Last night I had a hard time getting to sleep as I worried about all of the commitments I have made and how I am going to accomplish them. (Somehow it always works out though) This happens every time I am so terribly irresponsible to do something like – shock! – go for a bike ride on a nice summer Saturday afternoon. No, it shouldn’t be this way, but, oh well.

So when I finally did get to sleep, I dreamt that I was attending a huge event in a huge room with a LOT of developers (think keynote address at PDC for size). In this room, we were each given documentation for a new piece of technology. The first part of the documentation was pure reference material — how it works — and the 2nd part was a big hands on lab. I was *still* plowing through the documentation while many people were asking very specific questions about the coding, since they were somehow already into the hands on lab. They were being heralded because they were pointing out very helpful problems with either the lab or the technology itself. I think we were into day 2 or 3. Finally I turned to the woman sitting next to me and asked where she was at in the process. She was reading the docs too, but she had teamed up with other people in the room and other members of her team were deep into the labs. I told her, “well, I have always worked alone. I’m not used to teaming up with people. I guess I’ll just have to live with my slower pace.” Uggh. For 20+ years, this is the way I have worked. I can’t imagine working any differently or god forbid, having employees. I defnitely can’t imagine paying someone to be on vacation when I never get to take one! (yes, perhaps I would have more time that way…) I’m sure the other part of this is that while diving specifically into things like ADO.NET 2.0, WSE3.0, etc., I have still not actually built a ASP.NET 2.0 website, for example, and therefore I have not been a great source of feedback. I think it’s part of the keeping up with the Joneses thing, and I should be happy with what I am able to do and equally happy that there are also plenty of people with the time and energy to provide lots of great feedback on things like .NET 2.0, Indigo, Avalon, etc.

Well, it’s raining, so I don’t have to worry about being tempted to go on a bike ride on this Sunday morning. Back to work, I guess! The hard part is what on earth do I select to start with? I suppose whatever is due the soonest, as always…

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