A month of Mondays

The last month or so has been fairly busy. I'll write more about each of these activities, but here's a quick summary of what I was up to (from about mid-January to mid-February):

• Attended the Foundations of Open Media Software developer workshop, which was again held during the week before linux.conf.au in Hobart, Tasmania. I had helped organize the workshop (what little I could do from Japan), gave an update on the state of liboggz and an introduction to OpenMAX.
• Participated in the Annodex Association AGM (and I got to announce the results of the election of the 2009 committee!)
• Gave a talk at the LCA OpenMobile miniconf about my work with Renesas: developing software APIs for managing the hardware codecs of the SHMobile processor series, and OpenMAX IL support.
• Chaired the LCA Multimedia miniconf, which I'd organized together with Silvia Pfeiffer
• Gave a presentation at linux.conf.au, Ogg Chopping: Techniques for Programming Correctness and Efficiency, mainly about functional programming.
• Was invited to join the W3C Media Fragments Working Group
• Got confirmation of Mozilla's funding, contracted through Wikimedia, for work on Firefox's Ogg seeking and server negotiation. Michael Dale and I were interviewed by Rodney Gedda of Computerworld: Wikipedia video gets boost with $100,000 Mozilla grant.
• Prepared and held my PhD intermediate thesis defence.

Somewhere in there I also managed to fit in a few days skiing in Hokkaido, and some time in the office in Tokyo. I've spent the last week relaxing back home in Kyoto and taking stock before getting back into things.

Break's over! onwards and upwards.

I love Mondays! Over the last two years I've learned a lot about how to get multiple tasks done in parallel -- a mix of GTD and some other techniques I've been developing. Unfortunately it sometimes means making sacrifices, like getting up in the wee hours of the morning to get work done on a ski trip; but every few months I also need a reset; I tend to go a bit crazy whenever I visit friends back in Sydney ;-)

If you've got any advice or words of encouragement please share them in the comments!