I thought it would be a good idea to check our itinerary for the coming 3-day trip to Bali so I could put the travel times into my iCal. We’re on the 4:50AM flight on Friday 24th of July up to Denpasar, and the 12:30AM flight back to Perth on Monday 28th of September.

Wait. What?

Yes - September. Ahhhh crap. Looks like I picked the wrong date in the webform for the return flight when I booked the tickets back in March.

It was going to cost about $500 to move the two flights to the correct Monday. The idea of booking two new flights was presented and two tickets (from Bali to Perth, then Perth back to Bali in September) cost just over a grand. Considering that we were having to spend $500 to fix my mistake, an extra $500 meant we were up in Indonesia again, so…

We’re now going up to Bali at the end of September for another long weekend. Two international trips in two months will be awesome - if everything goes to plan the trips will sandwich the new Zed’s arrival. Also it’s the start of Magdalena’s school holidays so she won’t have to get time off work because of my mistake.

All in all, a worthwhile blunder on my part.

As any programmer will tell you, when you hit “the zone” it can be hard to track exactly what it is that you’re achieving. It’s not uncommon to sit down for a six hour session and at the end of it have a poor memory of what you were doing at the beginning.

This is a real problem if you make a living off charging for your time, as the natural result (for honest people) is to under charge by under accounting for your time.

Using source control can be a good initial reminder, so long as your commits are meaningful and descriptive. I use the following command to give me a basic idea about what I’ve done today (since midnight):

It results in output similar to this:

e6de125 Added progress controller and basic views
bce08e1 Added stylesheets including 960 grid layout
b034acc Implemented initial 960 grid layout
2576762 Added AASM gem dependency