Busy bee

One of the big worries I have is that I will look back at my life in a decade and realize that I spent my youth working only for a company. I work for a pretty awesome company now, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want all my accomplishments in life to be through them.

In the last month or so, I’ve been struggling to structure my life so that I get things done around work — I get up early, run and do yoga, write some on my novel (tentatively named A Touch of Life) or code, then go to work. In the evenings, I read a bit (from books!), write more, sling more code.

I’m using an app called RescueTime to track how I use my time. I don’t have much of a “time-management” issue — if I want to work, I’m hard to distract at home, and if I don’t want to work, good luck getting me to do so. That said, I often like stats I don’t have to create myself (bye, bye, chemistry), and on evenings I feel like crap, it can remind me that I’ve done a good job of getting shit done.

My current job (soon to just be “the job”) is rather pleasant, as far as jobs go. My initial period as the “clean-up person” — the strongest .NET person on staff, and hence charged with cleaning up the messy projects that were left by the previous developers — is nearing an end.

Thank goodness. Some of that mess was worthy of The Daily WTF…

Since .NET projects tend to come in odd bursts, I’m picking up PHP and the .NET MVC frameworks. Two of my colleagues created a PHP MVC framework/code generator that I’m playing around with.

I’m moderately impressed with the .NET MVC framework on an initial pass, despite the inconsistencies in the documentation for the Preview 3 release. It gives .NET two distinct edges over PHP, now — it’s compiled, and its ORMs (Subsonic and LINQ) decrease development time once you’re familiar with them.

Not that, technically speaking, .NET wasn’t MVC before — it was just the classroom definition of MVC, with the views and controllers on the same level in the hierarchy when code-behinds are used. (A good picture of that is here. By the way, that professor created the MCV pattern.)

Another perk of my new job is health insurance. I spent $130 yesterday filling and refilling a month’s worth of prescriptions. It really is decent health insurance, I promise. It’s just that there supposedly aren’t generics of my asthma meds. I’m going to need to see the doctor about getting a different set of meds, obviously.

If many of my rants weren’t about clients from work, I’d totally post them here. The sorts of characters I deal with… I swear. Folks still wearing wallet chains and designers that have never seen or used an internet shopping cart before…