The Lair

As seen on Wikipedia. Perhaps I meant a vow of silence.

I switched off my IM client yesterday. Or rather, I didn’t switch it on at all in the morning. Such a trivial sounding thing to do, not launch a piece of software on a machine. The truth is that this was probably one of the first times that I had access to a stable internet connection and chose not to have IM software running. Ok, so I cheated a little in the afternoon and launched it for a few minutes, fully intending to go offline after seeing who was online at the time. Only StaticX was online and pinged me so I spent about half an hour jabbering to the wee Scots leddie. Not a perfect score for abstention, but close enough, near as dammit. Also, IRC does not count, ok? [Yup, there’s a long way to go to reform my IM/IRC habits].

What did it feel like? Not having my IM client teat to suck on left me feeling simultaneously liberated and uneasy. For one thing, you never do realize how much time is actually sucked away switching contexts from work to a chat window (ok, so some chat windows are work, that’s irrelevant here). It’s the equivalent of a runner training with a heavy lead belt and suddenly being asked to run without the excess weight. All of a sudden, work timecycles become a lot larger - I could write not one but multiple paragraphs of code without needing to concentrate on anything else. A slight digression here: a paragraph is basically a unit of my own devising, the smallest logical piece of code I need to write to express a certain concept. It could be a line, two lines, five lines but whatever it is, it’s a small self contained chunk of code. Keep it in my head, figure out how to write it, and then write it. Get it onto the editor window somehow before something else forces it out of my consciousness. Long years of experience have told me that if I context switch to something else before I write at least a paragraph of code, I’ll never get any work done.

At the same time, I had this vague sense of unease that any recovering information addict must feel - what if something is happening, if someone wants to get in touch with me and they can’t? No IM? Unthinkable. Maybe I should just leave the client on, just in case. No, I really shouldn’t. After a full 6 or 7 hours of this internal argument, I finally did crack and launch Trillian for a short time… but at least I switched off the moment the conversation with StaticX was done.

Not having to deal with weirdness over IM also meant that I could internalize some of the angst (ie: see previous post). Incidentally, yeah - Ubuntu Server and all the idiot fanboys may suck, but I’m still going to need to secure that box. I guess I’ll have to find the time from somewhere. Also to clarify, I love Ubuntu the desktop. Ubuntu the server may yet reach those heady heights, but it’s not there yet. So, I guess my real beef is with people who recommend it for every thing without knowing exactly how deficient it is. Or maybe, just maybe, having a pair of lovely Fedora Core 5 and RHEL 4.0 servers to work with has spoilt me for an unbiased assessment.

Angst. While I’m on the topic, it’s also worth noting that I tend to take eleborate care over cooking meals when I’m truly stressed out. I noticed this years ago, during the heady dotcom era… and it’s back now. Everything from risotto to various attempts at making paella. But the real star find was apricot and fig chutney from a local supermarket. *sigh* It’s fricking fantastic, it is. The mango chutney I dragged over from SL has been put to shame by this delicacy.