It's been a little while since I've last posted so I thought I'd do a bit of an update post, in case anyone follows this blog on a regular basis and wondered why hadn't posted in a while. I haven't really mentioned it here as much as I do on Animania every year, i.e. That it's almost November which means it's almost National Novel Writing Month a.k.a. NaNoWriMo a.k.a. NaNo.
About for those who may somehow have not heard of this, NaNoWriMo is an event that's been going on since 1999 in which a large number of people decide to stop saying "I'm gonna write a novel one day" and get to it. So for the month of November, those of us to participate and NaNoWriMo try to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days; which works out to 1667 words a day. It's challenging but doable.
So I've been a part of the madness since 2006, winning consistently since 2009. Not only do I participate in NaNoWriMo every year, but I'm also one of the two municipal liaisons for my region. That means I organize write-ins, the Kickoff party, the TGIO party, and so forth. Much of the prep work for that starts in October, so for most of October and most of November my blogs tend to get a bit more neglected because my energies are focused on my novel and making sure my region has a great NaNo each year.
Additionally for this year, I'd already started to slow down my blogging because I'm writing another user guide. It's not quite as complicated in terms of functionality as the last one but there is a lot of stuff to cover so it'll probably take me a few weeks to write it. It's a bit more challenging in some respects because unlike the other app, this one doesn't have distinct segments rather some functionality is limited based on user rights. Further those user rights can be mixed and matched. I had to rethink how I organize the information so it will be accessible to all users and not making folks with fewer rights have to wade through stuff they can't do.
On top of all that, the app I'm writing the user guide for has a major upgrade being released right after the start of November. So we had to put some finishing touches on that and we're still doing some debugging, though we are now pretty much down to the smaller bugs I'm noticing as I'm writing the user guide. At least that's our hope. We have some outside testing going on next week that may reveal new issues, which will mean having to get them fixed quickly before launch date.
And of course I got my PS3 this month, so some of my evenings have been taken away from my usual tasks to play Final Fantasy XIII. Was there really any doubt as to which game would be the first to be played on my new system? LOL
I started to also say that I just didn't have much to write about, but that's not entirely true. In working on the new version of that application, I've done some new to me stuff that I think would be cool to talk about. I've probably need to give myself permission to write about those things in a shorter form versus my usual longer posts. Now granted, those of you with more experience than me will probably know all this stuff already. But I like to blog about it because I often forget why I did something or need to do something that I thought I had done before, so then when I Google it my own post comes up and I'll remember what and why I did something.
More than likely I will be doing very many posts though for October or November after this one, again predominantly because of NaNo. Working 40 hours a week, the main times I get to write are at the twice a week write-ins and at home after work. But I did want you guys to know I am still here, I am still alive, and I will be back.