The strange weekend

…also, don't work the weekends ;)
-- Michelle Thorne

An apology

So last week was my first working for the Mozilla Foundation, and it was one of the best Mozilla experiences I've ever had. Second only to meeting community members from around the world. This may not make it seem like its that high up there but I know that this is one I'm going to remember for the rest of my life (or until I go senile :P)

My last entry to this log was a little, how to put it, crap, short, random; the list of options goes on. It was an odd smash of what I'm posting to my main blog, and the additional bits I need to be keeping track of for university. This format does not work.

Despite the last entry being so bad, it did remind me that there is a split between the two places I'm posting. One that has a fuzzy, blurry, grey area between what is, and what isn't relevant. Maybe I need to rethink my blogging setup a little.

The quotes

In these log entries - that's what I'm calling posts that are not on my main blog - I've been trying to include a quote from someone that sums up one of the key lessons of my week. Sure not working the weekend might seem like a crappy lesson to have learned. It's by no means the only lesson I've learned. However it is something a lot of people told me in some form or another.

Jean-Yves told me I need to switch off sometimes.
Michelle told me "don't work the weekends".
Laura said something along the lines of don't do too much, and cause burnout.

None of them meant that I can't, or that I shouldn't push myself to beat my targets, or to be lazy. I know that what they meant was that you can't work 24/7 without going mad.

Sure my weekend was one of the strangest I've ever had, and I'm not sure if I enjoyed it or not. What I do know is that I needed it.

Why was my weekend strange though? Was it because I saw a flying pig? Was it due to watching a bizarre combination of films/tv shows?

None of the above.

For roughly the past 7.5 years my free time (my weekends) have been dedicated to Mozilla contribution. Be it marketing, coding, governance, event planning, etc… I've always worked my weekends. Never felt like I have, but that's kind of what I did.

Now I must make sure that I don't. Events, or Mozilla contribution that is dissimilar from my "day job" should be fine in moderation. However there is no knowing what a non-stop Mozilla lifestyle would do to a person.

They'd probably turn into the Mozilla Dino!

Placement objectives

This is the scary one. I'm past my deadline for doing this, and it's kind of important for my degree.

I've mentioned a few potential objectives in the past to a couple of people, but avoided putting them into this log for fear of having crap ones, and forgetting that, getting to the end of my placement, and screwing up the degree portion of this placement.

There are one or two I've settle on so far, and unlike the convention for these placements, or rather what the university recommends, I've decided to set aims and objectives periodically, as they occur to me, and of varying magnitude and scale.

To make them easier to track I'm setting up a page here with this log that has all my objectives on it. Big and small.

• Be able to make the perfect cappuccino with the office coffee machine.
• Be able to strike a balance of working on projects of higher importance / urgency vs low importance / lack-of-urgency.

The page of terror as I'm going to call it, is not just going to be a boring list. It will be to start with, but given enough of my free time - going to put those weekends to use - it will have a few simple charts of where I feel I am in regard to achieving those objectives.