24 Jun 2002 mstarch   » (Journeyer)

Books

Just finished a depressing book, J.M. Coetzee's 'Youth' which I impulse-shopped saturday. It's about a south african young man who travels to London in order to live a life as a poet. He thinks London will transform him into an interesting person, he believes himself special because of an inner spark of poetry, but he soon discovers that life is finding him wanting in every way. He finally comes to the conclusion that he has to make a life of it for himself, that he has to take chances and be prepared for defeats along the way. The scary part is that I feel the book might as well have been written about me...

Vacation time

Wuhu, I'll be off for a week of (hopeful) relaxation in my mothers summer house next week. It's one of the few remaining traditions in my family. It's very nice to have a well-known place like that where you can really relax, and where you have fond memories.

Golf

Last week I played golf twice, both from very early morning. It's really really nice to walk on a golf course at dawn, listening to the birds, enjoying the quiet, drinking the brandy ;-). It's really kinda meditative and definitively very relaxing.

Programming

I really need something worthwhile to code. I feel like I haven't coded anything 'real' for months, and the worst part is that a part of me doesn't really miss it. I fear I might end up as a sufferer of the burnout-syndrome, or maybe I just need a holiday. I need some motivation, and I definitively need someone to cooperate with on a project. I have spent too much time writing stuff on my own, without supervision, without peer reviews, without constructive critisicm and debate, without the social aspects of programming. That has always been one of the cools aspects of open source development - you're not (always) on your own (not that that's the case for professional programming, but it seems to be in my case).

I still think about the 'is there more software that needs to be written?' problem that keeps plaguing me, but now I think that that is more of a symptom of my lacking motivation.

Music This week, I've been listening to; Tom Waits, Smashing Pumpkins, Kristin Hersh, Dead can Dance, MOS Clubbers Guide to Ibiza Summer, and ... stuff.

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