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Why I'm up at 6:30 AM on Sunday

Posted by Matt Deatherage, 4/6/03 at 6:57:29 AM. And that's "Why am I just now going to bed," not "Why am I getting up this early?" Also, technically, were it not for the incessant lobbying of candymakers to extend Daylight Savings Time to the beginning of April (for Easter) and the end of October (for Halloween), it would only be 5:30 AM. But anyway: my head is spinning from a day of reading SEC filings and NASDAQ regulations, so as I wind down and let my brain sort through them in a background thread, I thought I'd explain why things didn't go the way I wanted this week. If you don't care about my week, there's no need to read further. The plan was pretty simple: we'd put out at least two issues of MDJ by Wednesday morning, and then turn those around for a nice mid-week MWJ issue by Wednesday afternoon. They'd involve 75-plus more products, a full load in and of itself. On Thursday and Friday, we'd move on to the recent stories about Apple Computer's changing board of directors, the changes Apple has made in its summer trade shows, and the "Other Macintosh Software" category that includes goodies like Konfabulator and BBEdit. That would lead to a second MWJ on time on Saturday with all those articles, a fine week if I do say so. Except nothing else cooperated. On Monday, when getting to a large section of farmed-out software, I found that the file had come back with dozens of excellently-written briefs but no full items - the ones that go beyond two-sentence descriptions and lists of recent changes. We can't publish an issue of fifty briefs, and there were plenty of juicy products waiting for more explanation, so I got to sit down and write a dozen in-depth looks, or about six pages worth. That took about a day. Also on Monday, something went really crazy with our co-located servers; for several hours they were so slow to respond that I couldn't even check mail half the time or open up a remote access connection. It cleared up after several hours, but slowed things down. So those were big delays right there. On Tuesday, I installed PGP 8.0.2 on the production machine, after PGP finally reset a download link for me on what is gunning for the title of the World's Most Obscure Web Site. We have commercial licenses for PGP since we use it to digitally sign the setext versions of MDJ and MWJ, and I was really looking forward to the update because PGP 8.0 won't quit. Seriously. It accepts the "Quit" menu item, command key, or Apple event, but doesn't quit; I have to force-quit the program every time I have to restart (once per day to do credit card authorizations on that system). PGP 8.0.2 made failure to quit seem like a minor issue; it was much more proactive and failed to launch. It crashed after identifying the keyring files, meaning we wouldn't be able to sign anything except in Classic. After about four hours of fiddling, I found that if I deleted every PGP file found in the several places they were installed, as listed in the "Read Me" file, then rebooted and reinstalled, that PGP 8.0.2 would both install and work correctly, and it even quits. But that's another several hours gone. The two MDJ issues were published by Thursday morning, about a day behind. On Thursday afternoon, creating MWJ 2003.03.30 took 2-3 hours longer than expected because of the backlog difficulty. You see, we tried really hard to get through the Christmas backlog before Macworld Expo started in January, but all we managed to get was through the products. There was an MDJ 2003.01.06 with 45 product write-ups (briefs and items combined) that published just hours before Steve Jobs' keynote address started. Once the keynote hit with Apple's massive amount of news, we knew the product writeups would need revision before they could see print. Then we started categorizing to get through the backlog, so now when we publish MWJ, we have to go back and check that January issue to make sure we haven't missed anything that should go in. Write-ups of GeekTool and Lasso Professional had to be included and then the latter rewritten for Blue World's latest news in March. So that took more hours than expected. I also took a couple of hours here to fix some nasty problems in the setext processor I wrote last summer. It wasn't handling capitalization on high-ASCII characters correctly, was misnumbering showcase items if there was more than one showcase article per issue (requiring fixing by hand), was starting some lines with hyphens (signifying dashes, as in "this is - for all intents and purposes - a silly example", would sometimes break the line so that the hyphen started a line, a bad rule), and a few other problems. My brain wasn't exactly in gear, but these things needed fixing and I fixed them. Then, for reasons I still do not understand, the early evening production of MWJ 2003.03.30 turned somewhat nightmarish when the PDF version was sent corrupted to every PDF-receiving subscriber. I'd already received several complaints about corruption within just a few minutes of distribution, so I took a look on the server, and sure enough, somehow four bytes of the binhexed PDF file had changed in copying from here to the server. (They had eight-bit characters in them,a definite no in binhexing.) Our system is not designed to redistribute an issue; Nat had to pull the scripts and capabilities out of thin air for it, and that took another hour or two. Just in that time, there were dozens of complaints, and dozens more were probably cut off by a posting to our MacJournals-Talk mailing list explaining the problem. So now it's late Thursday night, but I can't move on to the Apple corporate stories: we have a corporate tax appointment with our accountant Friday morning at 10:30 AM, set weeks ago, to get everything in line for filing all of the necessary tax returns for everything and everyone. The backlog has prevented me from taking the time to make those 2002 year-end adjustments to the books (correcting the amounts of fees paid for the year, interest charged, expenses accrued, and so on from January statements), so after a late dinner in OKC, I started on that. It took me until 7AM Friday morning. I got a couple of hours of nap and then, thanks to a large caffeinated beverage for someone who usually does not ingest caffeine, I made it to OKC and back and got everything ready to go for taxes (well, actually, I still have to clarify one number, but I can do that this weekend). I went home, let the caffeine wear off, and slept for about six more hours. At this point, it's Friday night at 7PM. We're supposed to publish a new issue of MWJ in about twelve hours, and there is almost nothing written for it and absolutely nothing edited for it. What's more, recovering from 22-hour days usually takes me a day or so on its own. I put up a valiant effort Friday night, but I had to go to sleep about 5AM without having the Gore story done. I then had to nap in the afternoon (22-hour day recovery) and worked on provigil-defeating SEC and NASDAQ reports in the evening and until now. I think I finally have a hand on just how shallow Apple's changes are, but I can't get it finished tonight. Especially since it's now about 6:50 AM. I'm not even going to get to church today, for the fifth or sixth straight week, and that really bothers me. (OK, so I didn't go to church while on vacation, and that's my fault - I'm not blaming work, just mentioning my annoyance at my Lenten laxness.) The odd thing is that all this is eerliy reminiscent of 1996 and 1997 in MDJ's first run. Readers often pine for those days, but for me they were a lot like these: 18-22 hour days, very little sleep, constantly on the go, sleeping nearly all weekend just to recover, and writing some on next week's stories to try to stay up with the game, when not working on the books or tweaking the PDF or setext design. It is kind of fun, pushing yourself that hard and still getting the story (and I think we have the governance story down, once we get all the i's dotted and t's crossed), but I'm seven years older than I was then, and I wasn't a teenager then either. Readers may be nostalgic for those days, but I increasingly remember why I am not. So it's nearly 7AM on Sunday morning and the articles aren't done. The annoying part is that I worked through another weekend while hardly realizing it, meaning I'll have to be careful to take extra time this next week once we get some more stuff done or I increase the risk of burnout. It's weird to like what you're doing so much that you can keep these hours but then suddenly hit a wall so hard you can't do anything for days, no matter how much you want to. I'm still not fully equipped to deal with that. Oh, and I have a doctor's appointment Monday afternoon just for regular maintenance, so I can't drift too much into afternoon sleeping. That's why I'm off to bed. Wish me luck on explaining NASDAQ rules and the composition of Apple's board.

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