procrastination diagram

Hmm, no moonbase or Jupiter missions.

If everything goes according to plan, I should be posting here more regularly, as I seem to have suckered my self into an Iron Blogger event, the basic idea being that everyone posts at least once a week or subsidize other people's beer (list of other participants unceremoniously dumped in my blog's sidebar).

It may not be productive, but I do feel like I should remind the universe of my existence occasionally, and it gives me an internal excuse to post before I finish my five-projects-deep rewrite of my website.

I don't have any resolutions at the moment (beyond go to the gym more and get stuff done), but I think I need to plan to be more distracted at events that lend themselves to maudlin recollection.

Hmm, I'm clearly not doing this often enough; the posting software kicked off the wrong web browser.

It is 2 AM the night before MITSFS inventory. We don't quite yet have all the data necessary to start generating shelf catalogs (in our local jargon "shelfdex packets"), at least partially because I sent some people home early. I will really, actually, have a checklist for this next year. Or possibly arrange to be in Argentina.

It is 1 PM the next day, and I am frantically trying to write a piece of software that I should have written two years ago: the resolver, so that spurious books aren't handled by a very tired person with a SQL interpreter. Of course, "frantically trying to write" means staring at a buffer consisting only of comments that I wrote yesterday.

It is 3:15 PM. The software is by no means done, or even at the required functionality level, but I'm improving something that sort of works rather than staring at a buffer full of vague comments and unparsable code. "We have a heartbeat!"

It is 6 PM. I know what this year's hilarious screwup was. But I can fix it... with a SQL interpreter. Fortunately I'm not yet that tired. (When you're matching the books that were unexpected in one place with the books that came up missing in others, you want to make sure you're matching with books that were missing in this inventory.)

It is 9 PM. "Yes," I said. "For the love of God."¹

It is half past midnight, and the library has been reconfigured to be a library again, not an inventory-taking machine. I am far too tired to do more than poke desultorily at the shiny thing in front of me. I can also only sit in awe of Kevin, who got three hours less sleep than I did last night (and in the student center at that) and then herded cats all day. It was claimed that inventories don't usually end with fewer boxes of books than they start with, so I guess we won.

It is 1 PM the day after, and I am fixing up this blog post, after sleeping for about twelve hours. My brain seems to be vaguely wondering where all of its neurotransmitters went. (Disclosure: I did actually start each paragraph at the the times specified, but I went back and edited, sometimes writing more based on recollection.)

1. (People have begun to barricade themselves with boxes of spurious books.)

My T60 is increasingly held together by scotch tape, and the T510 I ordered isn't supposed to ship until shortly before my birthday (and I seem to have ordered a display option that the official documentation doesn't admit to he existence of), so I picked up a ThinkPad X100e to fill a potential gap and to be lighter than the T60 or the T510.

It's not quite a netbook: it's a little too large, but that's hardly a bad thing. The keyboard is a little odd, clearly taking design cues from the weird, flat, semi-unusable Apple keyboards, but it's full-sized, seems to have nearly as much travel as my T60's keyboard, and has the force curve that we know and love from IBMLenovo keyboards (you get clear tactile feedback that you've actuated the switch before you bottom out). Also, it's not actually flat; the keys have a subtle curve to them that helps you center your fingers and hands properly.

Also, unlike netbooks that I've heard of, you can stuff 4G of memory into it (which I of course have).

It doesn't seem to be obviously slow, but I haven't actually benchmarked it against anything. It's at worst not obviously blindingly fast. Windows 7 was quite tolerable performance-wise even before the memory upgrade. (Of course, I nuked Windows 7 from orbit last night, and not just because it decided to uninstall Chrome and putty in a seeming fit of pique.)

Linux support seems a little rough around the edges, although I haven't explored nearly enough. I only just got the wireless working (had to download a tarball from the vendor and build it; I suppose I should package it for Debian now), and haven't tried suspend/resume or X. More later.

I've just found the following paragraph in an unfinished blog entry from February 2006, labeled "abandoned projects":

Obvious confession time: I don't have the attention span to get anything accomplished on my own. I put a pile of time into a project, and lose interest. Sometimes I only get to the point of doing elaborate planning in my head, but I can't be bothered to write anything down. This tendency actually shows up at work sometimes (I have this additional, related problem where I tend to lose interest in projects after I've finished the hard part but this is usually compensated for by annoyed bosses.

This is actually not entirely true, but given four year's perspective, it does help to know that you have a problem and to keep coping strategies (like, for instance, writing things down) in mind...