I often complain about being busy, no doubt because I have a talent for com­pli­cat­ing my life. Things were relatively quiet for a while, but that’s not true anymore.

At work, we’re close to releasing the first version of our product. Happily, crunch time at Atlas isn’t nearly as bad as it was at Microsoft. Instead of working eight-ish hours a day, it’s more like nine or maybe ten. The pressure level has risen, of course, but it’s far from in­tol­er­a­ble.

The real busyness is in my ex­tracur­ric­u­lar life. I’m the president of BiNet Seattle, a bisexual community group, and have been for the last three years. I also do a hell of a lot of the work and I’m burning out. I recently gave notice that I’m stepping down. (It looks like a successor has been found.) Meanwhile, a lot of planning is going on in an effort to revitalize BiNet, as attendance has been dragging.

For the last few years, I’ve also been heavily involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, as the webmaster and the co-dramaturge. We do readings of Irish literature, par­tic­u­lar­ly that of James Joyce and W.B.-Yeats. Every June 16th (Bloomsday), we do a staged reading of a chapter of Ulysses. This year, the longtime director has moved back to Northern Ireland. Currently, I am acting as the director, on top of my other roles, but I don’t think I’m the right person for the job, and I’m hoping to find a re­place­ment soon.

I’m a member of Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters, an LGBT speaking club. I’ve been working on my CTM for far too long, and I intend to knock off the final three speeches this year.

I resume my wood­work­ing class next week, which is going to tie up ten Tuesday evenings. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to work on this time. In previous years, I built a very nice set of nesting tables and an un­sat­is­fac­to­ry pair of bar stools.

In my Copious Spare Time, I’m also making occasional con­tri­bu­tions to two open source projects, DasBlog and Vim. I made Vim compile with VC5-VC8, and I promised Bram that I would provide some doc­u­men­ta­tion on debugging Vim with WinDbg and dealing with minidumps. I’d also like to produce a native Win64 version. With DasBlog, I’ve provided some feedback on the usability of the in­stal­la­tion in­struc­tions, as well as a fix for dodgy permalinks. I’d also like to make use of my former expertise on IIS per­for­mance (see 25+ Tips, 10 Com­mand­ments, IIS 5 Tuning, and Pro­fes­sion­al ASP 3.0) to do some per­for­mance tuning of DasBlog.

I’d also like to fit in some time for pho­tog­ra­phy; for reading my way through our enormous backlog of books and magazines; writing the occasional blog post; cooking; bicycle riding; traveling; working out; hanging out with my wife; so­cial­iz­ing with my friends; movies; and more. Not to mention all the very dull projects around the house and garden that I’ve neglected.