I’m getting back on track, but man, I am sloooooow. The past few days, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been performing sub par at work. I can’t focus on what I’m doing, I’m feeling technically dumb, and just plainly out of place at times. Of course, this could be attribute to the following (in order of previous statement): a.) I am working on 3 different projects at the same time, b.) I am extending someone else’s program, written in VB 6.0, and c.) I am doing a lot of marketing stuff for the United Way and I have no experience in it.

Multi-tasking, while essential to living in today’s world, really decreases one’s productivity. Especially when one of the tasks you’re trying to do is programming. The minute you lose your train of thought, you need 10 minutes just to get back on track, and then, you forget a few minor points which could set you up for more delays later on.

VB 6.0 Man, that is one lousy set of APIs. (Sorry, KF!) But then again, part of it is just because I’ve gotten so used to a different set of APIs that I’m having a really hard time with the simplistic approach VB offers. But, I’ll probably end up re-writing the code to C++ or C#. If I have to support it later on, I’d much rather it be NOT in VB.

Marketing. Man, that’s something that I think you either have in you or you don’t. I don’t. So people aren’t giving their pledge cards in on time, what do you do? Have incentives for early returns. That hasn’t generated enough action? Send out a reminder on the PA system. Still not working? Have the managers remind their teams. And on and on it goes. I will never have come up with that stuff. Does it actually work? Who knows. The way I see it, people are either going to give or they’re not going to give. And whether or not you put up 100 posters to remind people, that’s probably not what makes them give. Oh well. I just don’t have the patience for it. One learning is, next year, I’m staying clear of this.

But today I felt myself starting to get back my handle on things. We’ll see. I think it can only get better after this. It should. My review’s coming up!

A month tomorrow to be exact. Oh well. With Glenn leaving and my travelling halfway around the world and getting sick, I didn’t really have the time nor the inclination to write anything. I had plenty of material, but no desire. At least I have pictures from the trip, which I will be posting up some time soon.

Nothing much to write, except that Ok Go’s video with the treadmills is AWESOME. Go see it. It made me laugh out loud. I almost saw them live too. I had the tickets but had a scheduling conflict. Bah. I’ll catch them next time.