elorg.net

What to do… what to do…

If I pick up extra projects, do I put it all towards the credit cards and possibly pay one of them off? Or do I put some or all of it towards this?

As part of my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to finally make good on all of the websites for local stores/restaurants that I’ve been wanting to do. I have all of these great ideas. Hopefully they’ll feel the same way and take me up on my offer.

So far I have my favorite restaurant – the owner has been wanting a web site for ages. I tried to approach him about it when I was unemployed – er… freelance? – but he already had a designer (who, 3+ yrs later has yet to produce anything as far as I can tell). Not like I’m much better. We’ve been talking about doing a website for him since… November? But then we found the house and started stressing out over getting the loan. Then DST.

Now is the time. I need it. I need to be more creative before IT burns me out or something.

I also just got an email from an old client. He was great to work for and would love to do some more work for him again. I just hope this time around I don’t end up having my day job completely suck all of my free time away from me again so I can actually complete his projects in a timely manner.

Anyway.

I just found out that there’s a tutorial to integrate WordPress and Vanilla. I’m going to try to implement it in a dev area to see how much I like it. Especially since there’s a new version of both scripts out now. I’ve been wanting to find one CMS to manage my entire site (journal, forum, static pages, etc), but have been unhappy with any of the solutions that I’ve looked at so far. Either their GUI completely sucks, it outputs html full of tables for the layout design (yuck!!), or it’s great – but far too complicated to try to figure out how to implement / template…

I think I’ll try this first. If I don’t like it… I’ll neglect my site for a bit longer while I work on client projects and revisit it when I get inspired again.

=)

Today was great. Most of the week is supposed to be in the 50′s. Granted – that’s not exactly warm, but it’s not cold. We haven’t been wearing our jackets, and today we even opened the sunroof when we went to lunch for the first time all year!

I’m *SO* glad that DST is done. We’ve been busting our butts working on updating all of the server OS’s, applications, databases, etc., in preparation for DST for… 2 months now? Thank god it’s over. Maybe now I’ll be able to get some sleep or have some form of a life outside of work.

Granted, I didn’t need to work as much as I did. But the UNIX team had it tough because all of their servers’ patches were so out of date that they needed additional resources – and I volunteered to help whenever I could.

Maybe now we can finish the upstairs bedroom walls. We moved in, removed the wallpaper, and then got sucked into work projects and DST remediation for 8+ weeks and haven’t even finished unpacking. At this point we’re thinking of canceling the house warming party and just having a big outdoor bbq party or something in the summer.

So… If you haven’t heard – Daylight Saving Time is moving. This is a nightmare for anyone in IT. We’ve been patching, patching, patching. I’m so exhausted from all of this. What really sucks is that the vendors are giving us patches, and then after we start applying them to the OS, database or application – we find out that it won’t work and then have to start over! Or there’s a bug in it or we find out the hard way that it breaks things and so we have to get a newer version, rebuild servers, or find a work-around.

What a headache.

So if you haven’t figured it out, we’re going to hold off a bit until we have the house warming. We just don’t have the time or energy right now – and the house is a mess.