Coffee and Code

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.

Because of the relative popularity of my Flash-based I-Ching @ SanctumVoid, I've decided to spend some quality time between now and 2007 re-tooling the Oracle. (And popular in this case means that I've noticed some hits on the page that WEREN'T search-bots!)

I-Ching @ SanctumVoid started as a javascript project 2-3 years ago... I then converted the app to Flash. (I personally think the Flash version is, like, waaaay cooler.) Now, it's once again time to re-vamp the Oracle. Here's my half-assed plan:

1. Move the I-Ching nuts 'n bolts logic out of the Flash frontend and into a set of web services. This will accomplish a couple of things: It will prevent me from having to stare at too much ActionScript inside the buggy, crappy ActionScript editor, and it will allow me to create front-ends for the Oracle in different formats, for example, webpage and blog plug-ins.

2. Conversion of the hexagram descriptions to Pinyin transliteration (e.g. Ch'ien becomes Qian).

3. User membership features will allow people to have profiles in which past readings could be saved.

4. A new, flashier Flash user interface.

These are a few of my ideas. If you have any requests for functionality on the new Oracle, drop me a line!

In the meantime, for this Sunday: doing laundry, reading Hardcore Zen, call Andy to gloat about my new 18-inch Iron Maiden: Somewhere in Time Action Figure.