Notes From The Black Hole

What a fiasco the last 10 days have been! The next 10 don't look much better, BTW. This blog entry is mostly to let any concerned folks know that I'm still alive. The only way I even found time to write it is by dropping out of two major team projects altogether: one that was very, very cool and one that was quite important to my career. Realistically, though, imploding on 27 projects is a much less good idea than completing 25…or something…

• Referee 2 or 3 conference papers over the weekend.
• Finish up Google/PSU Summer of Code project selection over the weekend, with the assistance of my advisory board. Also, assist in finishing up X.org Summer of Code project selection.
• Write a professional paper with a colleague, due in the next few days.
• Write 3 professional talks to be delivered over the next 2 months—first in 10 days.
• Complete a multi-million-dollar grant application with a large team over the next 4 weeks.
• Travel to 3 professional conferences over the next few months.
• Finish teaching out my Spring course.
• Prep my Summer course.
• Write a report, with colleague, on progress (such as it is) on our Google grant stuff so far. Ditto for our IBM PSAS grant.
• Get our open source certificate program set up over the next couple of months.
• Do something with the charity project I've kept on hold for a month; probably try to line up someone else to work on it so I can drop out of the critical path due to lack of time.
• Now that I'm paying a student to build the hardware, need to get "the IR project" (long story, will tell later) sorted out.
• Get the HaskellDSP SDR framework sorted and built, with student assistance.




• Mother's Day Sunday, wife's birthday Thursday. Must select/purchase presents.
• Need to figure out whether I'm really going to Burning Man this year. If so, need to get that arranged, and a project done for it. (I really don't want to go without one.)
• Have a Linux kernel driver I need to write. Probably only about 6-8 hours of work, but needs to get done sometime soon—it solves an important desktop problem. I have a student who offered to help; I'm not sure whether it's faster, though the student would learn more that way.
• Now that I have a business manager hired for my dotcom, need to get its finances straightened out and the taxes paid. Also get our personal taxes paid.
• Finish out the Mighty Mouse Project by putting up a HOWTO page here somewhere. Arguably depends on the kernel driver above, but could start without it.

I'm probably missing some crucial things; I'll edit this list as I think of them, as I've already done.

• Get Nickle parametric polymorphism / ADTs figured out with the help of colleagues. Performance-debug Nickle and figure out what to do about its dogginess.
• A webcomics aggregator / feed thing.
• A work-alike MH replacement with some needed extra functionality.

OK, this list is as cogent an argument for "saying no more often" as I've ever seen. Check. Now, back to the black hole. (B)