I've never been especially good at managing my time, but over the last year or so, I've nearly gotten a handle on balancing my various writing deadlines, personal writing projects, Netscape and WWdN stuff, poker, and the all-important time with my family.
I've had maybe six auditions in the last six months or so, and that's actually been just fine with me; I've been so focused on writing and raising teenagers, auditions just don't have the investment:return ratio that they once had for me. So now that I'm on a massive deadline (manga is due in just over 48 hours) I of course get a huge audition this afternoon, lose all of tomorrow afternoon to an InDigital shoot, and feel like all my careful planning and scheduling to maximize creativity while minimizing panic has gone entirely out into a black hole somewhere.
While I struggle to fix some dialog that I used to like but really, really hate now, as well as flesh out a scene that was originally a few panels but apparently wants to be two pages, please enjoy this week's Geek in Review: Five Ways to Make iTunes (more) Awesome:
Some people whistle while they work; I listen to music. Depending on where I'm working, I'll listen to iTunes or Amarok, and occasionally even put on the radio to remember why I stopped listening to the radio in the first place.(You can Digg or vote for it at Netscape, if you're into that sort of thing.)
Even though Amarok blows iTunes away in many departments, I like iTunes, and believe it's a great bit of software, especially for users like my parents: it's easy to use, hard to break (unless you're really trying to fuck something up) and it looks pretty, especially since they integrated Cover Flow. I think iTunes can be better, though, and since I'm not a programmer (though I once played a Nanite creator on TV) I puzzled out some idealistic ways that I think iTunes could be dialed up a little bit closer to Awesome.
I kept a couple of criteria in mind as I made this list: I think the average iTunes user doesn't want to mess around with AppleScript or do anything which involves the command line. I think they enjoy many of the "set it and forget it" features iTunes incorporates (like scheduling podcast downloads, auto-updating iPods when you connect them, etc.,) and enjoy that (most of the time,) iTunes "just works."
All panic aside, this continues to be a tremendously exhilarating process, just in that "I've jumped from an airplane and I haven't found out if the parachute will open, yet" way.
