Like many sysadmins, I have a lot of things going on. This is an excerpt of some of the current entries and an explanation.
- Look at planners.
In Time Management for System Administrators, Thomas Limoncelli suggests getting some sort of personal assistant, either analog or digital. Since my current smartphone leaves a lot to be desired and I have an old-fashioned penchant for fountain pens, going the analog route seems ideal. So, to make an informed decision about what to get, I need to know what's available and that entails a trip to a local office store.
I may use such a trip to look at furniture as well. I'm planning to work on an "office" in the spare bedroom to separate play from sleep. Having read about Mitch Haile's office, I am somewhat inspired. (Although proper furniture is expensive.) And, having just read this, a shredder may not be a bad idea either.
The hard part about this is actually going out and doing it.
- Look at shelving.
As mentioned above, I want to work on assembling a "home office." One thing I want to avoid is having the computers on the floor since it's not good for them and it's not really good for me. I've also damaged cables because of where the computers are and their proximity to the chair. (Not "major" cables fortunately.)
I don't need expensive shelving, just durable shelving. "Nice" is a bonus. Plastic is out due to static concerns. Lowe's Home Improvement has several options, like this one.
Like with the office store above, the hard part is actually going out and doing it. I could probably even do them both in the same trip since there's a Staples near the local Lowe's. (Although I prefer Office Depot out of our local office stores.)
- Install a personal wiki.
At first, it sounds silly to install a wiki for use as what's little more than an online notepad. However, it seems like it would be a great way to write down things and flesh out ideas with little overhead. I could keep notes as documents on my laptop but that requires having access to the laptop. I'm fine with the requirement of needing to be online to modify it. I have a small Moleskine notebook in my coat pocket in case I need to make notes when I'm not near a computer. (I have also considered getting a portable voice recorder for taking notes as well.)
- Play with RT.
In Time Management for System Administrators, Limoncelli suggests using RT as a tracking system. While this won't work for anything on the immediate to-do list, it would help make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
I already have RT set up (although I'm not sure the email functionality is working correctly, I'll have to check that) but I haven't done a lot of playing with it yet. I expect that I will end up rereading RT Essentials.
- Read the books I got this month.
For some reason, February is usually a big book-buying month for me. Highlights include The Algorithm Design Manual, Code Complete, Programming Pearls, The Practice of System and Network Administration, and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. This will probably keep me busy until, oh, May.
There's other books I have which I'm sure I haven't read or don't remember reading. Most of them are still in boxes. I hope to unbox most of them when I'm done setting up the "office."
- Write a Rails app.
I actually have a specific Rails app in mind. have mentioned before that I like books. However, I've taken to buying the print book + PDF bundles when I by from The Pragmatic Programmers. I've been saved some by having a PDF of the book when it has not been available.
Since I can't have all of my print books while traveling but I can have all of my PDF books, I want to have an application I can use to search the PDFs for given content. (For various reasons, it should only be accessible locally from the laptop and only run when I want it to run. However, this isn't an application issue as much as a deployment one.) Ferret, paired with either pdftotext or pdftohtml, should work for the search component. It should be reasonably easy to write. I just, you know, have to do it.
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