Zeno's Paradox: No Longer Spinning My Wheels

Zeno's Paradox

February 23, 2004 - No Longer Spinning My Wheels

After a couple of months of banging my head against a beast called Project Pad, I'm not back and making progress on things. I've also been reading a good deal and playing games a bit less. I figure that this is one of my cyclical moments where I had to take a step back and tighten some screws, adjust some mirrors, and reorient myself a bit.

Finally making progress on Project Pad has probably been the best thing to happen to me in the last few days. I'm to develop a Flash-based front-end to a Boolean search language I wrote last year as part of the Spoken Word project. It seems like every time that I was about to make some progress, a brick wall would pop up out of somewhere and knock me out for a bit. Today, I managed to get the persistence working in my applet and tomorrow, I'll tie it in with the server-side search language. The problem was probably more with me than the platform. The problem is that Project Pad's architecture and implementation are pretty non-intuitive to me, and I could never wrap my mind around the problem enough to be able to make a dent in it. (I had a similar problem with integrating Cocoon with Oyez last year.) Today, I finally managed to bust through the mental wall and actually get some running code working. It sounds and looks trivial (if you were to see what is actually running), but the pieces have fallen into place and I can finish this work and move on to some more interesting things. My personal karma is definitely better as a result.

I've also noticed that post-Metroid, my interest in video games has dropped sharply. I picked up "The Two Towers" and I've been playing it a bit. It's a really fun and good game, but I just don't care to play it at the moment. However, I've been reading quite a bit lately. I read through Charles Lewis's "The Buying of the President 2004" and a lot of Neal Gaiman. "Buying of the President" is basically a straightforward book about who's funded who in the 2004 election and what we can expect as a result. Half of the book was about Bush, while the other half was about the (former) nine Democratic challengers. After that, I finished up volumes five, six, and seven of the Sandman books. I'm really enjoying them, and I'll feel a sense of loss after I finish number ten or eleven as it'll all be over. I've also been reading "American Gods". Barbara gave me that as a gift, and it's been pretty good so far. I still need to read more, but so far so good.

Finally, I've been cleaning my apartment like mad. Some sort of spring cleaning instinct came early to me, I guess. I went through my books and DVDs, catalogued them, and culled out the ones that I didn't care to keep. I've listed them on Amazon and they are going pretty quickly. I guess I didn't price them high enough...

I've also decided to drop my film course. The format didn't suit me. I would do my readings, and then go listen to the professor talk about the readings. It was moderately interesting the first time (reading) and quite boring the second time (lecture). Since I've been a bit stressed, I figured that I'd cut the course loose and relax a bit. I've also tabled the grad school thoughts at the moment. I was stressing about that too much and decided that I wasn't playing to my strengths enough. I'll revisit the question later when I have a better idea.

Anyways, that's about it for me. My run this afternoon is taking a toll on me and "American Gods" is calling out to me. Time to relax and read before passing out for the night.

Posted by br284 at 07:53 PM

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