Out in San Diego again, and very tired. The flight out was delayed, the connecting flight out was delayed as well, so I was very delayed in getting out here. A trip that normally only lasts eight hours from the time I leave my house stretched out into 15 agonizing hours of sitting in airports and on planes. Four or so fitful hours of sleep later I was at work prepping for a meeting.

On the plus side that was yesterday and I did manage to get about ten hours of sleep in last night. Things seem a little less blurry, and I feel a little more coherent. I’ll be finishing up the last of the migrations for our client here in San Diego tomorrow, but after that I will have the rest of the weekend free to enjoy San Diego. Which is probably a good thing, as I don’t think I will be coming out here all that many more times - well, at least where this client is concerned.

So, as to the subject of this email, which is decidedly not related to work in any way, shape, or form. I’m a bit excited about the latest version of Tinderbox . I downloaded and upgraded a week or so ago. This is actually my first chance to work in it (for those of you who don’t know, I keep my weblog and some other writings in Tinderbox). At a very high-level, and without really having a ton of time to try all the things that are talked about in the release notes I do have to say I like what they have done. There are some subtle things with the user interface - it feels much smoother now than it did before. I will spend some more time in this app over the weekend and will probably post again on it….

Now as to the other subject - NaNoWriMo. This is the shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, an interesting little event that I read about last week. The premise behind this is that you spend one month writing a 50,000 word (or more) novel.

This is taking the premise that everyone has a novel in them and raising it to a whole new level. Per the insane gentleman who started this (fellow by the name of Chris Baty), the thing that is keeping everyone from writing is….well, not having any reason to write. Or, more accurately, the lack of having a deadline to complete their writing.

There are two ways you can participate in this insanity - first, you can pick November (which is the official month), sign up on the NaNoWriMo Website and participate with a whole slew of other idiots (er, I mean fellow travelers on this insane journey, or something like that). Or the other suggestion is to pick a month and try to go it either alone or with as many other socially challenged, and stupid friends as you can get to go along with your harebrained scheme.

The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this was “hey, doesn’t this result in a whole slew of garbage being written?” Well, this Baty guy has an answer - he notes that it is because you are writing so much garbage that you can complete your insane novel in a month. That by having this ridiculous deadline you are enabling yourself to - basically - write crap and not care too much about it.

As I read further about it - and yes, I was intreguied enough to buy Chris’ “No Plot, No Problem” book about this event- every single objection I could muster was smoothtalked by this used-car-salesman/novel writer.

My final thought was “what kind of idiot would actually want to go through with this?”

And of course, the next thought was - yeah, I’ll probably do it.

Everything has been a mess lately - work, home, social. You name it. It’s fluxing. (Is that a word? Oh well, it is to me now…)

I had planned on getting a post out last week, but that didn’t go off as planned. But, later is better than never. So what’s going on?

Well - at work we’re currently talking to four or five prospective clients. At least two of these look to be almost a sure thing - we’re at the point where we need to fill out applications for business licenses, get signed statements of work, etc. The others are all good leads which most likely will develop into something.

The one downside to the work angle is our current big client - we’ve been in a mode of “de facto” transition for several months now. Their stated goal is to reduce reliance on outside consultants, and bring as much of their operations in house as possible. Which - believe it or not - is fine with us. A good consultant works to put himself out of a client - because they know there are other clients out there. However, the communications with this client have not gone as smoothly. At this point, however, things have come to a bit of a head and we should be able to reach an agreement on what will be happening over the next year.

Social - well, I don’t do much in a social sense. The recent spurt of travel and the fact that I was sick for most of the last few months has really put a crimp on my social interaction with my friends. But we’re working on changing that - Beth and I have a babysitter this evening so we will be going out tonight. We have plans next Tuesday to meet an old friend of ours and his girlfriend (however still no sitter as of yet - that’ll need to be resolved), and I’m planning on visiting my friend Dan out in San Diego next week. So things are looking up here as well.

Home? The big thing here is that Alex is now starting to eat other things at dinner. Yes, we are finally making some inroads in his whole “cheese and bread”-centric style. Note that this is not being done without any whining. On the contrary, it can take him up to 60-70 minutes to eat a small bite of some horrible substance we have put on his plate - like meatloaf, potatoes, or steak. (Yeah, we’re incredibly mean parents - we once made him try a donut and he cried).

I’ve also been spending some time the last day or so helping a friend with their computer. Windows 98. Oh, how I have missed you! One thing about having a Macintosh - it makes you forget all those exciting little PC viruses and Ad/Spyware programs. I’ve spent part of the last day taking a crash course in how to repair Windows from this garbage. Which is what I’m going back to doing now…..

More in a few days.