Brent Stace’s Weblog

Excluding the queen-size bed purchase earlier this year, over the weekend we’ve made another substantial purchase. We bought furniture for our over-1-year-barren living room. We bought a sofa, love seat, coffee table (with internal storage), and 2 end tables, and we should be getting them mid-late Oct. 2008. It was very hard furniture shopping, esp. with Jenn and the size of the room. This is probably why it took over a year to find the “right” furniture. So, we should have furniture people can enjoy come the Thanksgiving feast we’re having at our place this year. I’m debating if I should post a photo of the furniture once it’s in our house…or maybe I’ll just tell you that you have to come over to see it .

Well, the fiscal year is coming to a close at the USPTO. Officially it ends the beginning of Sept. Once I get all my due cases in, I’ll be a couple counts short of making 130%. I can get 5 counts in if the cloaked-in-mystery review team for my GS-13 promotion could review my cases prior to the fiscal year ending. Strange that a case I did in early July still isn’t reviewed, but a case done in late Aug. has been reviewed. So far only 1 of 5 have been reviewed, and 4 have been officially submitted. I’ve come to realize something at the end of this FY. And that is 130% isn’t worth it anymore. For future FY’s I’ll just do 110%. I’m not going to bust my butt (that hard) anymore. It gets more difficult to maintain a 130 as you go up in ranks at the PTO since more work is required of you as you go up. I’ll be able to scrape by this year…may have to take some time off to do it, but It’ll happen. Therefore, after my promotion (hopefully end of Oct.), maintaining that 130 will be more difficult that it has ever been. So, my logical response, at this point in my life, is to tone it down a bit (to 110).
What is sad is that even though I’ll probably be taking time off to make 130%, I’ll probably be working from home (voluntary OT) to hopefully get through some amendments so that I can have a real vacation in Jan. 2009 (passport pending) - probably more about this future vacation later.

The Unoh program is fully functional, as reported earlier, but adding advanced AI’s to it is taking a significantly long time to do. The logic is very complex. Actually I’ve kinda hit a…writers/programmers block regarding it. As such, I’m thinking that I may release version 1.0 as it was before I started hacking it up with AI code. When that happens, let the laughter begin (mostly at the poor interface). But, at least for me, it’ll be proof of concept. Hopefully when the FY ends and I switch gears/goals to a 110% at work (see above), I’ll have more time to devote to Unoh.