I’m taking ten minutes out from programming the world to a standstill (Javascript, jQuery, and Webservices have been the poisons of the morning) to surf the web and shoot the breeze with friends. When faced with long term development projects, it’s all too easy to become consumed with the deadline, to bury yourself, and eventually burn out.
Burning out typically means you no longer care, and (hypothetically) end up playing Angry Birds rather than getting on with anything useful. The same fanatical levels of focus you might normally devote to the working of elegant user interface magic instead gets re-purposed to the flinging of birds at pigs.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a brain dump blog post. I should do this more often. I know not myself what will leave my fingers next - it’s liberating in a strange sort of way. I wonder if shortening my sight as far as the next sentence makes the chore of reading any better or worse?
Change of subject. The DVDs turned up from Amazon today - “From the Earth to the Moon” - an HBO series that I somehow knew nothing about. If only we had known about this when our eldest was doing her school project on space… Is this where I put my cards on the table and admit to being a huge space cadet? I wonder if it goes hand in hand with software and web development?
Side note - learned a lot of things I had no idea about when I helped our eldest do her school project (which, incidentally, we didn’t help her write - unlike many of her friends, who’s parents routinely write the entire project for them.. sorry for the rant, but I think it’s terrifically unfair, and only ends up hurting the child in the end because they have learned nothing). Hmmm… that footnote went on a bit. Where was I?
Did you know Laika (the Russian dog) was killed pretty quickly after launch following a malfunction in the rocket, and that it was covered up for the best part of 50 years? Did you know the Russians also sent up a Tortoise? (known in our house as the Space Tortoise now)… Oh, and you know the famous photo of HAM the chimp from the American rocket programme, with the insane grin on his face? That was the one shot where he didn’t look like he was going to try and bite somebody’s arm off - because that’s what he was trying to do to the press photographers who wouldn’t leave him alone…
Oh well… there went lunchtime. Back to the Javascript I guess…