Wednesday, October 16, 2002

That Middle Place. I'm in that middle place. I've been here since yesterday. This is what happens when I've got a ton of stuff I'm learning at work and projects that I'm doing at home. Suddenly - I pause. I'm in procrastinator's paradise. I have too many options. I have too many things to learn/do/create. If I'm at work and I run across something that I want to learn for my home projects, I feel guilty about exploring further. If I'm at home, and I start getting into my project I feel guilty because I really need to go over my J2EE books some more and study for my exams. This sensation of never having enough time to "get into" whatever I want to do is paralyzing. I think I need a shrink. Blogging, of course, is like fuel for fire. As much as I enjoy finding cool sites like Mitch Ratcliffe's Business Blog, they still do nothing to put me on my way to meeting my goals. Now it's time for bed (1:30 a.m.). I haven't produced or learned anything relative to my life for the past 4 hours. I've got all this stuff I want to do and learn, and there's only 24 hours in the day and I've got to sleep for what, 3 of them at least (hahaha. Oh how I WISH I could function on 3 hours sleep). I really need to learn to UNPLUG the internet and sometimes UNPLUG the computer so I can get the stuff I need to done... but then there's always that one thing I need that's only available online... I hate this feeling. You know what I'm going to do now? I'm going to go to bed because I have to, but lie there awake analyzing my project and mentally preparing for work. If I get up, I'm doomed. I'll be a zombie tomorrow. I have to stay there torturing myself mentally over analyzing everything and adding to my mental list of things to do... Definitely need a psychologist. Or a pharmicist... what's that new no-sleep drug again? -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 6:59:03 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Distant no more. In 1967 historian Geoffrey Blainey coined the term, the tyranny of distance, using it as the title of his book about how Australia's history and national identity were shaped by our distance and isolation from Britain (the "mother country") and Europe. Blainey argued that Australia only broke free from its... [Jonathon Delacour] 12:48:28 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Weblog Revue. Here are a bunch of interesting weblogs, covering a variety of topics: douglasp (Doug Purdy). Recently outed by Dare as a Microsoft blogger, Doug is a Java & CLR geek who is deeply involved with both current and future .NET Remoting - a topic near & dear to my heart! Somwhat surprisingly, Doug's blog has very few .NET-specific references - instead it touches more on philosophy, Doug's reading list & marathon running, Mozilla, Mac OS X/TiBook fiddling and a number of other non-technical topics. Overall, eclectic and personal. Green Hat Journal (Pinku Surana). Pinku's a DevelopMentor instructor and also one of the authors of the Hotdog Scheme compiler for .NET. Topic-wise, his blog runs the gamut: observations on implementing closures in .NET interspersed with references to Justice Scalia's interpretations, thoughts on animal rights & privacy issues, and biotech. Tecno-Geek Weblog (Brian Maso). Brian's another DM instructur who recently started blogging about Java and Web Services. His first contribution to the discussion is a counterpoint to Steve Loughran's excellent The Wondrous Curse of Interoperability, wherein Brian asserts that Web Service interop is overrated. This is obviously a controversial stance... Thinking About Software (Alexis Smirnov). I met Alexis in person for the first time last week at the web Services DevCon, where he'd driven down from Montreal for the conference! Although I had read his blog previously and had seen his posts in Sam & Greg's Groove Experiments project, it is always good to put a face to a URL. Alex's blog tends to focus on .NET & Groove, with a good ratio of linkblogging to commentary. All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels). I met Werner at the last Rotor conference - he's a researcher at Cornell, focused on high-end distributed systems, clusters & cluster management, and scalability/robustness analysis. The scale & scope of the problems that Werner is working on was truly eye-opening - the weblog updates intermittently, but it's a good subscription. Fast Takes (John McDowall). John was CTO for 2Bridge, then mySimon, and is now now the VP Engineering at Grand Central. I met John ~4 years ago when I was interviewing for a spot at 2Bridge Software. John impressed me, coming across as a smart, level-headed manager & technologist. His weblog has a similarly thoughtful tone. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 12:44:17 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein 11:27:24 AM    trackback []     Articulate []