OddThinking

So, the OddThinking Brewgle Meet-Up isn’t the only deadline that I have missed.

For a completely different set of reasons, I missed my self-imposed deadline for having a new photo database site up and running by January (with the photos migrated by February.)

My original deadline was chosen because I knew that late January to February was going to be a big month for photography and travel, when I attended a number of events. If the site was ready by then, I could put all the photos on the new site. If it wasn’t ready by then, then I would be too busy with the new photos (and the old and clumsy workflow) to work on it for a while.

Sure enough, I missed the January deadline, which meant it had to wait until March; I have largely finished dealing with the metric-shedload of photos I have taken in the meantime. (This also explains the quiet period on OddThinking. I have observed several times before that my photography and my blogging both compete for the same attention budget. For the past seven weeks, photography has received the lion’s-share.)

My excuses for missing the January deadline include:

• Computer failure which lead to a replacement PC. This didn’t cause any loss of data, but it did eat into my time per week I am willing to spend on comparative shopping, and time I am willing to spend on the computer.
• My new camera (which was purchased in January in preparation for the expected rush in late January/February) took up a lot of the time per week I am willing to spend on photography.
• My time away from work has revealed to me a certain undercurrent of indecisiveness in my nature. I don’t think it was a problem in my work-life; I certainly understand that sometimes that a quick decision is better for business than a well-informed decision. However, now I am concerned that when there are unclear decisions to be made, I am losing interest in the project, and wandering off to do something else. This project is definitely headed to analysis paralysis land, which I need to remedy. The most challenging part is working out whether the lack of control of a third-party web-site outweighs the benefits of not having to deal with hosting.

The good news is that I am back on the case, with a new desire to get this thing over with, even if there is still a lot of work to do.