Coffee and Code

Hi everyone, and happy belated New Year 2021!

Looking back at my blog here,  I can't believe it's been 5,559 days since my first post on October 14, 2005! It's been alive over fifteen years in one form or another. Even though I rarely post here, I keep it alive just for fun. I can use it to say things like:

• Stay safe and healthy out there!
• Cook with cast iron.
• I'm probably watching too many food-related videos on YouTube.

I'm looking forward making some major updates to my websites and apps in 2021. Keeping those tools sharp even though I'm management these days! Over the winter, I'll be hunkered down, enjoying good company, food and drinks, and working on the ol' website as time allows. 

To your health and wellness in 2021,
Jeff Woodman

This weblog has been inactive for quite a while. 1,579 days (or 4.326 years), to be exact-ish! I'm honestly very surprised that it's been that long, because it feels like much less time has passed.

I am still very much alive. I have made some career transitions from developer to web manager to full-on, non-technical management for my day-to-day work. Lately, I've missed application development and web design as a hobby... so, I got on the phone with my web hosts and got this blog working properly again. I hope to post updates of a personal nature in the future, but know better than to fully commit to it right now.

More to come!

Just a quick note to let you know that I am still alive and well here in sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico. The past two years of my life have been an absolute whirlwind. Ups and downs, strikes and gutters (as the Dude says).

Suffice to say, I'm happily re-employed at the New Mexico Department of Transportation, and even though I was away from the agency for 5.5 years, it feels as if I've never left. I am very lucky to work with a group of fine people that will literally do anything for friends, and we have a lot of fun as well. Tonight, several of us will camp in the Pecos wilderness now that parts of the forest have been re-opened.

I am now quite sure

Joe Pilates is Satan.

Damn, my stomach hurts!

Will someone please buy me this shirt?

Sometimes, I embody what the pictured shirt says. Every few months or so, I become obsessed over some programming project and spend almost all of my free time working on it until it's done. That's how this weblog, and the website it sits on, came into being in the first place.

Is this a good way to work? I'm not sure. One one hand, single-minded focus can be handy, because it makes it easier for me to push through and complete large bodies of code. I tend to overdo caffeine and sacrifice too much sleep during my code-a-thons, though, and it becomes more difficult to communicate with other humanoids when I've got code on the brain constantly.

I manage to get a little balance in my life by simply going months and months without doing any techie-type stuff at home. It's a feast-or-famine approach, I guess, but there really is more to life than just the internet. Seriously. Someone told me that, and I believe it.

You'll see a new design for my website appear this summer, the details of which are still quite secret. I have a couple of smaller code project planned as well. However, I am devoting most of the summer to non-techie stuff, such as looking for a house, marksmanship, taking care of our awesome dogs (see: my flickr account), and some awesome summer concerts (Iron Maiden/Dream Theater in June, and also RUSH! in June).

Today, I will be getting some sun in my backyard... mandatory sun, as I must bring the rule of law to my yard with my mighty weed-trimmer. As the weeds are trimmed, so too must beer be consumed. If you're a home-coding geek, reading this post: How do you like to work? How do you achieve balance? Do you try to? Tell me.