So now I’m stuck with a shaggy head of hair that hasn’t been cut in six weeks.

For the record, I know the title is over-provocative, but it wouldn’t really be blogging if it wasn’t…

• pneumonia
• croup
• reflux
• emergency rooms
• doctors
• viruses
• sleepless nights
• zombie days
• work
• family activities
• TV
• a healthy portion of “I don’t know”

A lot of those things were unforeseen and disproportionately affecting our 6 month old son. Many had a major impact on our daily schedules, mental capacity, and overall productivity. I certainly got
into a state where I was just exhausted and unproductive. Things just weren’t getting finished around the house and I wasn’t happy about it. I just couldn’t get up the energy to change it,either.

About a week and a half ago, I ran across an article on Hacker News about using org-mode in Emacs to implement GTD*. Well, I know Emacs as my standard editor and IDE in Linux, but the rest of that title was foreign to me. I read the article anyway and started to see a path forward for geting back on top of everything.

org-mode is simply a set of features that have been added to the base Emacs functionality which allow you to easily capture all your tasks, events, notes, and much more in a single place. GTD is the abbreviation (I almost said acronym) for Getting Things Done by David Allen, a well-known and popular book on organization of your daily life.

Well, in the last week, I’ve started to try and capture all the tasks I need to accomplish using Emacs. I keep a copy on my work computer and pull a copy every night onto my netbook. Every morning, I re-sync the updates I made overnight and I’m off and running again.

Since moving my tasks and calendar into this system I’ve been more productive and let far fewer tasks slip endlessly, both at home and at work. I’m still reading through the book, trying to understand more of the system, but it’s been a pretty good change for me.

[*] I think this is the article: How I use Emacs and Org-mode to implement GTD, but I don’t remember the exact one and I’ve lost the link.  Either way, I found that page to be extremely helpful.

We were all set to have the TV delivered between 3:00 and 7:00 pm two nights ago. My wife made sure she was home and we waited. At about 8:15 pm, I called the shipping company to see what was going on, as we had neither seen nor heard anything from them. After waiting on hold while they reached the driver, I was told it would be another 30 minutes before he could be there. “Is that going to be okay?” the lady asked me. “Well, no. But I want my shipment, so I guess it’s going to have to do.” I replied. After 45 minutes of additional waiting, the TV was finally delivered at 9:00 pm. Only two hours after our four hour window expired.

Well, the new TV is only so impressive if you don’t have a high definition television signal to display, so we had already called Verizon to change our FIOS service over to include the HD channels, etc. This brings us back to last night, where we had a block of time from 1:00 to 5:00 pm for a technician to come out and change out our SD DVR for an HD DVR (for some reason, they HAD to have a tech do it rather than their usual method of shipping us the new box and including a label for us to return the old). So my wife again makes sure that she’s home and available for when this guy arrives, forcing her to postpone a number of errands she needed to get done.

You can probably guess that the guy wasn’t timely, based on the first little annecdote. It gets better than just being late though, as a 4:58 pm phone call from Verizon informed my wife that the guy wouldn’t be coming at all. He was so far behind on his schedule that he just couldn’t make it to our house last night. What went unexplained was how they only figured out 2 minutes before the end of our window that he was that far behind. All for what should be a five minute service call to switch out a single set top box.

So I was disappointed right there, as I had been planning to watch game 7 of the Caps-Penguins playoff game in high def. Slightly sulky because of the lack of HD, I set the DVR to record the game so I could watch after putting the kids to bed. Now, my wife watches American Idol religiously, so that was also recording and she wanted to watch it while I caught up with the game. Not a problem, as we have the home media option from Verizon, allowing her to play back DVR recordings on any of our other TVs. When we tried to do this to allow our daughter to watch an episode of the Backyardigans before bed, we found that the multi-room DVR functionality was broken. Wouldn’t work at all… It appears to me that Verizon missed our appointment, but still made the changes to our service like they had been there, breaking our current setup.

This unexpected “feature” pushed back the time I could start watching the game by quite a bit of time, adding to my disappointment. The final straw was watching the game itself. I guess it might be a blessing that I didn’t have to watch the Caps crap the bed in high definition, but it was no less disappointing to see a highly competitive series end with a complete blowout that was never close, in score or effort on the ice. And to the Penguins, probably their biggest rival of recent memory. It’s almost as bad for me as seeing Duke get worked over by UNC for an extended series of games. Not quite that bad, but close.

Verizon gets a chance to fix our setup with another service call this morning (my wife loves that she’s trapped in the house for the third time this week). The Caps have to wait another year to see if they can make it right.

• Get faster at doing the critical tasks
• Stop getting distracted by new content to read
• Automate the process
• Not worry about having the most up-to-date items, as I’m still behind on old feeds
• Get up five minutes earlier

All that being said, there isn’t a lot of traffic at 5:43AM, and I hit enough green lights and open road to make my bus without any kind of aggressive driving.  The manual transmission just made the drive more fun, though it didn’t affect my ability to make the bus on time.  I actually had about two more minutes than I thought, so my dashboard clock may be messing with me just a little.  Regardless, I need to change something and stop cutting it so close.

