Darn it... having your house on the market is so frustrating. Its not that I mind keeping it tidy. Once you get it tidy, it becomes just a matter of ritual to keep it that way.

No, the frustrating part is that when someone is coming to view, we need to spend an hour or so vacuuming, cleaning counter tops and putting away the kids toys... then get out of the house an hour before they're due to arrive (just in case they arrive early, which happened to use once back when we cut things fine)... then we can't come back for at least three hours (in case they're late, and to give them ample time).
The long and the short is that it is really decimating my weekends, and as a result I've gotten very little done on iComic. I got to spend about half and hour on it this morning looking at what it would take to add a Cancel button to Subscriptions... then I had to go to get out before some folks came to look at the house.
With any luck, we'll get an offer soon, and I'm sure I'll look back at this and say "well, that wasn't too bad". And hopefully it won't have been.
Another frustration is that I'm not getting time to read all the books I have on the go... Just to give you some idea, here's the list of books I have where I've read less than 2 chapters, or just skimmed for specifics I need (in alphabetical order)...

• Becoming a Person of Influence
  I thought this was going to be a bit "preachy" when I first picked it up, but I skimmed it in the bookstore and its actually a very interesting book that I'd recommend to anyone who is a leader or is someone that others look up to. I only got a couple of chapters in, and even that small amount of learning has made quite an impact on the way I treat others. I just hope I can find time to read the rest of it...
• Building Secure Microsoft ASP.NET applications
  Got given this one at a seminar I went to. Another book that will be full of knowledge I need to acquire, but probably won't until its too late.
• Cocoa Programming
  You'd think I'd have read this one... Only had time to skim the chapters on table views (when I wrote the Subscriptions drag and drop), and finding memory leaks (which directly contributed to me finding some majors ones in 3.0, which I fixed in 3.01). I'm sure I'll learn a lot from this book... at some point...
• The Complete Manual of Typography
  When I was thinking about the redesign of my site, I realized I didn't have a book on typography. I also want a good one on graphic design in general (particularly as it relates to DTP). Graphic design has been a pet hobby of mine since Adobe reinvented first with Pagemaker and later with Photoshop. I just wish I knew enough to make my designs more cohesive. Still, with www.dell.com I do get to add little flourishes... for example, the image style (and the coding behind the image rotation) on the initial homepage of Dell.com is something I did when I wrote the code for that back in December 2001, and its lasted pretty well given its prominence.
• Developing International Software (second edition)
  When I was thinking about the redesign of my site, I realized I didn't have a book on typography. I also want a good one on graphic design in general (particularly as it relates to DTP). Graphic design has been a pet hobby of mine since Adobe reinvented first with Pagemaker and later with Photoshop. I just wish I knew enough to make my designs more cohesive.
• MacOS X Unleashed (second edition)
  I guess I got through more than a couple of chapters on this one, but its also 1600 pages long, so I'm still a ways off being done. I found it quite a frustrating book in many ways, as it tries to cover everything, and ends up doing nothing in enough depth. Often it amounts to simply listing out the man page, which I'm sorry, but I could have done just as well myself.
• Perl in a Nutshell (second edition)
  I got this when I decided to do the King Features mega plugin and wanted to do it with a shared file. In the end I did it in a fairly simple way mostly because modules (that I thought I could use) turned out not to work in the way they needed to for this particular problem. The next chapter I need to read is the one on regular expressions, as I'm sure I could do a much better job on the plugins if I had half an idea what I was doing.
• A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming
  I wrote XP off as another "developer productivity" fad, but its still around... I thought it was at about time I found out what it was all about...
• Writing Secure Code (second edition)
  BillG literally made the original edition of this required reading for everyone at Microsoft. Michael Howard (one of the authors) came down to do a presentation to the development teams of Dell, and I got my copy signed. Plus he's British like me, and his sense of humor is just as beligerent :)
• AppleScript for Applications
  Last, and definitely least (I couldn't even bring myself to list it alphabetically), I got this book thinking it would help me understand how to make iComic integrate with AppleScript, but this really is a very useless book... Probably one of the worst technical books I ever bought.

Putting my frustrations aside, and ending on a more positive note, my 30GB iPod should be here on Tuesday. I drove around on Friday evening after the 6pm launch to see if anyone had one on display, but alas no such luck, so I guess I'm left waiting. Ah well.

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