my special purpose

This entry has nothing to do with the fact that the button on my boxers is too small for the buttonhole and should be replaced.

As happens on many days when I’m staring at a lot of code and feeling mired in it instead of afloat atop it, I felt depressed today. This billing system at work is taking me too long, although I feel I’m getting quite close to finishing the first roll-out-able phase, which will be a relief for me. The stuff I’m working on is good because it’s open source and I can hack about in its guts, but its guts are strange and sometimes pretty stinky. I’m mostly prepared to deal with little ailments like head pigeons, but there are serious problems with the siggelyspooj in there.

Meanwhile, I’m looking at a number of neat projects that I want to make time for, but usually I don’t. Sometimes I’m burned out from doing other things, and sometimes I just stare at the wall and vegetate. I need to try to cultivate a second wind that will pick up when I’m ready to work on cool things, like JSAN. Casey, the JSAN Central Mentality, is being sponsored by about half a dozen people to go to OSCON and talk about his new baby (JSAN, not his real new baby). He said, “how is this going to look?” I told him it would look like he was the paragon of open source cooperation, and it will. I need to get me some of that. (The reputation, not Casey. I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but…)

I started to look at making some of my little JS widgets into JSAN packages, but JSAN.js was broken when I first tried. I might get back to it soon, though. Then I decided to try to get 0.01 done of Religion::Bible::Reference, to get that branch of Rubric moving forward, but I realized that the state in which I last left the code is reprehensible. Really, I should try to build on the things I’m supposed to have learned from HOP and APP2 to build a better reference parser, anyway.

So, rather than give up, I looked at rt.cpan.org and was reminded of a number of stupid Module::Starter bugs, which should now be squashed. Hooray!

I need to be more systematic in goal achievement. Perhaps I should make some to do lists on my wall chart and work on them in strict order. Then again, I’ve been to-do-listing for months now with sporadic results.

I think the real issue, here, is failure to correctly identify my dharma. So, here’s my plea: if anyone knows Vshnu, or has his number, let him know that I could use some advice. He won’t even need to brave a battlefield to give it to me. (If he doesn’t hurry, though, he might have to brave worse: Musikfest.)

Written on July 7, 2005
🏷 motivation