This is a really stupid productivity trick, but it works so well for me that I thought I'd share it in case it works well for others.

When I arrived at work this morning, I had 4 things that all had to be done fairly urgently: create a storyboard for a video to be reviewed at a meeting tomorrow morning, revise some documentation before sending it to a developer for review, provide some documentation effort estimates for the next release, and deal with some online Help bugs. My problem is that it would be fairly easy to spend an entire day doing any of these, and I can't decide which to do first.

Fortunately, I keep a kitchen timer on my desk. This morning, I set it for one hour and started in on the storyboard. At the end of the hour, I had a rough storyboard complete. Given my perfectionism, I could easily have spent another hour tweaking and polishing, but since my timer was up, I just sent it out to the meeting attendees.

Then I set my timer for another hour and dove into the documentation estimates. When that hour's up (I've paused the timer to compose this post), I will decide whether I want to spend another hour on the estimates, or switch to bug fixing.

You'd be surprised how much you can accomplish in just an hour if you don't allow yourself to spend any of that hour worrying about whether you should be doing something else instead. (Or worse, trying to do something else at the same time.)

This turned up on The Mission U.K.'s Youtube channel, with the description "from the forthcoming DVD." Apparently, there will be a forthcoming DVD of their 25th Anniversary show at Brixton Academy.

Admittedly, after seeing Fields of the Nephilim's Ceromonies, all ordinary concert DVDs seem...ordinary. Still, it's the Mission playing "Severina". What's not to like?

On Saturday morning, I ran in the Willow Glen 5K, the first race I've really run since running the Willow Glen 5K a year ago. I wasn't expecting to do particularly well - for the past month or two, my running training has been interrupted both by travel and muscle soreness from lifting.

In addition, I had to contend with sore feet from climbing on Friday. Ah, the joys of being a multi-sport "athlete". ;)

So, I walked a couple of sections of the course, and ended up finishing a couple of minutes slower than my time from last year. But, I finished. And I had no hip pain! Take that, trochanteric bursitis!

Now I need to pick my next race to train for!

In a fairly typical fashion for me, I discovered this band at almost the precise moment they broke up. They played their farewell show just a couple of weeks ago.

This is Adoration, with "Sense." (Guitarist Stephen Carey has also played in a band called NFD, which has a song called "Senseless." Makes for a balanced perspective, I guess.)

Tested my nascent Bulgarian language skills by greeting a colleague on the phone in Sofia with "dobar vecher!" (Good evening!). He seemed quite surprised.

In theory, I also know how to say, "Good day", "Please", "Thank you", and "I would like a cup of coffee, please." I figure that's about 50% of the working vocabulary I'll need for my visit in June.

I took some screencaptures from the just-released Fields of the Nephilim live DVD, Ceromonies, to share with fellow fans over on the Dawnrazor forum, but they were pretty enough that I feel like sharing some of them here. Ceromonies is one very fine looking (and sounding) concert DVD.

( Neff bomb under the cut )

So, I really wasn't sold on this video for Moonspell's "Lickanthrope" at first. (Guys? "Lickanthrope"? Really? I know English is not your first language, but that's no excuse for total dorkitude.)

But then I got to the bit at about 3:34 where Little Red Riding Hood decapitates the werewolf with a katana. And as it turns out, you can totally buy me for the price of Little Red Riding Hood with a katana. Video makers, take note. I'm cheap.

I've sorted through the photos that I took in Paris and posted the best of them as a Flickr set. I thought I'd share a few faves here.

( Photos beneath the cut )

This is a song called "Death Throes of the Terrorsquid". It is simultaneously hilarious and fucking epic. (Sample lyric, "We've defeated Vikings, and ninjas we have slain!")

I seem to remember a period when heavy metal bands felt required to take themselves seriously. I am so glad that proved to be a historical blip.

Paris was absolutely great. We did so much stuff that I'm not sure how I would go about summarizing it all. I think the highlights were our visits to the Louvre, Chantilly, and the Chateau de Vincennes/Bois de Vincennes, so I'll try to get it together to post more about those. We also ate a lot of fantastic food, including some very odd but unexpectedly good things like seaweed butter (butter with flakes of seaweed mixed in instead of salt), and sheep's milk yogurt sorbet on cucumber gelee with black olive tapenade on the side. (Also, creme brulee flavored with herbs is apparently A Thing right now in upscale Paris restaurants - I think I had one version infused with tarragon and another infused with Thai basil.)

I'm also pleased to report that the stereotype of French waiters as being stuffy and snobby appears to have little relationship to reality these days. With just a couple of exceptions, in everywhere from Michelin-starred places to random pizza joints in the suburbs, we encountered staff who were friendly, eager to be helpful, and very tolerant of the limitations of my French language skills. (In any of the touristy areas, it's pretty rare to encounter someone who doesn't speak at least a bit of English. Some conversations became a bit of a battle to see who was more eager to demonstrate their foreign-langauage skills.)

I did use odd moments of wifi access to upload a few photos to my G+ account. I'm going to try to get my full photo set up on flickr for those who are interested. I didn't take a huge number of photos - most museums in Paris allow photos, but for some reason it would have felt weird to me to be snapping away while in the Louvre or down in the catacombs, so most of my shots are of gardens, exterior architecture, and food.

The only real disappointment was the weather - it was pretty uniformly overcast, and on a couple of days it rained pretty hard. Mostly, we just bundled up and coped, but I think we did a lot less leisurely strolling around various neighborhoods than we would have with better weather.