As an entirely unrelated mention, I’ve put the soerensays2 theme into a Mercurial (Hg) repository, so I can start making some changes to it. I’m just gonna let the log messages so far speak for themselves:

changeset:   4:8d2ac374a722
tag:         tip
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 16:50:25 2009 +0100
summary:     pre/code: add Menlo; no need to make it larger any more; no indentation

changeset:   3:dd105c8d8777
tag:         tip
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 16:02:48 2009 +0100
summary:     No more columns; 32em instead of 25em; 18px instead of default (e.g. 16px); centered for now

changeset:   2:c1d03afcbb24
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 15:43:06 2009 +0100
summary:     Remove the header link for now; was never properly implemented

changeset:   1:741937fb2884
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 15:31:50 2009 +0100
summary:     Restore double-em style

changeset:   0:10dd0d874700
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 15:28:41 2009 +0100
summary:     Initial

Kudos to Peter Hosey for Lazytwitter-style help with uploading a de-repository’d copy of the WP theme to the Web server via SSH. Looks something like this:

hg archive -t tar -p 'yourtheme' - | ssh example.com 'tar xf - -C ~/path/to/wp-content/themes'

As I’ve noticed with lil’ side projects such as Denis’s all-new Ruby-based CyanChat relay, working with a distributed versioning system feels ridiculously liberating to a developer. I can see what all the fuss is about. I just still question it would work well in all kinds of environments where Subversion does.

I’m still at a loss what exactly happened, but it must have been a combination of bad timing on the housing company’s part, negligence on mine, and incompetence on that of the bank.

In any case, a relatively simple, brief conversation on Thursday fixed it, or so I thought: the nice lady told me the server should be back up within fifteen minutes.

You may have noticed it wasn’t, but whatever the reason, it now is.

Must be jetlag.

Einstein had it right: if I could put my problem in adequate, comprehensive words, I would have just the solution. But therein lies the rub: I can’t put it in words. I can outline the basics, but that inevitably leads to two things: it sounds either overly technical when it should be more personal, or entirely silly when it should be more serious, and it is only truly understood by those who suffer the same and thus couldn’t possibly give much advice.

Allow me, then, to instead enumerate some of the things which aren’t problematic; not so much because I believe it to result in helpful comments, but more for the observed cathartic effect.

In September of last year, my brother pointed me to an internship offering at a small Windows software development shop in Bremen. I’m more of a Mac developer, but I try to be open to all platforms. I was intrigued by the opportunity, especially considering that, since the middle of ‘05, I hadn’t really done much to push my life forward. Graduation. Canada. A few days of fame with a little Mac freeware. Successful launch of another Myst website. Diabetes. Now, a job.

As they have told me much later, they were somewhat unsure about me. Not so much my developer skills, but my social ones. This didn’t come as a surprise to me; however, very few software developers manage to have both.

On the third day, I was told I’ve exceeded their expectations; over the coming weeks, I was pressed to decide on when I would start full-time; beyond that, they wanted me to start an apprenticeship. Three months of interning; a bit over half a year of full-time; now two or three years as an apprentice ahead of me.

Can’t complain, right?

No, the job has been great. I’m very thankful for everyone involved that I got this far, and I think it’s safe to assume that I still have plenty of potential ahead of me at that company. Beyond that, I should be just fine elsewhere, too. There are no reasonable grounds to believe that I’m particularly bad as a software developer¹.

We’ve had a difficult project which — just my kind of luck — I’ve been working on almost from day one; it’s become increasingly stressful. Customer provides incomplete specifications; project lead is overwhelmed and unable to press the customer for more detailed information; I waste far too much time developing in the wrong direction. One thing after another, we miss deadline after deadline; worst yet, we eventually decide to go live anyway (due to pressure from the customer, of course), thus multiplying the problems as what would otherwise be minor bugs now start causing huge amounts of incorrect database rows. It’s manageable, but not fun. Lessons learnt from it? Yes: when my gut tells me that we need more information before starting to implement something, I should at least try to press for just that. My gut would have been very right, but my mind told me that I was new still and didn’t understand the process well enough. Turns out I understood it better than the others did.

As the stress kept piling on, I had to move other projects aside, which made things difficult for everyone in the company, as customers complained about the backlog (which nobody could really be blamed for — certainly not me). It was, as two people close to me had been saying for quite a while, getting time for a vacation.

