Wow, its been almost a month since I last had time to sit at this keyboard and pour any thoughts out. Not that any of my latest thoughts would have made much sense to anyone. I have been busy with fighting real life to gain some ground and get settled in to a better routine that will allow me enough time to get back fully into the swing of DMOZ and also BOTW. Thus far its been sporadic at best, frankly by the time I get home every night and get the kids fed and in bed, I am to burned out to sit long at my computer screen. Combine that with the fact Comcast Broadband sucks and is usually out at my home when I am in the mood for some serious editing, and I am just barely hanging on. Its certainly not a lack of desire, I have a great deal of projects I want to get completed ASAP in both places. I also owe a lot of ‘ear’ time to a few good friends whom I dearly miss chatting with regularly.

I did find a few hours last week to plug away at BOTW. I am working to get through my break in period with them so I can start contributing more positively. I managed a couple of dozen additions and some good organization in my little area of Regional over there. With DMOZ I have always tried to be at the forefront in areas of interest, specifically I try to be both visible and vocal as much as I possibly can/could. With BOTW, I admit to being more of a lurker. I follow discussions and projects from the sidelines, but am pretty much plugging away silently on my own.

I have a reorg that has been set to begin for over a month now waiting on me. That I think will be tonights goal. Get parked projects completed first and foremost, then work on new ones. Hopefully I will have more to come later on current and future personal projects. At the moment I need to get myself back up to speed on what is going on with the primary one, so I can get it rolling ASAP. Thanks cherel for continuing to remind me about it. Without you I might loose my mind sometimes. Glad you are around to nudge me when I need it.

More to come later……

I am partly back at this point. I have been trying to log in every few days and dedicate a little time to editing. Currently I am working to get back up to speed with some quality control projects, but I have also been dabbling in the Editor requested Reinstatements and New permission lists. I hope to be able to put more and more time back into things as my schedule starts to work its self out.

And finally some good news:

Wanted: Serenity, please, and plenty of it!

Welcome back Mak! I missed you.

Wow time flies! Today marks my 4th ODP birthday, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me!

Hard to believe 4 years ago today, some nutty Meta editor (whom will remain nameless at least to non-editors, to protect their own reputation ) goofed and pushed that accept button on my third (or so) editor application by mistake, instead of rejecting it. Hey everyone makes a mistake every now and then, right? Oh well I am glad they took that risk and let me try and break some things. Its been a fun roller coaster ride so far. Looking forward to the next four years.

I have been so swamped in real life I haven’t logged in to edit for quite a while now. I think I made a couple of edits a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even realize my birthday was today, until an old friend turned ex-editor sent me a nice email a little while ago. I happened to be on line at the time and it spurred me to do some work.

What I did tonight:

• Reinstated a few editors who were requesting it.
• Cleared a few Reds from Indiana.
• Updated several URL’s adding some new one’s to save some of those reds.
• Caught up on email and the forums.

Later I might pop over to RZ and see what I have been missing as well. If I owe you a response its time to bump me again, as I think I got to everything I was lacking on. I hope to get more time online soon. I am also suffering many ISP related issues. My provider can’t seem to maintain a steady broadband signal to my area. My signal and connection is intermittent at best and often goes out in the middle of browsing.

Until next time!

Just a brief update on my status for the summer.  I have been mostly away the last couple of weeks and likely will continue to be mostly away for some time to come.  Real life has taken some twists and turns making less free time available to dedicate to hobby projects etc.  Also intermittent ISP problems have created even more problems with getting on line.

I am still around and will do my best to dedicate as much time as I can.  It will be very sporadic for a while though, at least until I can stabalize my internet connection and get some symbalance of a schedule in place.  If I owe you an email response, bump me in a week or so.  I haven’t been ignoring you, just been busy and forgetful. 

Here are some probably useless numbers regarding how my month panned out in June. It wasn’t an overtly productive month for me, but I was able to accomplish a few more things on my list.

Editor Accounts
I tried to focus on dealing with Editor issues such as new joins, reinstates, abuse, etc last month. For the month my numbers were:

• Reinstated 9 editor accounts, no denied reinstatements.
• Joined 2 new editors, rejected 6 new applications for editor accounts.
• Accepted 4 editor new permission requests, denied 0.
• Granted new category access to 2 editors based on their editing experience and interests.
• Wrote one Dashboard Feedback to an editor and unfortunately had to participate in removing one editor account. [Note updated to clarify that no single Meta can remove any editor's account]

Overall I accept about 15% of the new account applications I review and over 80% of the new permission requests I review. Those numbers really are meaningless though. New account applications I reject are almost always easy rejections, those applications with serious problems such as being incomplete or categories being far to large for a trainee. My new permissions requests are usually fairly straight forward and easy accepts are generally easily picked out of the list too. With new permission requests, there is also edit history available to make a decision much easier.

Actual Editing

Honestly didn’t have a lot of time to edit in June, between being sick, swamped at work, and family engagements my free time was pretty well tied up. I did manage to get in and do some work though.

• Only made a total of 97 edits for the month.
• 30 of my edits were additions to the directory.
• 23 edits resulted in deleting or unreviewing sites from the directory.
• The rest of the edits were quality control issues, either fixing titles, descriptions and URL’s or moving sites to better locations and new sub-categories.

July isn’t looking much better, as far as being very busy with real work and family engagements. I will be mostly away most of the first part of the month, and the second part will likely be very busy at work. Not sure if I will be more or less productive than June. Still working at it though, even if not getting a whole lot accomplished.