Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

The last week I have been working real hard. Part of that work has allowed me to hang out with a bunch of cool staff and clients. I have been hanging with RLP, Matt, Jamie, Amanda, Rasita and Roh.

I count it a real privilege to be able to spend time with these people.

Amanda works for me 2 half days a week researching and writing articles for SpyJournal (see her Geek Girl Series) as well as performing site maintenance and backups for our clients, documentation management (filing) and technical office duties (cleaning the office!) She is slowly developing her own website.

Roh is a technical genius. He knows everything about the web architecture, servers, MySQL, PHP, DNS, Cpanel etc. His daughter Caitlyn was born blind. Check her website out.

Day and night, wake and sleep - they are starting to blur - I am not sure which state I am in at the moment.

This started Thursday night. After I got home from volleyball coaching, I looked in on my developer who was supposed to be doing some remediation work for me on a website - due to be completed by the following day at midday (my time). He assured me it would be done. I knew I had some work to do for this which had to be completed by Saturday my time but I had been waiting for him. I made a start anyway. Here's how the last 3 days have gone for me. This site is going live on Monday morning.

Friday 3:45 AM - went to bed

Friday 7:45 AM - woke up

I have had an extremely frustrating morning so far.

Last night I went to bed early (midnight)with a fair amount of work in my job queue intending to arise early and get stuck into it.

First thing I noticed when sitting at my desk this morning was the PC had restarted it self - strange I thought. I logged in and then noticed that the local PC backup had failed. On checking why I noticed that a hard drive was missing. Further checks revealed that  hard drive had failed in the night - maybe the cause for the mysterious reboot. This is 2 from a batch of 3 Western Digital 500GB drives that have failed inside a month - any bets on the last one going soon?

I have been using RescueTime since half way through December. It has proved invaluable to me in order to see how what I am spending my time on. RescueTime is a small application you install on every computer you use. in my case, that's my main machine, my secondary dev machine, my main laptop, my virtual PC and my remote desktop at a clients and another clients laptop I have here to work on (it can be uninstalled later). Of course you can just install it on one machine if you like, but as I discovered I spend time on several. Once you create an account it starts recording your time on applications you use and websites you visit. This is then sent tot he RescueTime servers where it is compiled for your viewing.