smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Cue dark-ages Britain. And.. action.

The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Here’s one.
The Dead Collector: That’ll be ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There’s your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not.
The Dead Collector: He isn’t.

Life, man. I’m living it. Every day. Lately that’s meant living three days worth in each and every day.

Work pressures are such that I can barely pause for respite, without the inexorable feeling that I am somehow tumbling forward at an ever-increasing rate of knots. This is the time of the year when one simultaneously somehow manages to feel re-energised and challenged, yet entirely exhausted by the fact that that is a bloody tiring process.

It’s not that I hate that, either. I’ve achieved more in the last two weeks than I have in the last two months — at least in respect of my day job — the flip side however, is it cuts deeply into spare time; forcing other projects onto the back burner. The good news is that I have two weeks of leave coming up soon.. oh to be able to recharge and cut back to some of the projects I really want to progress. Joy.

In the mean time, it has exposed an entirely unnerving process whereby the content I read on a daily basis, some of which is likely to be your very own, ends up growing at a frightening rate. Inbox zero? Pah! 900+ unread RSS items (it will breach 1100 tomorrow) and a stack load of design work and code for a new project, both growing moss at an almost genetically engineered rate.

It seems right-now is when everything happens, yet right-now isn’t time I actually happen to have. I desperately love the universe we live in. It is truly remarkable in it’s ironic tendency to somehow “know” the exact moment that one is entirely busy and provides even more stimuli and input at that exact moment.

So whilst this may indeed be the silly season, I for one welcome our crazy-inducing overlords. There’s something to be said for smashing through the pain barrier to deliver a result no-one expects you to possibly pull off in the time-frames given.

And then I’ll enjoy the upcoming down-time, because it will seem all the more restful as a result. So.. not at all dead. Still very much alive (thank-you to those who have asked) and not the least bit, well, busy.

Jeff Atwood has recently written a little on how your
desktop is not a destination:
“The desktop background, as I see it, is completely superfluous. My desktop “background” right now is plain black. And that doesn’t bother me in the least, because none of it is visible.”
I agree with Jeff on this point. The background shouldn’t […]

I’m trialling a lack of a graphical desktop background. More specifically, I’m experimenting to see how colour might affect productivity or perhaps more importantly, creativity.
Like a blank sheet of paper, I have virtually nothing on the desktop, save two AIR applets1 a small number of “in use” folders2 and a small mac-like applet bar bottom-centre.
The […]