I wasn't particularly proud of stuffing in code comments like "horrible abuse of global variables" or "wastes memory, and it's a one-off that'll never have to be touched again.

Shiny: liquidpcb looks like a nifty thing to try - and I finally have plane tickets to LCA! (And much less money - but more than I thought I'd have. I'm going to be able to stay within trip budget, it looks like!) Adam pointed me towards Edward Hasbrouck's books on being a nomad, so next time I travel I'll have to actually look at that and do it with more planning.

Yifan's curled up at the head of the bed in a fetal position in front of her attempts to make Python produce a tetrahedron and I'm sitting at the foot of my twin mattress listening to "Stacy By Gaslight" (my favorite song by Shreyas's band).

I'm rambling now. I started having fun with classical piano again at the acetarium last night, messing with the rhythms and inversions on some Beethoven sonatas. It feels comfortable - but I know I've been on that plateau too long and need to keep pushing myself to get off it. So it is with many other things; now that doing community facilitation stuff at the level I'm doing it at has lost its terror (putting together an unconference, moderating a meeting...) I feel this great compulsion to rest and just be okay at it. I'm okay at a lot of things compared to many folks, but that's not the point - the point is whether it's okay compared to what I could do. The ghost of what I could be is my most persistent and annoying competition.

So I slammed through a bunch of OLPC support-gang tickets to get my rear back in gear (thanks to cjl for setting an excellent example), and now - well, 303 emails is better, down from 360 or so. I'm still not all that responsible or reliable, but at least I'm now painfully aware of it when I fail, which is the first step to failing less, right? Gotta set up my feedback mechanisms before I can respond to and learn from them.

Yifan and I have decided that tomorrow is our vacation day, even though I "don't have work" and she's been "on vacation" for 2 weeks. I'll be working late tonight to get things done so that I can take tomorrow "off."

And then we also realized that we don't know what to do with free time. (Our current best attempt: "There are... restaurants around, and we could eat.")

Perhaps we work too hard.