If you work a technical job with a salary, you’re already facing two great dilemmas. 1.) you work for a salary, and 2.) you work with technology, where the work is almost never done. I find myself caught in a trap often enough - I don’t do well if I don’t get adequate sleep nor if I don’t have adequate time to spend with my wife and kids. Yet I don’t do well at work unless I’m perfectly willing to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Dealing with this struggle effectively requires a number of crucial habits and procedures which you do not violate no matter what.
Late Night Window
Up tonight working on deploying a new version of our OTA software to a regional cellular provider who will remain anonymous. Since my wife is a troop leader and both my girls are Girl Scouts, I’m surrounded by crates and crates of cookies right now. I’m eating haystacks at the moment. I know they changed the name, but I’m calling them haystacks.
I wonder who makes these cookies? They sure are good. My dog got into a box of haystacks yesterday - ate a half a pack before we stopped him. That dog sure was acting strange afterwards.
I try to imagine I’m doing worthwhile work, like Richard Feynman at Los Alamos, when I’m working one of these windows. I wonder if the boys in the Manhattan Project ate Girl Scout cookies when they designed the first atom bomb. Not very likely.
Middle-aged Men With Small Dogs
I am a middle-aged software developer. I have metabolic syndrome, which is essentially pre-diabetes and pre-heart disease, according to my doctor. I have a lovely wife and two beautiful young daughters, so I have a lot to look forward to in my remaining years. I got a dog to encourage me to get out and get some exercise. According to this search, there’s a lot of evidence and commentary suggesting that dog-walking can benefit your health, so I walk my dog religiously.
For Further Reading
The following two sites are at the top of my crucial reading list:
New Pages: Nix-known and Nix-unknown
I am a linux Systems Engineer and open-source software developer. There are many things I know about Unix. There are many things I don’t know about Unix. I intend to list all these things and hopefully move many from nix-unknown to nix-known. It should be fun!
Getting Started on Octopress
I haven’t had a blog in a long time. Earlier, I had a horrible PHP + CSS + MySQL + Contract with the Devil page that I moved around from website host to website host whenever my contract was up for renewal - I always found a reason to leave. Now I’m on a lovely VPS on Linode and I love it.
I tried Jekyll before but had a bear getting it running - now I’m trying Octopress, a wrapper for Jekyll. It’s much easier to use. I’m getting used to it. Now, I get to use my favorite text editor (vim) to create my blog. What a concept!
cool! easy codesharing!
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