Distractions, Stumbling Blocks, Obstacles, Time

Trying to get back into the swing of writing a bit more regularly, and in the original spirit of this blog, I’m just going to let my brain go and dump some of my thoughts.  I apologize in advance (actually afterwards because I’m writing this sentence after I wrote what follows), well, apologize in general for the complete lack of organization of thought below.

Its Sunday and I have just about recovered from a week that was a bit distracting.  I’m in the middle of a challenge where I’m attempting to recreate an existing website for a client entirely within wordpress 3.01 and Pods CMS(which was going great and then I hit a brick wall). I like the Pods system quite a bit, love its potential, but the site itself and the tutorials/examples seem to be missing quite a bit.  It seems like one of those deals where the developers keep building and improving it but never quite get around to explaining how to use their masterpiece, even though they seem to respond well in a quirky chat program.

I suspect they wouldn’t have to spend as much time chatting, if they or someone else took some time to explain how to use the thing.  In short they need an evangelist/mentor type.

Last weekend, my primary laptop started acting up.  Based on a myriad of details, I suspected that I needed to reimage the machine to clean it up or else face the possibility that the mother board may be dying on the machine.

Ugly no matter what, a pain in the butt, time consuming and possibly expensive.

The machine has been on borrow time for almost a month, but due to financial issues last year (which are now mostly solved) I didn’t make the move to replace it yet.

So around mid week, I attempted to prepare to reimage the machine, using a borrowed laptop to hold my current image temporarily, I proceeded to take the machine back to a factory state, then upgrade it to Windows 7.  That took about 4 days, when it should have taken 1-2, but tech happened.  ATT Uverse went down when some gas pipe layers wiped out the new fiber optics in the neighborhood.  I had several other stupid issues of that nature as well.

Long story short, despite hoping to avoid it, I lost about a week of work on this challenge and I still don’t have my old broken laptop working again (ergo it runs, just don’t have all my tools on it yet).

All of that took place while I was trying to finalize a different client’s website.  One of the stumbling blocks on that finalization is that the client states that one of the fonts and font colors of text on the pages is incorrect.  I used the fonts they told me to use, so I asked, OK, what’s the font and color supposed to be?

Its been almost a week and they haven’t said what that should be.  If its wrong, tell me where its wrong and I’ll fix it.  Its a simple setting switch.  Not sure where communication is breaking down on this issue.

[deep breath]

I did take time out for a stress break yesterday.  My wife talked me into a trail run at the US white water center in charlotte.  That was a lot of fun.  During this whole week, I’ve been trapped in front of laptops trying to get mine migrated/upgraded/repaired, and my running almost came to a stand still, which isn’t great for peace of mind and overall well being.

But yesterday the run helped, and then we went next door at the last minute to a neighbors party.  So I got to celebrate with some carbon life forms and get my head out of a stupid display for a while.

In the meantime, I’ve been listening to the Pillars of the Earth audio book from Ken Follet.  We’ve been watching the show itself on Starz and I’m pretty hooked.  Its not as riveting as Deadwood or as titillating as True Blood, but I do like it.  nice change of pace.

Anyway, my challenge deadline is coming up this Wednesday.  I have no working laptop yet.  I have no working solution for Pods CMS yet.  I don’t even really have anytime yet, so it looks like I’m probably going to lose $1k in revenue. 

The $1k isn’t going to make or break me, but I hate to miss an opportunity.  More importantly, I really hate getting bogged down with tech issues in hardware and stuck on learning a new system because there are no resources for teaching that new system.

Oh, well, there’s only so much I can do.

In the meantime, Becky and I are going to see Tears for Fears at the Fillmore on Friday.  Been a long time since we had a date/concert so I’m looking forward to that.