Back from about a month and a half vacation: both real vacation and medical leave. Boys and girls: hacking enough to get back problems isn't worth it. Even a small amount of exercise, attention to ergonomy and taking a fifteen second break to stand up and stretch every half hour or so seems to give a very good return on investment: one is then able to continue hacking even in the long run. End of sermon.

The reason I hacked so much was to get over a death. It was a good thing in the short term, but I got too addicted to hack mode to notice when I had gotten over things. So I continued until my back stopped me. On the whole, it might have been a better idea to have a life instead.

I've solved the mystery of the missing life, I think. Too much work, too little time for friends, all hobbies concentrated on computers. I've decided not to work overtime, and to make a special effort to spend time with friends, and to get a new hobby. RPGs and amateur acting seemed fun before, so I'll start with them.

I've sold my computer. I have a laptop from work that now handles all my computing needs. A nice enough laptop, at that: an HP Omnibook 900, only problems are that it weighs about a kilogram too much and has an abysmal battery life of only about 3 hours. I do not miss having to admin several computers. Having only one makes life easier, and if it has to be only one, a laptop is a very good choice, at least for me. I like the fact that it's small (compared to a desktop - there are much smaller laptops) and mobile. Mobile computing happens to be interesting.

The Palm V is not a computer: apart from backups it requires no administration, and crashes only about once or twice per year. I don't even yearn for new software. I'm quite content with the current selection of installed software: the builtin stuff, a better launcher, a calendar and to do list summarizer, and a game. Oh, and a `hack' for making åäö easier to input.

With the home computer I lose my TV card, so I've bought a real TV set instead. Should be nicer to watch DVDs on a somewhat larger image than the 10 by 25 centimeter one I had on the monitor.

I notice that I've just about stopped reading diary entries on Advogato. There's simply too many of them: it gets too hard to keep track of who is who, and even just the total volume is too large to read, now that I'm back to work. This is probably a loss.

On the automake thing: autoconf is useful enough, but I won't use automake, as long as it generates Makefiles that are both huge and complex. In theory, if the Makefiles would always do what I wanted, that wouldn't really matter, but of course there is sometimes a tweak or two that needs to be done to make them work in a particular scenario. Not very often, but the risk is too high even so. Makefiles are hard enough to do portably, I don't need them to be incomprehensible as well.