Sunday, December 23, 2012

Sabbatical Report: Catching Up


Welcome to Sabbatical Report #6; for explanations, you may want to read Sabbatical Report 1.

Family stuff has been fairly light this week.  We put up our Christmas tree, went out to eat at Souplantation, and went to see a movie.  We were going to do more stuff, but it was cold and rainy all week, and we just wanted to chill out at home.

Which gave me time to catch up on my other goals (my sabbatical goals are described in Sabbatical Report 3).  In terms of raw numbers, I’ve expunged 352 emails (instead of 400; a very slight drop from last week), I’ve expunged 12 todo tasks (instead of 20; a major improvment over last week), and I’ve completed 52 project hours (instead of 60), which is very good progress.  I actually completely finished 3 entire projects, which is the first I’ve been able to knock out since the half week way back at the beginning of sabbatical.

First, I identified and backed up all the files I have on this crappy laptop that I haven’t yet managed to migrate to the cloud.  Then, I finally got all my common scripts and config files checked into GitHub.  Finally, I actually purchased a new Linux laptop.  After going back and forth for quite a bit between ZaReason and System76, I finally went with the ZaReason Alto.  System76 is a great company with a lot of fans, but the support at ZaReason is supposedly amazing, plus I like that they’ll give me a choice of many different Linux distros, as opposed to being stuck with Ubuntu.  I’m going with Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, but apparently has fixed most of the stuff that annoyed me about Ubuntu, and delivers the promise of “it just works” that Ubuntu never did, at least for me.

I also put in quite a lot of work on Method::Signatures, and got this close to making another new release.  I have one last problem on older Perls that I’m consulting with the Damian on.  Once I knock that out, that’s all the catching up on that module I wanted to do over sabbatical anyway, so I’ll mark that one done as well.

So that wraps it up for this week.  Next week: Christmas!