For those of you who are unaware, Ruzena’s father is in the Navy. He was deployed to Iraq a couple years ago. Thankfully, he made it home safe and sound. He wrote a book about his experiences, which I highly recommend to anyone who really wants to know what’s going on there, directly from someone who was there. I’ve got my copy and have been reading through it, as I have time. It’s very well-written and does an excellent job of conveying how things were for him.

Get to it on Amazon, by clicking the book cover below. It’s not that expensive, and you’ll learn a lot from it.

Edit: Amazon’s currently sold out, at the moment. Get it at eCampus, or (if the site will work for you) search for ISBN (9781604418613) on Publish America.

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I’m trying out a new time tracking software I ran across the other day. RescueTime drops a little light-weight application onto your computer that monitors what applications and websites you’re in most frequently. I’ve got the widget for my top 10 activities of the last week on the sidebar, now. Keep in mind I just started on Wednesday.

Overall, it’s a relatively accurate little program. It lets you tag your own applications and sites, so you determine what’s referred to as “personal”, “procrastination”, or “work” to take from a few off my list. As you can see, I haven’t been working very much on my computer for the past couple days. I classify “work” as time that I spend doing things for Omega Vortex. Planet AT&T is one of my tags and will probably appear on my top 10 eventually, the more I use my laptop for day-to-day tasks at the store.

My only complaint is it seems to do all of its data management in YAML and it often chokes on various things. It also seems to completely lose the data intended for the request it tried to send when it does choke. Right now, I’ve only got a little over 8 hours logged into RescueTime and I’ve spent way, way, way more time on my computer than that. Edit: As a followup to this, it just tried to process another update and failed because it didn’t like something about the blog. So, it just randomly loses data. The whole last 30 minutes went without being logged. Hurrah. Maybe it’ll lose less data if I make it send updates more often, but they’d probably hate me if I spammed them with updates every 5 - 10 minutes.

Another complaint is that, from the error messages, it seems to be written in Ruby … but, I won’t go there.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with it. It just needs some work on its data delivery and not completely losing data when something goes wrong. I’d be cool if it threw out the offending entry in a parser error, but it seems like it just bails out on the entire request and doesn’t try again.

I’m hoping to use the time tracking in conjunction with my new phone to hopefully get myself more organized. The time tracking will be a motivator to stop procrastinating and doing other things when I should be working. The phone is a very easy way to keep track of important times and dates, because I’m very forgetful. Especially, when I get involved in something and lose track of time.

So, here’s to hopefully becoming more productive. I really need it, about now.