Yes. it is true. i am freakishly busy. and of course while being freakishly busy i find the most time expensive hobby ever. So matiss and i have been playing quake 3 again. We were playing the requiem mod for hours, but it got kinda boring so we switched to the urban terror full conversion. It rules.

I am totally not a game player, but i am suddenly VERY interested in playing counterstrike and solcom. It seems that the realism, the fun and energy associated with having to sneak around and shoot/protect people is great. Matiss and i will play the team survivor mode where we have to survive the ten minute round as a team - as long as one member of our team is alive and all the other team dead, we win. It is so much fun. We will yell out plans, sneak along walls, snipe, blow people up and all that good stuff. Have to form a community strategy whilst playing a FPS game is pretty exhilirating. It has brought back the jumpiness that i used to associate with long quake playing sessions. so much fun. but seriously so much time killing. i don’t have time to be playing these stupid games. hah.

I have been working really hard on the whole get things done mantra. As my brother and i are finding out, we both are quite stricken with a rather strong “ADDish” sense about us. We are unable to really concentrate on one thing for very long. Dylan was kidding that he took an ADD test online that was 40 questions long - wtf kind of ADD test is 40 questions. hah. but seriously. i have been trying to figure out how to really channel the good parts of my ADD and shed some of the not so good parts. and what i discovered was the following…

First off i have to start scheduling things. It has helped quite a bit since i got my phone and such to sync with my mac. i have been able to input stuff into my phone and make sure that alarms happen when they are supposed to, and that my todos are updated. I have also started to use basecamp and trac a lot more. It has really helped me keep track of whats happening and the ical integration of basecamp has helped me keep my phone in sync with my projects.

whew.. my projects. i have so much going on. i am working with on a fancy project. and that is all about that - except it has really changed how i view project management. It has lead me down a pretty fierce road of minefield project management conversion. A friend sent me this book called the Software Project Survival Guide which has really helped me look at software projects in such a fashion as to make them productive rather than evil. it has been VERY VERY helpful. It really made me reevaluate how i managed my work, and my internal projects.

This lead me to buy the first technical books i have purchased since college. I call this my “re-engineering” or my “de-advertising.” After not working wiht engineers for 6 months, i lost the vocabulary, the quirks and the function of being in that mindframe. I hope that these books will bring me back. heh.

First I picked up the Agile Web Development with Rails ebook. It is very good. I wish i would have had this when i was starting to develop in rails. it covers a lot of the stuff that i originally struggled with. Stupid plurality. I am really excited about the future in rails. I have SOOO many rails projects to do. soooon. hah.

The next books i purchased was Joel on Software’s book Joel on Software (heh). It is really a nice read. Joel is obviously an incredibly intelligent person. His writing is really able to remind me what being an engineer is all about. His descriptions of how things should go and how work should be really makes me want to find an AWESOME job and do AWESOME things. hah. soon. After Joel on Software, i picked up the mythical man month and then Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I haven’t read much of either one - but what i read of mythical man month made me bored. hah. so i hope i will be able to get through it. i think i will. i will have to plan it out though. hah. I am really intimidated by martin fowlers book. Software patterns are something that i have been practicing like someone who is really good at street fighting has practice martial arts. I am a bit rusty and i don’t know the vocabulary or the terms - but i get the gest.

I am tired of getting the gest. a week ago i was told by two separate people that i was really good, but i didn’t speak the write language. Well damnit. i am going to learn the language. haha. Take that computer.

in a completely other world, hiromi’s friend is over from japan. She is really nice. She is a huge apple fan and loves ipods. so we gathered all our ipods together and BAM.

hiromi is leaving soon - which is sad. but hopefully i will visit japan. and taiwan. visiting all my far away friends.

as i have said before “stupid ocean”

i think the word agile is pretty stupid.

i think that someone should make a website that allows you to use xml-rpc/fancy-connectors to cross post to all your blogs(myspace, livjournal, friendster, yahoo360, blah blah blah). i am so annoyed at having all these blogs and having no way to synchronize them.

i am going to make websites in this order: secret project 1, secret project 2, 3gscreensaver, howtoyoyo, something else.

see i am ready.

OMG. my mouse buttons almost killed this post. HOW I LOVE YOU FIREFOX FOR NOT REMOVING ALL THE CONTENTS OF THE FORM.