Mostly good couple days. Very productive at work (both for myself and hopefully for helping others at JOLT and abcd) and decently productive at home, moving the law school apps forward. Everyone I talk to in person at Harvard is sure I’ll get in (sadly haven’t seen the new dean of admissions lately ;), but I can’t help but feel that I look underwhelming on paper. The total meltdown my last semester+ of undergrad just looks worse and worse every time I glance at my transcript. I suppose that is part of the anxiety that is keeping me awake tonight- can’t sleep, so am trying to finish the poignant guide to ruby and listen to Sketches of Spain.
Am very tempted to do my next work project in Ruby on Rails, since it has been ages since I’ve tried out a totally new technology, and because for a variety of reasons my next project will likely only be live for a short time before it is replaced, so it doesn’t have to be perfect- just able to sustain a brutal slashdotting once, hopefully collect lots of data from those folks and others, and not die in the process.
Had a nice talk this afternoon with a gentleman from JOLT, HLS’s Journal of Law and Technology. JOLT is doing a day of speakers and panels in March, and are looking for interesting folks. I gave him some names of relevant folks in the open source, patent, and innovation spaces- sounds like they should be able to land interesting speakers, so hopefully I’ll be able to attend. As we were walking out the door he mentioned that they’ll also be talking about technology in education, which is my new hobbyhorse; hopefully I’ll be able to give them useful pointers there as well.
Have been using gnotime for two full work days now. Not perfect (I can’t figure out how to edit logs, which is a PITA since this evening I forgot to stop the timer when I left work) but still I think overall a huge success for me- both helping me understand how I spend my time and forcing me to think consciously about all my context switches and hence reducing them quite a bit. Lot less email processing during the day the past two days; lots more focused consciousness. Seems to have had a positive impact on how much I get done already.