Hello here is what’s going on.

I’m currently hosting a small pile of projects on a combination of self-hosted gitweb and self-hosted Redmine. I keep glancing meaningfully in the direction of GitHub; it’s code-oriented, it has wiki support, it has an issue tracker, and it can do simple site hosting via some contrived abuse of git. So why am I bothering to host my own stuff? There are actually a few reasons, thus I need the Internet to decide for me.

Just as I sit down to actually blog something, I see the first gigantic spider of the summer on my wall, and have to run away screaming like a little girl. The universe doesn’t want me to write! (Let’s pretend every other week for the past six was stalled by way more spiders.)

Mel lives here now, and I want to spend time with her whenever I can, naturally. This is something I’ve never had in my life before, and it presents something of a complication.

Weeknights consist of an eight-hour solid block of free time. I’d usually spend half of that doing absolutely nothing, another hour or two trying to pick up my last-known-state for whatever I wanted to work on, and then finally get a couple hours of actual “work” done. It was hardly efficient, but it kinda worked. And this was all a single workflow, to me; the hours of time-passing made for some irrational mental preparation for sitting down and doing something.

Now, though, I don’t have solid eight-hour blocks; I’m instead affected by a regular human being’s schedule, which includes going out or talking or eating or what-have-you in the middle of the evening. That free time is now carved into multiple smaller chunks of a few hours each. For most people, that wouldn’t make any difference, but for me those chunks are almost entirely consumed by the time-wasting that would lead up to a context switch.

So, I’m having to learn very quickly to knock this crap off, or I just won’t get any work done on anything. Frustrating in the short term, but certainly beats the… system I had going before.

It’s been a while since I’ve really sat down and thought about where my pet projects are and where they’re going, either publicly or privately. Part of this is just because I haven’t really done a lot in the past month and a half or so; between Christmas interruptions, having Mel move in, a brief and disasterous switch of medications, and restless nights due to cats wandering around on my bed, I’ve been varyingly exhausted or distracted or some other excuse.

Lately magical has ever-so-subtly hinted that roadmaps are a good thing, so in the interest of project management, here’s a rough outline of what I’m up to. With any luck, this will make it into a bug tracker and actually get done!

I’d still like to do these weekly, and I think being able to dump a splat-delimited list into a text file will help considerably. Here’s hoping.