I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed right now, which is pretty common for me. Because of some really bad financial decisions over the past couple of years, I'm in a position where I have to do quite a bit of consulting to keep afloat. Fortunately, I'm finding it possible to get really great work from really great people, doing (ok, won't brag here, even though I'm throwing off my alliteration) projects that I really like doing. Right now, that's mostly rsvg for Eazel, and a new project to implement PDF 1.4 transparency features in Ghostscript. It's likely that some inkjet printing and some font work is going to get added to the mix.

The only problem with all this is that I'm also involved in quite a few projects that don't have funding attached. Since I'm behind on my consulting work, it's really hard for me to grab time to put into these. Ordinarily, I'd "make time", but right now I'm finding that it's really important to spend time with Alan and Max. So the "volunteer" projects are taking a serious hit right now. These include Advogato, rcss (my cascading style sheet parser), Gill, and my PhD thesis (which I really would like to get around to finishing one of these days). I'd also love to have time to write the Libart book, work on the real-time version of the watercolor simulator, bring gfonted to releasable status, and do a "purifying" C interpreter. At other times, I fantasize about spending time on Athshe. I'm also giving a bit of thought to a distributed, Web-based formal theorem database, oriented toward correctness proofs of program fragments.

I keep telling myself it doesn't matter when all these projects get done, that the problems they solve will probably still be around no matter how long I wait for them. In the meantime, I've been having some success transferring projects to other people.

Well, I should get to bed now. Tomorrow promises to be a full day :)