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       Focus
       mars 15th, 2020
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       The past weeks, I was suffering from one single bottleneck: Focus.
       
       Projects  are piling  up everywhere  I look,  and it's  hard to  get
       anything done. Most  evenings, I'm totally exhausted,  unable to get
       get going with anything. Here's what's going on:
       
       ncgopher: As  you might know, I'm  working on my own  gopher client.
       Inspired by the Borland IDEs I loved  so much back in the early 90s,
       I'm writing a gopher client, the way  I like it to be. At least sort
       of.   Slowly, I'm  making some  progress, but  implementing features
       take time, even if I'm finally getting used to rust as a programming
       language.
       
       beetlebase: As  some of you know,  one of my hobbies  is mapping and
       collecting beetles. For some years I've  been a member of the Nordic
       Colepotera  Group. Their  homepage, which  is a  knowledge base  for
       Scandinavian beetles it  very outdated and even  harder to maintain.
       The tool is used by about 500 people at the moment, and I started to
       implement the  next version from  ground up. Also here,  progress is
       slow,  and reimplementing  10 years  of  history is  not easy  (many
       software   projects   have   failed   because   of   starting   from
       scratch). Anyway,  I think it's the  only solution to keep  the site
       alive, given the current code.
       
       fixing stuff: My son's NES is  not working anymore, probably a fault
       in its  PPU. I've ordered  new parts, the  NES has been  taken apart
       during error search,  resulting in all parts being  spread across my
       home office.
       
       Also, I  just got 4  junk gameboys. The plan  is to add  a backlight
       display to one of them. The other ones are in quite bad shape, but I
       like  to do  some experiments  in  fixing massive  stripes on  their
       displays.  There's surely  a  lot  to learn,  some  trial and  error
       included.
       
       sdr-rtl: I recently  bought a SDR-RTL dongle. I'd like  to play with
       it, and I  have already got ADS-B working with  dump1090. Quite fun,
       but I'd like to try out even more features of the dongle.
       
       wood  working:  I'm  trying  to  build  a  workbench  for  my  newly
       established shop. Things  are moving slow, I almost  didn't make any
       progress the past  two year. Yeah. At  least, I was able  to build a
       small saw  bench this weekend.  Using only handtools, things  take a
       lot of  time. At least  working is quiet, so  I can get  thinks done
       even on  Sundays, without  noisy machinery.  Happy neighbours  are a
       priority.
       
       work:  Two of  my  collegues are  off  work at  the  moment. One  on
       parental  leave, the  other one  ill. That's  about three  times the
       workload on me  right now. Hard to  keep up with all  projects at my
       job.
       
       Latest project: COVID-19  (not the jira issue, but  the virus). With
       two kids  and my wife working  from home, it's hard  to get anything
       done in my home office. And the face that I don't know how long this
       situation lasts, stresses me.
       
       I feels like I'm totally stuck  with all those ongoing projects. And
       there is one  single thing, which seems totally out  of reach I need
       right now:
       
       Focus.
       
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