A very hum drum day today... »

I spent a good portion of the day making tweaks and fixes to a really long coldfusion script that really does nothing but generate a big XML file...the file that it generates is then supposed to be imported into InDesign and somehow magically converted into the proper layout to produce the print journal Computing Reviews.

The problem is that this is very much not the sort of thing that Coldfusion was really built to do (so it really sucks at doing it)...and the code is really a morph of an older version that's been in production for at least 5 plus years (so it's old)...and to add to the layer of annoyance, the code is really clunky (and this time I wasn't the one who wrote the original version!).

So anyway, long story short, it takes a painfully long time to make even the smallest of fixes in the script right now...but it is possible, and I do it (until I can clear up enough free time to start the script over from the ground up, which will probably not be any time soon).

The other side effect to that kind of work is that it leaves me completely exhausted by the end of the day (it's like knowing you have to read 4 chapters of your History book before your mid-term tomorrow, which leaves you with no choice but to power through it)...and so I lose all motivation to put in the extra hours on all my own projects (that I usually find so interesting). At least there's always tomorrow.

On the writing front, I did ping my contacts at Apress yesterday about my latest proposal and did get word back today that they are still reviewing it (rumor has it that they'll have some more feedback for me maybe on Friday).

It's also been a week or two since I got PerlQuiz.com up and running...and already I haven't stuck to my personal goal of 'at least one post a week'...I have started a post on doing simple DBIx::Class CRUD operations in Catalyst, but it's got a long ways to go before it's ready to really be posted (and not doing that tonight once again thanks to my lack of motivation)...on the plus side though, with very little content, PerlQuiz is already showing up very nicely in search engines (ie. Google) for some good terms and though I haven't really dug into the analytics reports just yet, it does appear people are already stumbling into it. So I really do gotta get some more/better content up there soon!

For now though - I guess I'll go see if there's a new Smallville on tonight or something else I can veg. out on for a bit.