Coffee and Code

Will someone please buy me this shirt?

Sometimes, I embody what the pictured shirt says. Every few months or so, I become obsessed over some programming project and spend almost all of my free time working on it until it's done. That's how this weblog, and the website it sits on, came into being in the first place.

Is this a good way to work? I'm not sure. One one hand, single-minded focus can be handy, because it makes it easier for me to push through and complete large bodies of code. I tend to overdo caffeine and sacrifice too much sleep during my code-a-thons, though, and it becomes more difficult to communicate with other humanoids when I've got code on the brain constantly.

I manage to get a little balance in my life by simply going months and months without doing any techie-type stuff at home. It's a feast-or-famine approach, I guess, but there really is more to life than just the internet. Seriously. Someone told me that, and I believe it.

You'll see a new design for my website appear this summer, the details of which are still quite secret. I have a couple of smaller code project planned as well. However, I am devoting most of the summer to non-techie stuff, such as looking for a house, marksmanship, taking care of our awesome dogs (see: my flickr account), and some awesome summer concerts (Iron Maiden/Dream Theater in June, and also RUSH! in June).

Today, I will be getting some sun in my backyard... mandatory sun, as I must bring the rule of law to my yard with my mighty weed-trimmer. As the weeds are trimmed, so too must beer be consumed. If you're a home-coding geek, reading this post: How do you like to work? How do you achieve balance? Do you try to? Tell me.

A week ago, the hard drive on my laptop crashed.

I had managed to get a decent backup of my most important data about a week before the crash (intuition?), but I have lost several gigabytes of music, digital photos, and stock art forever.

At first I felt pretty badly; I actually had sort of a hollow, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized what had happened. I wasn't mourning the loss of data so much; I just had no idea whatsoever what to do with my time!

Hard drives are relatively cheap and it won't take me long to get the machine back up and running. So why haven't I done it yet? Well, the truth is, I am finding that not having a home computer immediately at my fingertips brings its own rewards.

Before the crash, I would typically spend one to two hours after work on the computer. That's in addition to the 7-8 hours I spend on a computer at work! I'd typically do things like check my bank account, mess around with financial spreadsheets, and surf news and current events. Occasionally, I'd piss away a whole evening on a website like cracked.com. Now, don't get me wrong here - I'm not blaming my PC for my own lack of time-management skills; hell, I love that machine. LOVE IT. I'm not saying it's not useful, either - for instance, I used it to create the website that you're looking at right now. It's just that with so much time daily on a computer, I tend to end up with what I call "computer head": bleary eyes, fatigue, and a seriously degraded ability to communicate effectively with other human beings.

I have survived a week without my home machine. I've had to find other ways to spend my time, and I feel much better somehow.

Now, I'm not going to get all high-and-mighty here and tell you I've begun the Great American Novel or anything; my time-management skill haven't improved at all, and I'm now totally addicted to Xenosaga III for PlayStation 2. However, I feel vitalized, more cheerful, less tired. I'm more likely to get out of the house and just go do something. Energetic and peaceful at the same time, like a zen monk who springs out of bed in the morning and goes about the morning chores, whistling all the way. Except I'm not a zen monk and there's no way in hell that I will ever spring out of bed in the morning to do chores; not without coffee anyway. But you get the idea.

Does it seem as if, as you grow older, time seems to pass more and more quickly?

That’s how I've been feeling these days... But enough. The month of July has been a lot of fun: fair weather, outdoor adventures, good booze and great friends. It has also been insanely busy month, as far as my occupation is concerned. I’ve recently taken the tactic of trying to convince myself that I enjoy stressful, high-pressure situations. Seems to be working out, but if I've lost all of my hair by Christmas then I might have to take that back.

As I write this, a Bowflex commercial is playing on TV: "I gave all my fat clothes to my fat friends!". What an a-hole, huh? I’ll bet his "fat friends" were like, "Oh, thanks" but peed on his car door handles afterward or something.

Uh-oh, looks like I’m hitting the bottom of my blog-worth thought barrel. I’d better go for now - that whiskey’s not going to drink itself, now is it?