davemclain.com

Life is definitely in 5th gear right now, I’d shift again but i’m not sure if this is a 5-speed or a 6-speed, and the last thing you want to do in a 5-speed transmission is shift into 6th gear.

So anyway, apologies to people for whom reading this is sometimes the only way they hear from me. I noticed last night that on my list of recently called numbers (my phone keeps track of the last 20) “Home” doesn’t appear at all and “Mom” is in the number 20 spot. So that’s something I’ll be remedying soon.

Yesterday was a 13 hour away from home day, while sick enough to take dayquil, which thoroughly messed me up as the members of ROI can testify. The conclusion of the day was a birthday party for 3 people which was pretty fun. I got to see John Murchison 2 nights in a row which is awesome and too rare.

Tuesday night was the Tomlin concert which was awesome to say the least. Picked up a couple CD’s out of the deal which is good since my music collection is getting pretty stale.

Well it’s been a long time since my last update, and I think it’s because I seem to have no memory at all. Life is kinda fuzzy when I try to remember further back than say….yesterday. It rained a lot yesterday. And while some people may have been more soaked by the rain I think I may deserve the award for most hated by it. The rain was out to spite me. I leave the B-school, it starts raining, when I’m in sight of the bus stop (with covering) it starts pouring. I get under the roof, sprinkling. As bus arrives it starts pouring, while on bus, light sprinkle. Bus stops, it’s like God picked up lake Austin and dropped it on Oltorf. The gutter was like the Rio Grande, and I just ran like crazy til I got inside. So yeah.

So I met with Tyson and Kevin Peck today regarding tysonjoe.com and theaustinstone.com respectively. Naturally I’ve already broken something significant on Tyson’s site. So now I’m sitting here tring to teach myself Perl so that I can fix his bulletin board. Perl, the swiss army chainsaw, oh sure it’s incredibly useful, but you’re going to lose an arm before you cut down a tree or (if you’re crazy enough) open a bottle of wine with that little corkscrew. Luckily the server is defending itself valiantly and not letting me run the script.

I sure hope Kevin doesn’t read this and think that I’m going to crash theaustinstone.com, that would be bad. Oh well, no sense hiding the truth.

I’m excited about everything (with the possible exception of classes): BYX (esp. the prospect of a lil bro and cell group), working on the web again, ROI on Wednesdays, MISA on Thursday and everything in between.

So yeah I’m now doing a bunch at the B-school as opposed to last year when my involvement extended to using the bathrooms on the way back from West Campus. Thumbs up go to the Passmores for being awesome guys, to all the people sacrificing themselves for the UBC (congratulations Michelle), to all the cool people in MISA and especially the cool people in ROI.

On to the thumbs down portion of my blog. Boo to CS. I miss code. I miss the thrill of the 15 minutes between 11:45 and midnight when you wonder if your code will work if you can finally get it to compile. ACM is pretty weak compared to business organizations where people actually interact. Though that might just be a sign of the academic imbalance in favor of CS. heck even the CS guy I’ve been spending the most time with is a business major too (yes there’s more than one of us, yes we have plans for world domination, no you can’t join)

So anyway I may have incidentally scheduled 3 overlapping events for the 5-6 range of tomorrow. Oops. Oh and I have 2 meetings for new web development prospects tomorrow afternoon, sweet.

I don’t want to be merely percieved as having the skills necessary to do an important job.
I’d rather have the skills necessary to do a job that is percieved as being important.

The year has begun and, as usual, I’m starting behind. The details are unimportant, but I’m staring at my schedule and for the first time truly wondering if what I’m doing is useful and if it’s preparing me for what I want to do. And of course that’s a funny concept since I don’t know what I want to do.

In the short run I want to spend more time at Andy and Shawn’s place, and try to make some money on the side doing stuff with them. Shawn’s got talk of doing tech support work, which I could see doing on a limited basis, Andy has expressed interest in web development, which in my opinion would be awesome. Of course there’s the problem of not really knowing where to begin in addition to not really having the time. But time has a funny way of not being there when I don’t need it and being there when I do. Who knows, there’s word on the street of Austin Stone wanting to redo their website. I’d definitely like to start doing stuff if for no other reason than I miss code. I’m a huge nerd, I know, but even if it was just making a clean, few frills dynamic site for free or minimal payment I think I would enjoy it.

Potential is everywhere, for better and for worse. I think the most important thing for me is to remain optimistic and to go for opportunity when I see it. We’ll see how it goes though.