Work and non-work

Not long after returning home from JavaOne, I picked up a new project, and combined with my existing commitments and my vacation schedule, I had to do the time juggling dance for a bit.

I just returned from a two week vacation at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks–a very welcome respite. It can take me a few days to quit thinking about my various work projects when my mind is idle, so I like vacations that are more than just one week. It is a wonderful feeling to “forget” about all the things your mind spends so much effort on for awhile and just enjoy some physical activity and some beautiful areas of God’s creation. I take my laptop along on trips like this, but almost exclusively just so I have a convenient place to accumulate digital photos.

Now that I’m back to work, I finished some performance bug fixes on a existing webapp for a client today, so I have a nice sense of completion already. My newest project involves several areas I’ve done work on before (intelligent agents, business rules using JESS) as well as some new areas for me (semantic web, ontologies, OWL, Protege). The system architecture is still being developed, but it all appears very doable (given the right resources and time) and very cool. The biggest downside is there appears to be more travel than I’d like.