Catching up

Holy Ned, it’s been busy here at Rockett Science. For starts, my lovely wife and I moved to the cozy hamlet of Bothell, Washington. It’s about 40 miles north of where we used to live, and 26 miles closer to work. My commute has dropped from and hour and 15 minutes to a half hour. Hooray!

The new apartment is a small two-bedroom on the third floor. There are windows all over the place; light pours in during the day, and we can see trees everywhere we turn. The cats can join us outside on the spacious balcony. The only downside is the proximity to I-405. It certainly makes the commute easier, but we get that constant freeway roar during daylight hours. But I barely notice it anymore unless the windows are open and we’re trying to watch something on TV.

Speaking of TV, that new science fiction series Threshold? Not very good.

The most hilarious bit for me was after the characters have spent some quality time puzzling over a fractal image seen on a ship’s radar. They’ve loaded the image onto a laptop and processed it six ways to Sunday. But when the team meets to discuss it, the leader DRAWS the freakin’ thing on the floor with chalk! A fractal image! It looks like it took upwards of an HOUR to do. This is supposed to be an emergency situation, and this is how they spend their precious time? Good God. We watched maybe a half hour before turing it off.

So in addition to mving, my workload last week looked something like this:

– Incorporating an interview that another writer conducted into a case study I’m writing (sort of creating a case study within a case study.)

– Incorporating internal edits into my white paper, which took a full day.

– Doing an 8 A.M. interview in Thursday with a customer in the U.K. for a solution brief draft due Monday.

– Doing research and writing questions for an 8 A.M. interview on Monday with another U.K. customer.

– Learning about Microsoft Data Protection Manager.

– Attending a Web demo of a business intelligence aggregation product.

– Incorporating edits into two case studies.

– Moving out of my shared office and into an unshared cubicle.

Phew.