Month: May 2005

Where’d the week go?

I’ve been running heads-down all week, making some progress on several fronts, but not enough on any of them.

At work, I’ve had three major projects going this week:

  • writing what I hope will be a significant report to the CIO’s office
  • building a combination blog and status report aggregator for my team (in other words, working with a colleague to put WordPress on a machine that he controls, playing with the theme, and pointing people at it)
  • trying to migrate a wiki from MoinMoin to MediaWiki in hopes of getting it off the machine in my office before what I thought was going to be a lab-wide powerdown for the long weekend. There is no clear path between the two wiki syntaxes; I got partway there by writing a new formatter for MoinMoin, one which produces something close to MediaWiki markup, but the results still need manual fixup. But the good news is that they don’t plan to turn off power in my wing after all, so there’s no urgency.

At home, I’ve been spending too much time doing work — e-mail is never-ending, it seems. But in my spare moments, I’ve also been working on building a migration path from Manila to WordPress (well, most likely to RSS2.0 so that I can use the existing migration tool in WordPress from there); I’ve learned a lot about Python’s SOAP support in the process, since I’ve had to get around some non-well-formed XML produced by Manila (pages with subscribers or trackbacks are the ones affected). I’m not quite there yet, but I have hopes of moving content this weekend.

That, of course, assumes I do anything with the laptop at all this weekend; last night, I was sufficiently beat by the time I got home that I left it in the briefcase instead of working. And I enjoyed not working so much that I didn’t even check my mail this morning until I arrived in the office — and, sure enough, the world did not stop spinning because I waited. I’ll have to keep that in mind next week.

It looks like a great weekend for geocaching, too — temperatures are going to be very pleasant, and we don’t have anything on the calendar after services tomorrow (Diane’s reading Torah, so we have to be there). I picked up a Zire 31 at the Shir Hadash gala earlier this month with the specific idea of using it for paperless caching — it’s time to act on the idea.

Hmmm…3:37 on a Friday before a three-day weekend…I think that’s close enough to a full day for me!

Car update

State Farm called yesterday to tell us how much they’d give us for the totalled Prius; the number was quite reasonable, but we’ll still be well short of the price of a new Prius. I was pleasantly surprised that they also will repay us for the unused registration and for the sales tax on the car (well, for the amount they cover) — I hadn’t thought of that at all.

So now we’re on the waitlist at three dealerships so far, and I should call some others over the weekend, on the extremely limited chance that there’ll be a blue BC available locally.