It’s Been a Long Time

Since I pos­ted any­thing, I mean. Which does­n’t mean I haven’t been doing things, just that I’ve spent more time think­ing and doing and talk­ing than writ­ing and describing.

The garden is look­ing bet­ter after the rel­at­ive neg­lect of the past couple of years, although there’s lots more to do, as always (the weeds have more time to grow than I have to weed). I’m Course Dir­ect­or for the XML Sum­mer School, which means work­ing with the mem­bers of the Fac­ulty Board for the courses they’re chair­ing and fig­ur­ing out who should speak, and on what, for the two courses I’m chair­ing, as well as tak­ing care of the oth­er myri­ad details that go with any event. I’ve met with people in Van­couver for knit­ting after­noons, and lunches talk­ing about dis­trib­uted pro­ject man­age­ment, and figured out that right now con­sult­ing and con­tract work in pro­ject man­age­ment looks to be the right thing for me to con­cen­trate on (pro­ject man­age­ment being a broad term that cov­ers a myri­ad of pos­sib­il­it­ies). I’m even read­ing up on some of the form­al­isms for pro­ject man­age­ment. I did basic pro­ject man­age­ment train­ing early in my career, but I’ve mostly done what seemed to me to be the right thing without using Gantt charts and form­al resource alloc­a­tion. Mostly it worked out pretty well, but some of the form­al­isms such as Scrum look inter­est­ing. I’ll post some of my thoughts on those later, along with thoughts on dis­trib­uted pro­ject management.