#work

but if you've ever worked on contract this will resonate. Whether you will want to laugh or cry will probably depend on whether you're still doing so.

It was 52 weeks ago that I taught my first yoga class. I now find myself on the hook for four, at three different studios. I think I'm going to be gradually cutting back just a bit, as that's at least one, perhaps two more than I really need to be teaching.

Part of the reason, of course, is that I've been doing some work for these guys.

Just in case you thought I was something other than a pinko-commie-bedwetting-liberal.

See this Seattle Times article for some discussion.

Five fairly busy days, too.

Finished building a diagram for the the data model for one of my clients. Did some more tweaking on my dia-to-sql XSL stylesheet to get things working. I think I'm starting to really like XSL. What's next, scheme? Intercal? Brainfuck?

I should package up my stylesheet for public consumption, though–I understand that the next version of Dia is going to have an XSLT plugin, which would mean you could go directly from the diagram to SQL without an intervening processing step.

Now I've got to start getting the legacy data pulled out of the existing database and into the new one. That's going to be a nightmare–the old database format is poorly normalized, and ages of poor programming have contributed to there being a lot of crapulous data in it. I am only looking forward to it in the sense that it will give me lots of hours to bill.

I hate to say it–especially where prospective employers might see it–but my version of productivity is kind of…nonstandard.

That is, I have a tendency to sit around play guitar, read email, etc. for a long time, then sit down, crank out in a few minutes something that might take someone else hours to do, and then move on to other activites.

The sad fact is that this frustrates me, perhaps more than anyone else–I mean, from the perspective of my employers, who aren't actually sitting and watching what I do, I am still terribly productive. I get more stuff done than a lot of other people, in a shorter billable time. That's great for customers, but tough on the bottom line sometimes.

But it's also tough on me, in part because I'm not in an office environment–I don't really have anyone to chat with or go to lunch with, no meetings to go to, or any of those other general wastes of you have you're in an office.

So even though I'm actually being just as productive as I likely would in an office setting, I always feel less productive. It's tough.

I'm not usually much of a "visual" guy. I'd rather read a text description of most stuff than look at pictures.

The one great exception to this is when it comes to modelling large databases–say, more than 10 tables. At that point, staring at line after line of SQL simply doesn't cut it–I can't discern the problems at a glance, there's lots of paging around, etc.

For the moment I use the UML mode of Dia, which is an OK tool, plus a custom XSL stylesheet for coverting the Dia's output into SQL. It works OK–you do get a diagram out of it, and you can coerce it to produce decent SQL–but it's just not…fluid. There's a lot of fiddly stuff that requires very careful work, and supporting things like foreign key references always requires more work than it should. This makes creating the diagram that much more work and frustration.