I have in two weeks. It feels great.

The list has a lot of small household projects on it for now, but soon I’ll have gotten through all of those and will be moving on to fun projects, like coding, circuit design, etc. Part of this will be more frequent blogging here too which should be a nice way for me to chronical what’s going on. And for those who care to know, you’ll be along for the ride.

As I write this, I’m about to enter the Read Magazines block of time, which is prodding me to conquer the stack of unread magazines on my desk that I never seem to find time for.

First up: The MagPi Issue 103 (March 2021).