—

* I used to know exactly how early/late/on time I was based on the clock in my car.  When I went to reset the hour for the start of DST, I accidentally cleared out the minutes as well, completely wrecking my morning timing.  I haven’t had enough days of commuting since then to see where those lines of demarcation are with my new clock settings.

• Second swim class with my daughter was a lot of fun, especially to see her make progress and really enjoy some of the activities.
• Trip to Richmond, VA for our godson’s first birthday party was fun and relatively smooth.  Sure, we looked like we were moving out of our house, with all the stuff for two kids in the car for a few hours, but the drive was easy, despite the rain.
• I don’t like people telling me what my daughter is saying.  I can translate better than anyone other than my wife, so don’t presume to tell me that I don’t understand her.  Irrational, maybe, but this really irked me over the weekend.
• Costco was rocking some good samples on Sunday morning or I was just very hungry.  I’m not sure which, but I could have made the rounds a few more times.
• Go Duke!  Yeah, they’re a really long shot for a national title, but it was nice to see them bring home the ACC championship this weekend and shake at least one monkey off their postseason backs.
• Go ASUS! My little netbook is working out quite well for me, as I type this on the bus ride into work.  I’m looking forward to testing out a few more of its capabilities later this morning on a video Skype call to my family at home.  I think my daughter will really enjoy seeing me at the breakfast table during the week.

And so, I’m sitting here in my bed, a little before 1:00AM, typing out a brief post just to feel like I got a minute to play.  Hopefully, this toy (plus the completion of a few major tasks at work) will enable me to write a little more frequently.

And now to bed before swim class with my daughter tomorrow morning before our drive to Richmond…

DENISE: I’m so happy to be done with all that, I could drop a deuce right here.

I appreciates all the Sesame Street cameos in Ep. 5, but it really shined for me largely because of interplay between JD and Denise, which was great:

DENISE: You just called me Jo.

JD: Do you not like that as a new nickname?

DENISE: Just a little butch.  I like bangin’ dudes. So…

JD: I’ve heard that’s nice

I also very much enjoyed that they’re not making the JD/Elliot relationship go through all the old machinations (Ep. 6).  We seem to be moving into new territory, no matter how it ends up playing out.  In fact, all the major characters are evolving faster this season than they did over the past few seasons, which is probably why the show was a little stagnant.  The maturation of the principals and the infusion of great new characters is driving the best season of Scrubs in recent memory.

Go watch Eps. 5 & 6 from last night.  You won’t regret it.

This week just fell flat in comparison.  Sure, you had Bob Kelso’s “I’m like Norm up in this bitch” line from the Coffee Bucks and all the scenes with The Todd (do youself a favor and go watch The Todd’s difficulty with windows in Episode 4 with ABC’s free viewer), but most of the time was spent on moving various story arcs along.  Hopefully, they back hard with the funny next week…

I first realized something was wrong around 6:15pm on Saturday at Wegmans, where we had packed up the kids and driven to for a quick meal and some grocery shopping.  This was our first real trip to Wegmans as we search for the best deals for our grocery budget.  With this high class night out started, I heard the sounds of a football game while picking up my dinner from one of the food stations.  A little surprised, I looked up at the TV to see the Ravens-Titans game several minutes into the third quarter.  “That’s odd,” I thought, trying to figure out what day it was.  Realizing that I had completely blanked about something that usually enjoy sitting on the couch and watching intently was pretty sad.

It only got worse later that evening (after even more ignoring of football).  I was looking on Facebook before bed when I saw a status update about Duke hanging on to win their game.  Again, confusion reigned for a moment as I thought they were slated to play Sunday night.  A quick check of Duke’s schedule/results showed me that my mind was a week behind and they had indeed held off a late run by FSU in a game that I missed completely.  This is rather foreign territory, as I probably only missed a couple Duke games all last season, and none of those were intra-ACC tilts.

Come Sunday, I have a chance to correct my errors from the previous day, and promptly watch even less sporting events than I managed to see on Saturday.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that I saw more Food Network and Style Network programming than anything “manly.”  Anyway, it’s not like I don’t see this day coming, but one more weekend like this and my man card may all but disappear.

Maybe my favorite exchange of the night came in the second episode and featured Denise, a technically great intern with no bedside manner and George, a patient dying of ischemic bowel disease.

DENISE: Mr. Valentine, I’m Dr. Mahoney. My attending really wants me to connect with my patients, so if it’s OK with you, I thought I’d get the ball rolling with a personal story.

GEORGE: OK. You can call me George.

DENISE: Awesome. Feelin’ it. So, George, last Friday I’m at a bar. I take this guy home.  He’s a little fat. Whatever, right? Plus, chubsters are so grateful, they usually try harder. Anyway, right in the middle of things, he’s sweating and grunting like a hairy rhino and I just start to hate myself. Really, really hate myself… So, without even thinking, I just head butt him right in the face.  Bam. Clock him right between the eyes. Knock him out cold. So, that’s what I got.  What you got going on?

The delivery by the actress was perfect deadpan, one of many times I laughed out loud at the episodes last night.  Maybe I have problems, but I thought it was funny. Go watch.