Worky, worky...thinky, thinky

[selenay]

I am currently taking a break from glaring at VBA. It's doing silly things to me. Namely, the macro that I have written keeps stopping part way through with no debug error, no reason, it just stops. Completely. It worked fine yesterday and then I added an extra function. Except there's no reason I can see for it doing this stopping thing. I haven't added anything that would force the macro to exit early and I'm not doing anything on the PC that would interfere. I think.

Sometimes I hate working with Microsoft stuff. Especially when my boss decides he needs new, more complicated features in something that I built months ago (er, a year ago...), that was supposed to go into weekly production weeks ago and still hasn't been because they keep making big changes every time we think it's ready for sign-off.

Not that I'm bitter or anything...

*g*

In other thinky things, I'm thinking of reorganising my blogs. Not this one, obviously, but the professional one has been languishing in not-updated hell for months and I need to either use it or get rid of it. I think the main problem is that I'm not sure what it's for anymore so I can never decide what to write. I've always tried to keep personal stuff out of it and it's definitely not a fandom appropriate place. It's also not the right place to talk about writing or moan about work because it's on my portfolio site.

So I'm thinking about splitting it off: keeping the professional blog (and actually updating it) and creating a seperate, personal blog for friends and family who don't see this one. I'll try to create myself some kind of mission statement regarding the professional blog so that I know in my head what is going on there (discussion of tech, discussion of projects, cool VBA/SQL/HTML/CSS/whatever tricks etc.) and the personal one will have similar content to this, but with less fandom stuff. I think.

Now I have to decide where to lodge the personal one. Do I create a new LJ, investigate Vox or create a new WordPress blog? Hmmm...


Some of this was inspired by reading an interview by Six Apart founder, Mena Trott, in .net magazine. It was an interesting article and more importantly, it was an interesting look at blogging.

And now I must return to the evils of VBA. The macro is re-running again and hasn't stopped this time - I re-started a new Excel session this time. Haven't changed anything in the macro so I have no idea why it's working this time and not the other two times I attempted to run it! A debug message would have been nice...

Comments

[historyterry.livejournal.com]

I find just setting up Special groups in LJ gets round a lot of the problems with who sees stuff, though of course none of my family will ever get near it :-). I don't know how many Special groups you can have, but for me that certainly gets round the 'closest friends only' issue.

Good luck with the VBA.

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I hate working with Microsoft stuff.

Only sometimes? ;-)

[selenay]

I think the big problem is that the stuff I always keep public on here - the fannish stuff, the fic, the "do I fancy Teryl more than Kate Hewlett?" debate - is all the stuff that I don't want family and non-fan friends seeing. I'd have to turn this journal into a friends only journal to keep everything split out and I really don't want to do that. At least in part that's because I know there are people reading this journal for the fan stuff and fic stuff who aren't on LJ, so they'd be immediately cut off. Plus I'd be crap at remembering to set the security levels correctly each time.

So a totally seperate blog of some kind seems like the easiest way of sorting this out. One of the things that I've been considering is that, when I've moved, being able to read the blog would help people here know what I'm up to regularly and hopefully keep us in contact better. I have every intention of emailing people and IM-ing frequently, but from experience blogging does encourage keeping up and in contact rather well :-)

I'm going to be thinking about this carefully, as you can tell. I've been taking a peek around at Vox, having never even looked at it before, and I can see some advantages although it's very different from LJ. The differences might help in keeping the other journal very definitely non-fannish, though. And it integrates easily with Amazon wishlists and Flickr. On the other hand, I could have a play with WordPress and produce a blog that would integrate with Flickr and LibraryThing. So I'm still not sure which I want to use!

The VBA has run successfully twice now, so I have no idea what it was doing. My current problem is that the data warehouse is dog-slow and the next development task on my list is at the stage of writing the SQL. So I'm waiting for the current piece of test code to finish, which has currently been running for over an hour. Gah!

[historyterry.livejournal.com]

I take your point. I was thinking about my options, too, for when I move, but luckily I don't run into those kind of problems. So long as I keep the chunky specialist (fic, trans or academic) stuff behind a cut, with my one special group, it seems to cater for all my scenarios. Everyone I'm in regular contact with knows about all this stuff, after all. The only thing I'd need to worry about is if I need an academic-only space.

You're right, there will be some rationalisation required as to what to do with your portfolio blog, not least of which will be a) deciding whether to keep it b) making time to keep the diary side up-to-date. We'll need to know what you're up to on a daily basis, you know :-).

With moving countries and changing job, you'll presumably want to have some kind of portfolio site, but does it need the blog there? etc, etc.

I am now wondering whether any of what I've said makes sense! Excuse me, it seems like it's been a very long day!

Tx

[selenay]

*g* Fair point!