State of the Starport

[mdlbear]

As of yesterday, all of my (operational) domains are hosted at Dreamhost, and thestarport.org's email has been moved over as well. (So far only steve and colleen have mailboxes there; since it's been overrun with spam for the last year and I'm the only one still reading email there, I don't think that's a problem.)

Tasks still remaining include:

• make email posting work. I may be able to do that just by setting the appropriate smart host.
• Finish configuring the new gateway/router
• Downgrade my account at rahul.net to something minimal, upgrade my AT&T UVerse connection to a static IP address, and dump my DSL account at sonic.net.

All this is stuff that should have been done at least a year ago. Possibly two, in the case of moving the hosting to DH. Better late, and so on, but...

Is it normal to feel down, maybe even mildly depressed, after accomplishing a long-delayed, scary task? I've been listless all day. It was certainly easy enough, and nothing went wrong that I couldn't handle quickly. I suppose some of the reaction might be coming from knowing how long I've been putting it off and how foolish it was to have done so.

So instead of feeling productive, proud, and accomplished, I end up feeling lazy and stupid. Could that be part of why I keep putting things off? Probably.

Comments

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I can't cheer you on for the delay, but remember this procrastination thingy is something you're still working to get past. It's as if you've been habitually playing a chord wrong on the guitar for decades--it takes time to retrain your brain to eliminate a habit no matter how easy it would have been, in theory, to learn to do it right in the first place.

And sure, this new effort to retrain your brain is wasted effort if you compare it to an ideal world where you learned it right in the first place.

But that's not a fair comparison, and you know it. So cheer yourself for fighting the procrastination "bug" in your wetware, cheer yourself for accomplishing the overdue task, and make a policy of when the task doesn't feel rewarding, reward yourself in some other way. Do something else that you know makes you feel good.

That, too, is part of establishing the new behavior. Make sure you feel good afterward, even if you artificially insert playing music, or a walk in the park, or a hug from Colleen to get the good feeling at first. It should train your brain that accomplishments lead to feeling good, but at the very least you aren't reinforcing the pattern of doing something good and then feeling down about it.

So, yay you!

Oh, hey--I had another thought. Fighting old habits takes emotional energy. If you used up all your emotional energy doing the task (even though it was an intellectually easy task), you will feel tired. And feeling tired is remarkably similar to feeling down or depressed. Maybe it's as simple as you used up your spoons because emotionally the task was hard.

[mdlbear]

Thanks for the encouragement. Apart from posting about it I really haven't had the chance to do anything to celebrate. Not sure what to do about that. I did get to go out filking in the evening, but that was scheduled and didn't feel connected.

Not sure what to do about that kind of thing. I know that I need to sit down and make a list of things I can do to feel good; right now that's just another thing I've been putting off for the last several months.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I bet Colleen would be willing to provide "'cause you got it done" hugs. That wouldn't take long, even on a busy day.

And if she was scheduled to give you a hug, get that one too!

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Hey, Steve? Where do you register your domains? I've been using Joker.com for years, but now all my debit cards are doing this anti fraud thing that bounces it, I have to call them, they have to make an exception, and it's getting to be a PITA. I hate GoDaddy because their entire site is one giant up-sell ad, so I avoid them.

[mdlbear]

I'm still using GoDaddy; mostly a case of inertia, since I've been there for several years now.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

or maybe you were geared up for a struggle, didn't have it and had nothing to generate the adrenaline/noradrenaline buzz!

[mdlbear]

Possible.

[ranch101.livejournal.com]

You wrote: "Is it normal to feel down, maybe even mildly depressed, after accomplishing a long-delayed, scary task?"

Answer: YES!!! Most assuredly.

[mdlbear]

Thanks for the sanity check.

[mneme]

While I have my domain on dreamhost, I can only mildly recommend them -- they've got decent customer service, but one can expect to have downtime several times during the year. :(

(admittedly, if you're doing a VPS solution I can't speak to that, as I'm using the cheap shared web setup).

[mdlbear]

So am I; so far it seems pretty reliable, and one can't beat the price. I could get more reliability elsewhere, but I can't afford it.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Actually, their downtime has decreased markedly over the last few years. OTOH, if you're only running a hobby, personal or low traffic business web site, you really don't need 3 or more nines of uptime. They do have a twitter feed that does tell you of any issues they are having.

[mneme]

It varies; they had a bunch of issues in the last year or two; some days with a lot of hours without mysql access (which broke my mediawikis until they brought it back up) and I think they managed to break mailman about 3-4 times in the past year. I think this is "one nine" uptime, at least if one counts only 100% uptime as up, but it's still reasonable enough (barely) for a hobby site.