An Experiment in Scotch

Last week was the first planned week of my work­ing sab­bat­i­cal. The fol­low­ing items were on the weekly sprint list: BrettBim.com in a show­able state (DONE) Blog post per day — 5 total (3 com­pleted) One story in rough draft (30% done) I spent 3 solid days on the first item plus a lit­tle bit of the …

Lit­tle story: I like foot­ball. A lot. One of the things I like about foot­ball is the chal­lenge of fig­ur­ing out, on a week-to-week basis, which team is going to win upcom­ing con­tests, specif­i­cally against the line, work­ing under the hypo­thet­i­cal that gam­bling on sports is legal in the US out­side Nevada. That’s another post …

I’m slowly (and by slowly I mean, not really at all) start­ing to think about look­ing for a job. I’ve been off for almost a month now, I’ve accom­plished quite a few things at home, got some starts on other things that can be con­tin­ued on nights and week­ends, and I gen­er­ally feel like I’m …

The last two days have been very pro­duc­tive. Today was almost com­pletely focused on the design of the web site, some­thing I strug­gled with a cou­ple of weeks ago. I gave up on doing a col­umn design since CSS doesn’t really sup­port that very well and went with an all hor­i­zon­tal lay­out. It feels cleaner …

Yes­ter­day, I took a day off. Heh. Let that one sink in for a lit­tle bit. Any­way, K was off so we ran errands, got the car fixed and cleaned the house. Today has been good, at least this morn­ing was. In the last 10 days, I’ve dis­cov­ered that from 2 to about 4 or …

Part of the prob­lem with this entire endeavor is that I’m try­ing to learn so many new things at one time, every thing I do becomes frus­trat­ing in its slow­ness. I really was look­ing for­ward to get­ting into a groove and cod­ing on some­thing for hours at a time but what I’ve dis­cov­ered instead is …

Doing lots of plumb­ing work on the NBA project, noth­ing very sexy or as it turns out, very fun. Today was not par­tic­u­larly use­ful long-term but did get a few things done.

Today has been far more pro­duc­tive than the last two com­bined. I jumped back into Python and SQLAlchemy, work­ing on a pet project to har­vest and ana­lyze NBA sta­tis­tics. The more I work with SQLAlchemy, the more I’m impressed with it. I’ve never done any work with NHiber­nate on the .net side of things but …

Only slight improve­ments over yesterday’s pro­duc­tiv­ity in that I wrote a tiny bit of code today and spent a decent amount of time brain­storm­ing. My plan to not surf the web any until late in the day was not imple­mented at all. I believe that I am addicted to the inter­net. How­ever, while most of …