Tuesday afternoon, the south facing wall of the building at 13th St and First Avenue buckled. A phalanx of NYFD trucks were onscene through the evening making sure the building wouldn’t collapse. I didn’t find out what happened until late this evening on my way back from the ECFCPUG get together. A construction crew was scaffolding the building while one police car stood by.

This corner is home to Mee Noodle Shop & Grill, an East Village institution. There were two handwritten signs posted about them being closed, their awnings were in a heap near the construction.

I’m somewhat heartsick about this. I’ve been eating at and ordering from Mee since probably sometime around 1998 (shortly after Ginsburg died) when Dave insisted I experience Chinese take out which didn’t suck. I know the waiters and the delivery men; the cashiers and cooks are all familiar and have been there for years. Those people all work as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone work. I’m worried about them and hope they’re able to absorb what will hopefully be a very short loss of income.

Every year for the past decade I’ve felt that I managed to accomplish more than I did previously. Throughout most of those years I couldn’t see how I could possibly do more than I was doing. But every year I did more. Until now.

The Laffer Curve has been in the news recently after the recent surge in US tax revenues. The Laffer Curve is a simple economic theory which shows that government revenues decrease when taxes are too high or too low. It points to a sweet spot where revenue is maximized by a tax rate that isn’t too low or too high.

The Laffer Curve of my life looks something like this:

Currently I’m on the right side the hump and have Too Much Going On. Time’s not being wasted, but my productivity, as measured by accomplishments, has fallen off a cliff.

Getting back to the place of maximum accomplishment will take some time, because I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to finish. So, the slogging will continue for now.

10.4.2 is out, apparently the iPhoto Color Shift Bug was not fixed.

update: FIXED! (iPhoto 5.0.3 update)

As I type this, Noemi is sleeping on my chest. Michelle is back at work full time and for the summer I’m taking care of the girls. Noemi five days a week, Lila and Noemi three days a week. When Noemi’s a little bit older she’ll join Lila on babysitter days. So until school starts again I’m doing my best to cram working time in between full-time daddy duties.

FCP 5 broke my FXScript compiler and I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet. While fixing it, I’m also porting it to AppleScript Studio, since that satisfies a near term and long term goal simultaneously. Once that is functional, which should be soon depending on available time (of which writing this is taking away from) I’ll release an updated beta of Joe’s Filters which will remove watermarks for registered users.

There’s plenty of other stuff dragging on me as well which I don’t want to waste time enumerating. Identifying demands helps a lot, but it’s still frustrating how long it takes to get anything done and how tired I am at night.