May 2007 - Posts
Since it had been a while since my last post, I thought I'd just drop a quick note to let everyone know why.
First, and most importantly - I've gotten over my Programmer's Block.I've churned out more usable, working, solid code in the last 72 hours than I had in the previous 72 days. OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but it's pretty close. So I've been hard at work.
The other reason is that I'm getting ready to go on vacation (starting Saturday) so I had to get some things done. I've been spending all my work hours (gasp!) actually working pretty consistently.
The combination means not much time for blogging.
That's ok, no one's reading it anyway.
Well, as I mentioned yesterday, I had a good opportunity for most of the day yesterday to test out the theories presented in Part I of this series.
I'm more or less doing the same thing today - though I expect to be here for a longer straight period of time.
And the results...?
It seems to be working! I'm not back to 100% efficiency (my mind still wanders quite a bit) but it's getting there. I'm actually being productive on that project and making a lot of progress.
Thank goodness!
Well, I had every intention of trying out the ideas I mentioned a couple days ago while I was at the office yesterday.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) there was so much other stuff going on that I never really had a chance to sit down to it.
But here I am on a Saturday in the office when I don't have to answer the phone or respond to support e-mails... so hopefully I'll find that the theory presented does in fact work.
For the last... who knows how long... I've been struggling to get work done on a project I'm doing at the office. It's not that I can't do any work - I have no problem picking up tasks and getting them done. In fact, it seems like I go after those sort of things just to avoid working on that main project.
This seems a lot like the concept of writer's block.
I did a search on the internet and the first hit was this site. It made a lot of sense. Particularly this section:
I sit down, sketch it out and then start thinking about how great it's going to be when it's done. Boom, crash, there's the mistake. It's that vision of greatness that's a killer. Why? Because your mind gets about 100 steps ahead of reality and then when you sit down to try to turn it into a working system the mountain you've built seems too large to climb. Basically it's day-dreaming and dreams are often far removed from reality.
This sounds almost exactly like what I'm going through. This person's suggestions?
So how do you combat this? I really don't know for sure, but I do know it helps to think small. It especially helps to avoid the dangerous day-dreaming of greatness. I'm trying to consciously watch for this and kick myself every time I find myself thinking about how great something will be without actually working on it. My success has still been limited however. For instance I just came off a four day crash over the weekend. I did manage to dig myself out of it by forcing myself to just tackle a tiny little piece of a project, then the next little piece and so on. With this I was finally able to put together some good productive hours.
I'll give it a shot tomorrow and see how that works. I think it just might, because it makes a lot of sense.
Word came today from the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the University of Southern California will be the opening game of the 2008 football season for the Virginia Cavaliers.
What does this mean?
Let's see:
Sounds good to me. Things are looking up for Wahoo football...
I really hate posting things on my site where the source is a pay article like one of Chris Horne's recruiting Q&A's from TheSabre. But I can't pass up commenting on this one snippet.
Nick Jenkins is a 4star DT that will arrive on grounds this summer to start his time as a Cavalier. He looks posed to take over the "workhorse" role of current defensive star Chris Long. Here is a snippet of his comments when talking to Chris Horne:
Every school I talked to except for Virginia was football first. When I went down to UVa, the first people I met were the academic advisors. That showed me that Coach Groh, Coach London, Coach Belin and everybody who recruited me were more about after football than anything. It seemed like every school except for Virginia was recruiting me for football. Virginia was recruiting me as a person and they were going to help me succeed after football no matter what, whether it is in football or off the field. That was big for me.
Now, we may not win the MNC very often by recruiting just these kinds of kids that care about these kinds of things. But we'll be competitive and we'll be proud of the kids we're putting out into the real world after their college careers are over.