---------------------------------------- Focus mars 15th, 2020 ----------------------------------------
The past weeks, I was suffering from one single bottleneck: Focus.
Projects are piling up everywhere I look, and it's hard to get
anything done. Most evenings, I'm totally exhausted, unable to get
get going with anything. Here's what's going on:
ncgopher: As you might know, I'm working on my own gopher client.
Inspired by the Borland IDEs I loved so much back in the early 90s,
I'm writing a gopher client, the way I like it to be. At least sort
of. Slowly, I'm making some progress, but implementing features
take time, even if I'm finally getting used to rust as a programming
language.
beetlebase: As some of you know, one of my hobbies is mapping and
collecting beetles. For some years I've been a member of the Nordic
Colepotera Group. Their homepage, which is a knowledge base for
Scandinavian beetles it very outdated and even harder to maintain.
The tool is used by about 500 people at the moment, and I started to
implement the next version from ground up. Also here, progress is
slow, and reimplementing 10 years of history is not easy (many
software projects have failed because of starting from
scratch). Anyway, I think it's the only solution to keep the site
alive, given the current code.
fixing stuff: My son's NES is not working anymore, probably a fault
in its PPU. I've ordered new parts, the NES has been taken apart
during error search, resulting in all parts being spread across my
home office.
Also, I just got 4 junk gameboys. The plan is to add a backlight
display to one of them. The other ones are in quite bad shape, but I
like to do some experiments in fixing massive stripes on their
displays. There's surely a lot to learn, some trial and error
included.
sdr-rtl: I recently bought a SDR-RTL dongle. I'd like to play with
it, and I have already got ADS-B working with dump1090. Quite fun,
but I'd like to try out even more features of the dongle.
wood working: I'm trying to build a workbench for my newly
established shop. Things are moving slow, I almost didn't make any
progress the past two year. Yeah. At least, I was able to build a
small saw bench this weekend. Using only handtools, things take a
lot of time. At least working is quiet, so I can get thinks done
even on Sundays, without noisy machinery. Happy neighbours are a
priority.
work: Two of my collegues are off work at the moment. One on
parental leave, the other one ill. That's about three times the
workload on me right now. Hard to keep up with all projects at my
job.
Latest project: COVID-19 (not the jira issue, but the virus). With
two kids and my wife working from home, it's hard to get anything
done in my home office. And the face that I don't know how long this
situation lasts, stresses me.
I feels like I'm totally stuck with all those ongoing projects. And
there is one single thing, which seems totally out of reach I need
right now:
Focus.