Blood, Work

Walked to Davis first thing in the morning yesterday. Deposited a pleasantly prompt client payment into my bank, and then visited the Harvard Vanguard blood lab to get the ol' stick-n-drain. This was the final bit of followup business from my May checkup. It took so long because it required a 12-hour fast but did not require an appointment, making it quite easy to tell myself that I'd do it next week - week after week. My eagerness to hit the bank, and my good spirits resulting from same, moved me to delay my morning coffee and finally deal with it. I'm told that I'll get an analysis in the mail soon. I do not expect bad news.

Things are getting interesting with work. Starting next week, and continuing for the next month or two at least, I'll be working on two high-priority tasks for two clients. I have decided that, so long as the business is just me, two active clients is my maximum. That is, while I'll always seek to grow my client database ever larger, the number of clients who are actively expecting work from me at any given time should not exceed two.

Technically I already had a little experience working with two clients at once this past week, when I did some late-night emergency work for a third client. That was an interesting exercise in stress management and judgment. The problem was an ornery Perl script written by someone who didn't know Perl too good which leaked memory at an alarming rate, so much that it ran any machine into the ground within minutes. It needed to work ASAP because its output was crucial to a presentation the following day.

Printed it out, took it apart, stated to rewrite it. After an hour, it was clear that I wouldn't be able to finish it before midnight. So, with the client's OK, I settled for simply identifying the one thing causing the leak, patching it, testing it, and then handing it back otherwise untouched. Billed two hours, and noted in my report email that I'd be happy to help clean up the program later on, if they'd like. (An excellent habit for an independent contractor, suggesting one's own follow-up tasks to clients.)

Anyway, yeah. My only concern, as always, is leaving room for Volity. Lately I've been working on it whenever I've been hot to do so, which lately has amounted to around two evenings per week, and that's been all right. Found and killed a real forehead-slapper of a design problem on Tuesday night, which I do believe will make all the "random" and "unpredictable" errors that have been delaying the alpha release finally reveal themselves as nothing of the sort, allowing their rapid isolation and eradication. I hope to put a lot of time into the problem this weekend.