8.12.2003: Chewing Capacity
Been a while since I've written here; thought I'd better get busy before it became a full month...
It's not that I haven't had things to say; I've thought several times that what was going through my mind at the time had to be better than the cheese nonsense that was up on the website before this. But I never sat down and wrote it into convenient byte-sized nuggets.
It's not only stray thoughts that have been piling up, it's stray projects too. During the last month three people came to me to ask if I could help them with a program or website. Not that I mind, but ... whew! On top of that I had started the Clikkonit beta project and set myself deadlines when the next beta had to be out (before the previous one expired) and nearly missed the second deadline. I set myself a longer deadline for beta 4...
Add to that the last week at work, where the only other true 'developer' at our office took a week to move into a new house. It's bad enough being one of only two developers, but it's worse to be both of them.
And that's only the digital side of my life. My wife and I have begun Illinois Foster Care licensing classes (there's an exciting possibility in the near future but I don't think I can talk about it yet, and certainly not in this public forum.), we've been working on fixing up the old house to put it back on the market, we finally got the bathroom floor put in in the new house, and a dozen other small projects.
Today I finally reached that special programmer nirvana commonly known as burnout. And an epiphany: while it was just one-thing-after-the-other (but not necessarily in that order) for the last few weeks, the last thing I felt like doing was sitting down and writing this web page. Now, however, when I lack motivation on any and all projects, I find this a relaxing diversion, one that has very little stress because there's noone to say whether it's right, wrong, needs to be changed, needs a new feature incompatible with the original design, needs a new way to juggle the numbers to create a new angle of meaning, or any such thing. I don't answer to anyone about the content of this page (I don't really think anyone's reading it either, but that's another story.)
Having said that, my enthusiam for writing suddenly ran out again, so I'll fill with two quotes this time...
We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves. -- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
(Yes, the "It was a dark and stormy night" guy)
The time to relax is when you don't have time for it. -- Attributed to both Jim Goodwin and Sydney J. Harris
