Soooooo busy!
I'm presenting at the SAGE-VIC conference tomorrow, so today has the usual rush of revising all my slides, applying eye-candy (Ascidian photos this time), and rehersing. Then I've got a long weekend, followed by four days of teaching.

That's why, after an otherwise peaceful week, every single client seems to be crawling out of the woodwork to try and push work onto me. Today. My last business day in the office.

The thing is that I don't want to do a lot of the work that's being proposed. It's not that I don't enjoy development, it's all the things that go with it (wrangling specs out of clients, contracts, moving goal-posts, feature creep, lack of closure, maintenance, etc) that I dislike.

Training, on the other hand, is cleanly defined, a lot more social, lot more rewarding, and a lot less stressful. Nobody calls you up at 4am in the morning to tell you that your course notes are broken, and that you've desparately got to fix a poorly worded sentence on page 83. We're doing a good job of increasing our training turnover, and I'm trying to reduce how much I'm involved in commercial development.

It's not an easy task to tell a long-term client that you don't want to do any more development work for them, and certainly not a task I want to try and do in the last stages of conference preparation.