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So, how addictied to /. can one man get? More

So, how addictied to /. can one man get?

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  • From reading your bio, I'd hazard a guess that you don't have the excuse of youthful exuberance to fall back on... :)

    Me, I know now that when I start to yawn, it's time to shutdown and hit the sack. Unless I'm at work at the time, of course... :)
    • That's right. Scary, isn't it. Well, now I've gotten my two more hours of sleep, I've just dosed up with caffeine (actually I napped on and off all Sunday) and I'm ready to face the day,
      Rustin
  • at work and I was worried that I was reading Slashdot too much. I was posting journal entries everyday at work and checking the stories after lunch. After reading your journal I'll make a pact with you. Slashdot once a day Monday through Friday and that's it. Okay? Think you can stick to that? I'm not sure I can, but if you try I'll try.
    • I'm not even going to try. Slashdot is my neighborhood bar, most prolific information source, third largest generator of traffic for my web site, and best opportunity to rant.
      As far as I'm concerned, I don't watch TV (at all), I get work-related stuff from here that I can't find as effectively elsewhere, and I've found a better bunch of people to spend my time with then I *ever* have since the early nineties.
      For crying out loud, I live in New York City, have an active enough social life to have spent a total of three dollars on my last serious evening out (comped for the rest), worked in publishing and finance, and have a bunch of friends who sound like something out of a bad movie (amazing lives, extreme credentials, massively broad interests) and *still* have better conversations on more topics here then I can count on locally. That says a lot.
      Cut down? Nah, I just need to optimize.
      Rustin

      • Right. I'm optimizing my beer drinking. While on-line!

        I think the fact that we can all hide behind nick's is why some of us are willing to say some of the weird-assed-crap that we say here. That kind of risk taking makes the conversations interesting.

        But seriously, I really do need to cut down. Quality... not quantity. Yeah, optimize. I like that.
  • In my own defense, I did manage to get out of the house on time, make it to the seminar (very cool, JE on that on the way), get over to a client, drop off a bill, get in five billable hours, and get an intro to a possible new client.
    So, (not that I'm defensive or anything) I may be a flake, but I *can* pretty much pull it off when I need to.
    BTW, got my first midwestern store today (twenty posters going out to Milwaukee this week) and another wholesaler lookin' good. If I can just hold off eviction and exhaustion for another five or six months I may actually pull this whole mad scheme off.
    Rustin
    • Congrats on the store in the midwest. Your buisness seems to be gathering momentum.

      And now for something completly different: With all the things that you are knowedgeable about (which seems limitless at times with all your fully thought out replies to complicated topics), what is one thing that continues to elude your understanding?
      • what is one thing that continues to elude your understanding?
        You will probably think that I'm joking about this, but:
        Windows.
        It makes me nuts. DOS I could handle, I *love* the Mac, I did okay on the Osborne, Wang (mostly System V), Apple II, and futzing around in VMS and whatever system my baby Fortran classes used (WATFIV compiler on sumthin' or other) but Micro$oft Windows makes me utterly nuts.
        I keep trying to get it to make sense. I keep looking for the underlying logic in IRQ assignments or driver incompatibilities or DLL issues (trying to get the dozens of various Wintel laptops I've had to deal with over the years to talk to me is a thing I will carry with me for all my days).
        I just can't make my peace with the fact that much of Windows (and the boxen using Windows) is flat out arbitrary or inconsistant. What do you mean ten Dell (blah model number) showed up in the same shipment from the same order and they use some unknown combination of three slightly different CD-ROM drives/SCSI cards/whatever? How could a high-end company like Toshiba ship a three thousand dollar computer with a modem that doesn't work?
        I just have never been able to wrap my head around the idea that things could really be that bad and that the system mostly comes down to hundreds of thousands of exogenous decisions made in thousands of places and changing every day. I need logic in my life. Systems that are consistent and predictable or, at least, admit to their arbitrariness. The whole superficial semiotic message of Windows is Order, Comprehensiveness, Logic and I can't stop being mislead by that. A quirky system is fine with me. Given time I've even been able, for example, to start feeling comfortable and working well with WordPerfect (this having been in the days of WordPerfect DOS with all its custom font installs and ten step commands) or Novell or Pagemaker.
        What always makes me happy is something with a strong sense of one guiding paradigm. Like the Mac OS, or QuarkXpress (or all their products), or the old IBM PC hardware. It doesn't need to be a nice personality, just a consistant and strong one. Hardware on Compaq servers made me all warm and fuzzy; hardware in Compaq laptops (four different proprietary power cord connector designs and none of them in stock?!?!?) made me twitch.
        And, as you can guess, the various IT departments I worked for/with just couldn't believe that it could be so. Especially since sometimes something would come up on a Windoze box and I'ld happily dive in and fix it in a few minutes. But then the next time some problem that the nineteen year-old intern understood completely would leave me utterly frazzled. And, of course, all the while I'ld be tracking down network problems, fixing Mac stuff, coming up with procedures to improve server backup and so on. This left some of my bosses/clients convinced that I was just trying to be difficult. This makes for baaaaaad work environments.

        Anyway, that is the first thing that comes to mind. Certainly the most important. The broader answer is that I have massive problems with using other people's notational systems. I always have to translate back and forth. I suspect that a brain scan would find very wierd stuff. A few psychiatrists that I've known have certainly agreed. I suspect that some of my low-level cognitive tools are off-sync with most people's. So something like the behavior of molecules makes complete sense to me (mmmmm-saccarides). The calculus used to describe it drives me a little nuts.
        Of course this means that I came and went when I actually took calculus. I alternated between looking at some tool and getting it immediately and looking at other ones and feeling like I was translating from Basque by way of Klingon.
        That, by the way, is why I did not pursue an engineering degree. I put in one term of feeling my brain twist back and forth and decided that this was a bad bet. All the while that I was at Carnegie-Mellon I kept having discussions with other students/RAs/teachers where they would hear about my not understanding what just about everybody else considered the easy stuff though at the same time I was carrying simulations in my head (mostly non-numerical) of things like interactions of multiple electrical fields or actions of complex springs or whatever.
        Not a happy time.
        Nobody I knew from CMU could understand it when I said that I wasn't coming back for the spring term. After all, I was so *bright*; surely things would work out fine.
        If I had the time and cash (yeah, right) I'ld love to go back to some decent engineering school (even CMU) and try again as in the intervening eighteen years I've gotten a lot more relaxed and a lot better at that sort of working with other people's systems. I guess that you could consider me the ultimate only child. A friend used to say that she had grown used to dealing with me by thinking of me as having been raised by wolves.
        And that is what I do not understand.
        -Rustin

        Oh, and by the way, how are you doing this? I was just thinking about this issue today. I was giving no small amount of thought to what my blind spots are and working on translation techniques. Your timing and degree of perception are certainly gratifying, I would even say flattering, but by now this is getting a bit surreal. Gadzooks!

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