Setbacks, slowdowns

[mdlbear]

Took the car in for its 80Kmile intermediate service. Under $300. Except, of course, that it needed front brakes, front tires, wheel alignment, and a battery. Ouch! Well, I was told last time about the brakes and tires; I had the rear done at 70K. Should have remembered, not that it made any difference.

Spent too much of the workday working on some personal writing; it's taken up altogether too much of my time and attention the last couple of days. When I'd gotten it to what felt like a conclusion I felt drained and depressed for a while. On the other hand, I got some major insights out of it which I will share if I can ever get them sufficiently disentangled from the specific situation.

Fortunately I have the kind of job where I can sit at my desk ssh'ed in to home, put myself up for half a day's vacation, and still manage to finish up a technical report and get involved in what will probably turn out to be a patentable idea in the field of secure communication. So I ended the afternoon on a high note.

An hour's worth of together time in bed is always good [grin].

... and having concluded that nearly all of today's writing session amounted to personal therapy and possibly future reference material, I can happily get back to being a computer geek. Having a private, personal pseudo-blog hanging off one's home directory turns out to be remarkably useful, if only as a safe repository for the occasional rant, whinge, or self-indulgent personal essay.

It's easy, and I recommend it: make a locked (mode 700, for the Unix geeks. Make subdirectories called, e.g., 2008/06 or even 20078/06/19. Write. Occasionally copy drafts into LJ or your website, and move useless junk into the attic.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

move useless junk into the recycle bin.

Aaaah, yet another old timer seduced by the Mac side of the force...

(It took me a month to convince my first boss that, no, on Unix, it's either there, or it's not, you can't just mark it deleted (reclaiming the space) and then change your mind later, because that's likely the first place the filesystem will write anything new... he'd been on single-user mainframes for 20 years and simply did not grok the idea of a truly multi-user system with daemons and stuff running around behind him doing stuff all the time.)

[mdlbear]

Hmm. Good point -- I was being excessively metaphorical there.

s/recycle bin/attic/ -- which is even more metaphorical unless you happen to be familiar with CVS.