slouching toward friday

I spent today running through a lot of the non-rjbs Perl code with Jay, today. Mostly we looked at huge, scary programs written by and for the engineers, and also at the mostly sane characterization code. My belief now is that the Perl I wrote will be discarded or replaced with VB and Access. I think this may well be good for IQE. They can be one big happy Microsoft family, and they can quickly implement good-enough solutions that they’ll never need to extend in the ways they previously demanded.

Honestly, I think the best thing for them is me leaving. I’m so burned out, there.

I’ve felt really really burned out in general, actually. I tried to hyper-relax last weekend and this weekend, neither time to much avail. In fact, this weekend my inability to really relax started to make me feel edgy and weird. Sunday, we headed out to Newark to get Jay from the airport. We stopped at Cracker Barrel on the way, which was good (but not great). I guess I mentioned this already, yesterday.

Anyway, tonight I thought I’d try to get some reading done in Network Programming with Perl, and I just found myself staring at the screen, feeling really, really useless. This feeling was nearly bordering on panic: “What if I get to my new job and can’t perform? What if I just stare at my monitor?”

Gloria went out to get some dark chocolate M&Ms, and I went for my last resort plan: I asked her to get me some soda. I’ve been basically avoiding caffeine since Februrary, with a few exceptions here and there. It wasn’t really bothering me, but I felt like maybe it would help me clear my head. I think it really has!

She got a twelve-pack of diet Pepsi with lime, which is pretty good. This is despite my renewed intent to boycott Pepsi. I will look for a less evil source of caffeine in the future, but something important was at stake here! I really do feel like my mind is cleared a bit, although I can’t say for sure that it’s caffeine-related. Maybe time will tell, along with the consumption of ten more cans of diet Pepsi with lime.

The dark chocolate peanut M&Ms were OK.

Written on May 10, 2005
🐫 perl
🌀 productivity
🏷 work