Yet another update from beyond.

If you’re still reading here, know that I’m more active on Twitter/Facebook now. Twitter (ignoring @’s and RT’s) feeds Facebook status. I respond to replies on both.

I stopped paying for my LiveJournal account. Made sense as I wasn’t posting directly there any longer. If you see this on LJ, you’re seeing it as an RSS feed from my blog.

I resisted for a long time the idea of putting out ideas in 140 characters. It seemed rather odd that information of value could be conveyed in such a short manner. I’m finding trying to construct information in as tight a bundle as possible but still make it useful is good for brain. It helps in my job which requires I break down something complex – to someone who doesn’t understand – into a couple of sentences they can take back to their respective people.

These short messages though are very helpful. Time is not as available as it used to be. But more importantly, I think I actually really understand a bit more about why it helps to be that quick. If you’ve read my writings since I first started on LiveJournal in 2004 you’ll remember I wrote “News Bits” every few days. It was just links and a comment. I’d usually do four or five in a day. These were really just one liners to things I thought were interesting but not worth the time for a full entry. One liner + link = tweet.

I couldn’t have explained all this in 140 characters.

This will mark Day 4 of my attempt to write this entry. It’s been almost two months since my last entry and it’s a bit challenging to get something put together. It’s time to just brain dump…

Promotion… I got a big fat one. I’ve now got a Senior title and 20 people reporting to me. (That’s up from 5!) I’ve known about it for a few months now, but actually being in the role is certainly more stressful than I anticipated. My previous role was primarily support of any services related to our Media website. These days I not only own website operations but the back end as well: Oracle DBs, ESB, leads processing, ad forecasting, payroll services, and more.

Colie is back in SF for work. She’ll be there for the better part of the year. Still adjusting. I miss that girl something fierce. The add load of the promotion isn’t helping, I think. I feel like John Adams without his Abigail. I tried talking through the day with my cat but her feedback and advice isn’t that sound.

Heading to Hawaii next week. We’ll be there for 7 days. The vacation is perfectly timed to help me with my stress. It’s going to be fun I’m sure but I’m having a pretty hard time seeing through the next day or two ahead of me at the moment.

My brother flies into town the 1st week of July. Really looking forward to having him home for a week. Yet again, something that’s hard to see through the next few days ahead of me.

So I’ve managed to get through it. Now I should stop procrastinating and get that initiative proposal and annual reviews I’ve been stalling on completed.

Woooooosah!

Today is my mom’s fif.. four… thir…twenty-fifth birthday.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

The inner geek in me shines with pride:

[jem@blackout] [15:38:32]
[~]$ $ w
15:38:36 up 367 days, 6:31, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

It’s live. You don’t know, but it’s there. It was one of the smoothest project launches of its size that anyone here can recall. We changed the engine out of a car running 80mph and the driver didn’t even notice. It’s a good feeling to wrap up six months in a matter of hours. I’m celebratory, but tired. I imagine I should be thinking about some time off now before having to launch my next project in September…

I know I just wrote a couple of days ago that you probably wouldn’t be hearing from me much. I have to take a momentary break from the fray to communicate that we’ve just passed a major milestone in our project and we now “green” for production rollout next week.

Six months down – seven days to go… Now even the little things that come up can’t stop this beast from being unleashed.

So close…

You may not be hearing from me for a couple of weeks. I’m in the last 10-days before a major six month project launches. On the heels of that, I go to Boston for a weeklong technical conference.

Admittedly, I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment. It’s not that I can’t accomplish everything in front of me; it’s that there is a lot in front of me that needs to be done. Thankfully I have a solid team backing me and we’ll make this happen but there are some long days and nights ahead.

Entries will be sparse and likely short if they even make it online. I’ll see you all in a few weeks and let you know how it goes…

Been a while since she hit it this close to the mark:

An authority figure may be giving you a real headache now. Maybe other people are having trouble with your attempts to control them. Either way, you can feel the constraint as you try to express yourself spontaneously. Remember, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even if you aren’t happy about it, tempering your urges can help you attain your goals in the long run.

Protanopia (1% of males): Lacking the long-wavelength sensitive retinal cones, those with this condition are unable to distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum. They have a neutral point at a wavelength of 492 nm—that is, they cannot discriminate light of this wavelength from white. For the protanope, the brightness of red, orange, and yellow is much reduced compared to normal. This dimming can be so pronounced that reds may be confused with black or dark gray, and red traffic lights may appear to be extinguished. They may learn to distinguish reds from yellows and from greens primarily on the basis of their apparent brightness or lightness, not on any perceptible hue difference. Violet, lavender, and purple are indistinguishable from various shades of blue because their reddish components are so dimmed as to be invisible. E.g. Pink flowers, reflecting both red light and blue light, may appear just blue to the protanope. Very few people have been found who have one normal eye and one protanopic eye. These unilateral dichromats report that with only their protanopic eye open, they see wavelengths below the neutral point as blue and those above it as yellow. This is a rare form of color blindness.

All the traffic managed to crush my Wordpress installation. Nice work readers!

After a quick Wordpress upgrade and a new wp-cache plugin, we’re back to serving content.