Ah... It has been far too long. :-) I'm not entirely
disillusioned with the art of the public diary, though I
have realized that I must compensate for the lack of
physical and description and life-story narration with more
of the ecletic jumble contending with reality for my mind in
fragile equilibrium. Oh yes! I am indeed teetering on the
edge of insanity.
And in the land of dark hackery I have little of note to
report, being caught in the doldrums of bug fixing. Upon the
distant horizon I see hopes of spending meager amounts of
time on a drag bar (e.g. an alternative to cut-n-paste), but
we shall have to see. A lot of what I am doing is writing
testing tools to verify others', erm, less than perfect
implementations. Not the most terribly exciting stuff in the
world, but it does engage my time :-)
This was a while back, but it does have some reflection on
directions my life may be heading in the near future. I
talked with Rebecka Schulman (sp?) for quite a while one
night while we both worked late at Eazel. It was somewhat
disheartening for I found that she has shockingly similar
interests to mine...but developed several more years
(e.g. I
am at the beginning of my undergraduate experience, and she
has already done graduate studies for a while). So the more
I discovered similar interests and goals the more I became
disheartened by her apparent disillisionment with much of
computer science. This is not to say that I was merely
depressed by her lack of enthusiasm, because she is doing
many very interesting things with Medusa in great earnest.
Rather her perspectives as somebody who has sampled my
dreams already was worrisome - simply because it robbed me
of some measure of foolish idealism. The issues she raised I
have already heard, they are obvious. But hearing "myself"
in a sense uttering them, or rather somebody who I sense
would have similar views as myself with a great deal more
experience (eg Rebecka), I was forced to actually consider
them, and I found much of it to be true.
Computers are a rather trivial pursuit. If you are not doing
something with them that makes them work towards other more
worthy ends - you must acknowledge that what you are doing
with your life is playing. That is not necessarily a bad
thing, but in my particular case it is difficult to accept.
I think this may mean that I need to find out why I'm doing
what I'm doing. Part of it...is because I do derive pleasure
out of architecting elegant solutions, yes. But is immediate
pleasure sufficient impetus to purse something as my life? I
don't know, but I think not. So now I am left with either
attempting to deduce a meaningful rational for pursuing
computer science theory, or I must supplement it with other
pursuits...or I must shallow myself and accept it as is. I
doubt I can do the latter, or rather I wish not to and so
choose not to consider it a viable option.
Being therefore disillusioned concerning the nature of
computers by talking too much with Rebecka...I have decided
to pursue other venues of expression and general temporal
consumption. Perhaps the most easily doable for personal
edification is to write. Now I have engaged myself quite
thorougly this summer in writing poetry, but as I am not
exactly an epic poet :-)... this is a disjunctious process.
So I have the grain of a novel and intend to start work on
it. It is rather frustrating for beautiful sections of
writing pass fleetingly through my mind as I work upon the
mechanisms of the world itself...frustrating because I
rather suspect myself to be at a loss for such passages once
I apply myself to the pen (I don't much relish writing
fiction at a computer for some odd reason, yes I know its
silly but...I am a beast of whimsy and it makes me feel
more, oh I don't know, more...poetic? to write in such a
primitive fashion :-).