One of the two invited me over to her place, and it seemed just the right idea. Since early 2006, I hadn’t gone anywhere, and even before that, it’s hard to say what recent trip of mine qualified for a “true” vacation. London in fall 2004, perhaps? Now, having spent about 9 months doing increasingly difficult (though still well within my capabilities) work, a feeling of exhaustion started filling me. The sense of accomplishment (I have a job? Check. The bosses respect me? Double-check. I’ve been getting great feedback from some customers? Triple-check.) was still there; the feeling that I could go on and on like this, however, was not. No, I did need a break, and now I have it.

For a while, I had fooled myself that this wasn’t necessary; some false pride made me not even bother to ask my bosses. I’m glad I got over that. Yet as the date of departure drew closer, something seemed off. I was not truly looking forward to this vacation. Part of it was just the anxiety over the whole flying-shebang: security theater, possibly forgetting to pack something important, knee pain during the transatlantic flight, not finding my friend at the airport. But there would, I’m afraid, be another part.

The theater was fine. The US has two fingerprints of mine now, as well as an iris scan. The customs officer was direct, but kind, finishing with “Thanks, have fun!” when I had revealed to him that my friend and I shared a passion for Myst. The pain was there, but bearable. The plane had in-seat video, with actually a rather good selection. I watched P.S. I Love You and Juno, both of which, while far from great, felt worthwhile and definitely a good way to forget the agony of limited legroom. Frankfurt airport was somewhat confusing, though most of that stemmed from me having arrived very early from Bremen.

And then I got out of customs. My friend was waiting right there.

I could be all dramatic and say “…and that’s when things went downhill!”, but that would be terribly unfair. She and her husband have been kind hosts, and I’m not sure any kind of preparation on their part could have changed things.

---

Sometimes in my life, the pieces just come together as if they had always been meant to. I had always wanted to work in a software company with a relative lack of hierarchy and a rather strong emphasis on the individual, where I could shine, and I got exactly that. And yet, a year ago, even mere days before I started, it was virtually inconceivable to me that this would actually happen. It seemed but a dream, or an ideal; not a reality. Still, it happened.

---

Perhaps one day, I will look back at this vacation and discover that every single moment in it was meaningful. Or, more likely, I will find out that every moment was actually an opportunity (that I did not use) to accomplish something. But for now, I’m lost. I can hear the voices of “just do something!” from everywhere, but they’re not helping, and while some may take this as an insult, I don’t mean it like that when saying that those people miss the point.

What I regard as the common picture of a vacation is that you hop on some chartered plane to a tropical island, drink cocktails and read magazines in the whirlpool, then fly back. Oh, dang, I forgot the mandatory massage. That doesn’t appeal to me. At least I think it wouldn’t; I don’t truly know, never having done this. I have my moments where I want to give that a shot, just like I sometimes feel like climbing Mt. Everest, skiing in the Alps or going on a safari, but I think that’s a world too foreign for me to spend much time in.

The trouble is, as much as I believe to understand what I don’t want from a vacation, I have a hard time defining what does excite me. Meeting a friend that I hardly ever get to see in real life? Sure, that is a great thing, but we talk almost every day anyway, so what is there to say? Learning or practising something I haven’t done in a while or ever before strikes my fancy, but not enough to motivate me all the way through. I’ve started a small project in Visual Studio, only to give up soon. Started writing something in Ruby, but only for two days. Wanted to practice my flowchart-fu, but, no dice; it just isn’t enough fun.

I can push myself to work a bit on various projects here and there, or to write posts like this very one, but all the while, this feeling of “what’s the use?” comes creeping over me.

Carpe diem

A few weeks ago, someone well-known in the Myst community died. If you knew him, you’ll know whom I’m referring to; otherwise, it isn’t relevant. His death was a tragic reminder of You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, or, the shorter version: carpe diem.

Seizing the day is a motto that should matter to everyone; indeed, I try to remind myself of it.

---

Rather fortuitously, that was the very subject of a kids’ sermon last Sunday that I happened to be at: make as much as possible of the time you have, for it is limited. Whether that’s a concept whose consequences children can understand, I do not know, but I appreciate the attempt to emphasize it from early on.

---

Maximizing the time at hand requires potential, and I do believe that to be an asset of mine. It also, however, requires aspirations. What do I want to do with the time?

