Le Blogging.. and all that kind of stuff...

It's the wee hours of what promises to be a nice relaxing Saturday morning. I should most likely be in bed at this time of morning, but I find myself wanting to write... not anything particularly profound or mind boggling, just write something.. to be creative in a somewhat different way than what I normally go for.

As weird as my mind works ( I'm not always certain myself that it does work, but a few people have parted opinion to me that it must be working still, as I'm still in a job in London, all be it with IMG, and whether that's intellegent or not is debatable), I find myself thinking that true developers, not just coders, actual developers have some of the most fun. We get to use creativity (solution finding is very creative at times), structure and methodology to create an answer to a problem that didn't exist 20 years ago. It is my personal view that developers have been wrongfully branded as people who like to work with numbers the whole time, and thus are highly right brained ( please correct me on this one if I'm wrong, it's been ages since I've picked up my psych books, although they might even be out of date in trying to explain brain function as location based for certain functions involving creativity, math calculation and reasoning), and thus lacking that creative flair that our designer buddies all receive credit for. Sidenote : Interesting how designer/creative artist sometimes highly correlates with excentricity (typo anyone ?)

Don't get me wrong however, this is no smack out towards the creatively superior ( I use the word very loosely here) among us. I aspire to some day have a different look at all things myself, and did music, choir and a very very little bit of drama during highschool myself. Had I not wanted to express my creative side myself I would not have bought myself a nice camera either (note to all, and I know most of the photographers here know this, it aint the camera that breaks the bank.. oooh no... it be the lenses I tell you.. ) I just find it interesting that those labels were given.

Like I said.. just writing in general tonight, I don't even believe the paragraphs make sense.

Little catch up would be in order I believe. After the long long nights and days of working on the Manchester United Multilingual websites ( launched for their tour in Asia in Jun-July) and the subsequent fixing of things that were glossed over in the mad rush at the end ( is that new to anyone that's in web development ?) I had a week or two of just feeling completely burned out.

I had a week (not to long ago) of feeling so drained ( even with enough sleep I rush to add) that my productivity either halted completely or got very very near to that. A lot of people would go that's normal and to be expected after working 3 weeks at near full pace for 16 - 20 hour days.. but there is an inherent problem in Groenewald thinking. We have this thing that if we're not doing something constructive the whole time ( and that includes burnout time) then we (or rather I personally) feel very guilty for not being able to maintian said productivity level afterwards.

So it happened that IMG gave me a day off and paid for my day leave last week Monday. To briefly explain, I am on contract which means that any day that I'm not in the office working I'm not allowed to add that day to my timesheet that gets signed off by IMG and then sent to a whole heap of companies that invoice each other (to cause red tape) and eventually pay me for that day. So if I aint in the office I don't get paid for it. So I would like to thank Karina ( lead dev) and Matt (VP Head of Techonology) for affording me the day off, and I believe it was just the thing I needed. Grieks had taken the Monday off as well from the aquarium and so we made a nice long weekend with a lot of stuff happening, but most of all.. no work happening, none at all.. and I think that migth have been a sneaky plan by me brother and Grieks to keep me away from my notebook, and almost all the time glued to my camera. A very big thank you to them as well, if that was the intention, if not.. thanks anyways :)

It completely recharged me, gave me that feeling of wanting to develop again and rekindled the feeling of wanting to learn something new. Last week after that was a good week, and this week past I feel I moved a mountain or two, little ones perhaps, but moved them no less.

Monday we start with a new project that has what seems like a very tight deadline, although I've been assured by the lead that they have worked this out very well ( differently than how the previous project was done) and that there is a very definite project plan that will be followed ( yeah we all know those are guidelines anyways) for this one. And the initial documentation that we went through on Friday and in the kickoff meeting on Friday seems to verify that this one has less work meat around the bone, and more case study fat around it.. which for a change might be a nice change. I've been told my involvement in this one will keep me busy until the 18th of Sept, which is excellent, as we'll (me and Grieks) be heading to the red sea for a live-aboard holiday on the 21st of Sept until the 28th.

After playing around a little on Facebook just now I think it's time to head to bed.

Maybe another day I'll blog again. So much admin, so little time.

Z [out]