The usual holiday stress would be all wrapped up in gift idea angst, anticipation of extended family gatherings, air travel butterflies and a general sense that I should be happier than I really am (which, of course, would not bring much joy).
This year's holiday stress is all about work, and feeling not really able to truly justify just taking some time off and enjoying myself. Rather than offer up a list, I'll just put down a ramble:
I'm building a rather involved website right now. It could truly benefit from the new features in Drupal 4.7, but since that's still in beta and many modules have not been ported yet, I can't really base their site's fortunes on it yet, so we're sticking with a modestly hacked Drupal 4.6. Of course, Drupal 4.7 could reach final release status sooner if I were participating in the debugging of the betas and, once they come, the release candidates. But I don't have the time, as I'm doing this community site. Not only that, I'm also doing a redesign on a popular blog site, a project that looks to be rather enjoyable. Meanwhile, I have the mega DVD project that has so overloaded my media drives that I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm going to have to dump all the media, restripe the drives and redigitize the footage -- which, even if I just go with the semi-fine cut timelines, plus handles, will still add up to 5-6 hours; yet that will give me the room to digitize the several hours of new footage of pick-ups and our beautifully shot introduction; which will allow me to finally lock picture and work on sound and titles, at which point I can start encoding to mpeg-2 and AC-3 and getting on with the actual DVD menu design, which will be the real fun part, except for the part of handing to the client her completed DVD masters, which is a moment a long time coming because I did not realize just how involved the subject matter was and I don't think she realized just how involved the DVD production process is; but still every day that I fail to boot up the editing system adds to that stress. And this all is while I prepare for a design job starting late January. And it really is wonderful to be busy, really busy, but right now, this week, there's a lot of pressure not to be busy, not to work so much, not to be staring at various computer screens and video monitors all day, and to be just relaxing and hanging out and "getting in the Christmas spirit," which is something I've always wanted to do but never really quite got the hang of, I think, and so my heart is in work work work but the week is conspiring against me to the point that I'm even feeling guilty just typing all this nonsense here, so I'm going to wrap it up, except to say that these are the reasons why I have not yet prettied up this little blog, because if I really did have time I'd be playing with the design and, who knows, perhaps even upgrading it to Drupal 4.7 beta just to get things moving along on this front. But alas this blog is a little side project at this point, and it doesn't pay the bills, so maybe I should stop typing this post and just upload it.
Happy Holidays!
]]>The usual holiday stress would be all wrapped up in gift idea angst, anticipation of extended family gatherings, air travel butterflies and a general sense that I should be happier than I really am (which, of course, would not bring much joy).
This year's holiday stress is all about work, and feeling not really able to truly justify just taking some time off and enjoying myself. Rather than offer up a list, I'll just put down a ramble:
I'm building a rather involved website right now. It could truly benefit from the new features in Drupal 4.7, but since that's still in beta and many modules have not been ported yet, I can't really base their site's fortunes on it yet, so we're sticking with a modestly hacked Drupal 4.6. Of course, Drupal 4.7 could reach final release status sooner if I were participating in the debugging of the betas and, once they come, the release candidates. But I don't have the time, as I'm doing this community site. Not only that, I'm also doing a redesign on a popular blog site, a project that looks to be rather enjoyable. Meanwhile, I have the mega DVD project that has so overloaded my media drives that I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm going to have to dump all the media, restripe the drives and redigitize the footage -- which, even if I just go with the semi-fine cut timelines, plus handles, will still add up to 5-6 hours; yet that will give me the room to digitize the several hours of new footage of pick-ups and our beautifully shot introduction; which will allow me to finally lock picture and work on sound and titles, at which point I can start encoding to mpeg-2 and AC-3 and getting on with the actual DVD menu design, which will be the real fun part, except for the part of handing to the client her completed DVD masters, which is a moment a long time coming because I did not realize just how involved the subject matter was and I don't think she realized just how involved the DVD production process is; but still every day that I fail to boot up the editing system adds to that stress. And this all is while I prepare for a design job starting late January. And it really is wonderful to be busy, really busy, but right now, this week, there's a lot of pressure not to be busy, not to work so much, not to be staring at various computer screens and video monitors all day, and to be just relaxing and hanging out and "getting in the Christmas spirit," which is something I've always wanted to do but never really quite got the hang of, I think, and so my heart is in work work work but the week is conspiring against me to the point that I'm even feeling guilty just typing all this nonsense here, so I'm going to wrap it up, except to say that these are the reasons why I have not yet prettied up this little blog, because if I really did have time I'd be playing with the design and, who knows, perhaps even upgrading it to Drupal 4.7 beta just to get things moving along on this front. But alas this blog is a little side project at this point, and it doesn't pay the bills, so maybe I should stop typing this post and just upload it.
Happy Holidays!
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