status report

So, I keep wanting to write a blog post, but feel like I have nothing to say. Graduation is looming, so there's something I can talk about. Also, I'm procrastinating at work. This can count as my lunch break.

This is my last semester at CU, and when I'm done I'll have two degrees and a minor to show for it, a GPA above 3.3, a stole, a medal, and lots of thank you notes to write. I'm starting to make plans with my family about the graduation ceremony. I want to throw a party at our house for both family and friends. We'll see how it works out.

I still need to talk to my boss about how sure he is that I'll have a job at Sun after graduation. It's been really nice not looking for jobs, but I know that will have to change pretty soon. The Just In Time internship fair is around my birthday, and ACM is hosting a mini-career fair for CS that I'm helping with.

But, mostly, I just want the semester to be over. I'm enjoying my classes fairly well but Senior Project just drains all my energy. Daniel has heard my rants about this. Come to think of it, so has Amanda... I'm definitely at the "burn out" point of the semester where I no longer want to do any work, and just sit on my ass playing video games as soon as I leave campus. This is fine for my classes, as I only have three, and have been doing fine on getting my homework and labs done. But this isn't so great for Senior Project, where I've been really uninspired to figure out what I need to work on in terms of improving our project (which feels "done" but not "good").

It's also not so great for work. Speaking of which, I need to start a batch process real quick... Ok. My performance at work has been declining as of late, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm feeling overwhelmed in other parts of my life, or if it's because I'm not enjoying it as much lately. I still enjoy doing queries for Amy every month, but it's been reduced to a few commands in my terminal. Even the creation of the zip file is in the script itself. All I do is pull it back to my computer with SFTP. Most of my work right now involves sending emails to people who want queries run. And some of them are grumpy. I also get a lot of email that I have to wade through involving bugs in our current project - which I'm not currently involved in. I've only done the tiniest bit of coding for it, and that was separate from the main part of the application.

I've been feeling more ADD lately, which means I'm having a hard time keeping track of what I'm supposed to be doing; when I can remember, I'm reluctant to sit down and tackle a problem because I can't remember what I need to do to solve it. One of my coworkers asked me to look at internationalization in python; I worked on it a little, and then gave up, because I couldn't figure out how to test my work. I started making translation files to test my hello world program, and gave up because I didn't have all the utilities I needed to create the files. I'm not seeing the whole picture, and it frustrates me.

Being ADD is fine for school; I can switch tasks, I can go do something else and come back later. It's not so great for work. I need to meet deadlines, be productive, feel productive. Even though I probably get things done at a reasonable rate, my productivity comes in bursts, and the rest of the time I just feel irritable and scummy.

Also, I have misplaced my earbuds, and so can no longer listen to music at work. This depresses me. Where did they go??