I can define long-term goals. Stable job. (Check.) Happy relationship. Move out / apartment / house. Kids / pets? Company of my own?

Not very useful. What do I want in the short term? What are some baby steps that I can do right now, beyond just sitting on my behind twiddling thumbs, wasting time sighing over having wasted time?

Check out random cafés hoping to score a chick? That is so not me. Walk around the block hoping for inspiration? Yeah, does the trick every now and then. But there’s no real bigger picture to that one.

Routine

I’m actually not interested in a normal life. I’ll admit that much. Normal has very negative connotations to me; normal means shedding the definition of who I am; I believe so even though I do not know what that definition is.

Getting a system, a routine, a form of stability into my life was crucial, and the job played a big part in that, but there is something destructive to it as well: it encourages me to settle for less than there is to my life. Don’t settle. Not yet. I’m nowhere near that.

Yes, I’ve made progress. But even though it has given me some temporary sensations of happiness, yes, even of satisfaction, it doesn’t cut it. I want more.²

I’ve had happy moments in the past. Is it too much to ask that I know how to, to use programmer jargon, ‘reproduce’ them? Probably. But perhaps I should know how to encourage them? To increase their likelihood?

I’m not getting a clear answer on whether I need to work harder towards my goals — which would seem to make sens — , or, in a vaguer sense, just pray, work in the right general direction, and let things happen. The job, for example, would suggest the latter: I had been hoping for a situation just like that for years, and now I have it. Perhaps, largely unknowingly, I did play a big role in getting there? But perhaps I largely worked against it and needlessly postponed it, or made it less pleasant than it otherwise could have been?

---

If anything, this vacation allows for a massive amount of reflection. I simply haven’t had time for this since September. Most of the thinking steers towards the negative, but some analysis has actually led to interesting lessons.

I just need to fully figure out what they are.

1. I’m deliberately avoiding the term “programmer”, for I like to be involved in project planning, UI design, support and other areas as well, even when, primarily, I do write code. ↩
2. Cue lame Myst Online references. ↩

…make a return on this blog. I’m not fully happy with them yet, but it was high time, most of it had been implemented weeks ago, and the choice of day seemed a fitting one.

Unlike previously, comments are now written in Markdown. Having participated in reddit a lot more in the recent months, I’ve grown more fond of it, though I still disagree with some of the syntax, but more on that some other time, maybe.

On a personal note: many have asked how I’ve been doing. Work has kept me awfully busy, but mostly in a positive sense — I’d rather drain my energy doing something fulfilling than waste countless years of time doing something largely unfulfilling.

Tired of Kubrick, I decided to jump to my own design a little bit early. The new theme isn’t quite done, and you’ll notice this in two ways:

• A lot of features are missing. Most prominently, this includes search¹ and comments (both reading and submitting). Update: Search is fully back.
• Most pages are missing. Right now, only the legal page is there. There’s no “about”, which used to be a somewhat comprehensive (though incomplete) section, nor “contact”.
• Some of the layout is inconsistent. This particularly affects older articles. If you spot an article whose layout doesn’t appear to make sense (presumably, it used CSS rules that I didn’t transfer over to the new theme), let me know. For current articles, consider upgrading your browser.

Improvements – visual refresh aside – include the addition of tags (I will deprecate most categories, leaving only a handful), better handling of images (they scale to higher quality) and what I hope will be generally regarded as a less-in-your-face layout.

The site makes extensive use of CSS 3 properties, which means it won’t display quite as nicely on older browsers, but I have tried wherever possible to make things degrade nicely. Several browsers won’t support the multi-column layout, but they should degrade nicely to a single column of text. Most won’t do drop shadows underneath some of the text and images, but the site will look fine without them.

I also try to take advantage of some HTML 5 additions, such as the <header> and <footer> elements. (I’ll probably also try and let MYSTlore take advantage of HTML 5’s <video> element.) The site isn’t entirely valid at this point, but I’m getting there.

Finally, there will be a series of tabs on the top, as I showed a while ago.

Now, I realize that using CSS 3 and HTML 5 features this early makes navigating my little place on the Web ever-so-slightly less enjoyable on a regular browser, but when it comes to technology, I’ve always been the kind of guy to jump on bandwagons. (I can’t help it. )

I hope you enjoy some of the changes.

1. You actually can perform a search; there just isn’t any interface for queries yet. ↩