Yesterday started off fine, and then took a turn for the worse. I had a technical report to write on the work we did for the last few days, and the words just wouldn’t flow. A writer’s block of the worst kind. Eventually, today, I finished it and got it all written down, but I labored over every sentence of the 4 measly pages.
In the evening, while depressed over the lack of progress of the paper, I wolfed down six(!) hot dog buns. Since I hadn’t eaten much during the day, it didn’t carry me too badly over the daily food intake limit, but it certainly fucked up my mood, to have transgressed so badly in my diet. Gaaargh!
I went home, rested a bit, read a bit, did NOT eat anything else, and went to sleep.
Nice things that did happen today: I agreed to give a talk on Linux kernel hacking at a workshop in Tel Aviv University in July. I compiled and installed oprofile, and was quite impressed with its profiling prowess. I read another chapter of Turnbull’s The Great Mathematicians – I’m up to Descartes now, me’thinks.
Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal 
Best way
To solve writer’s block, IME.
Decide you are going to labour through every sentence until you get the goddamn thing done. It’s frustrating as hell, but it gets you through the block eventually…
So, good job 🙂
Comment by moshez — June 16, 2003 @ 3:19 AM |
Re: Best way
Thanks… I’m just about to mail it to its intended recipients.
I wish I had a paper idea to submit to linux.conf.au… I bet I wouldn’t have had any writer’s block on *that* paper.
Comment by mulix — June 16, 2003 @ 5:56 AM |
Re: Best way
Ummmm….syscalltracker? 🙂
Comment by moshez — June 16, 2003 @ 6:07 AM
Re: Best way
No, even if they accept it (OLS didn’t), I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s history, dude.
Comment by mulix — June 16, 2003 @ 6:17 AM
Re: Best way
Oh? I’ve been to the project page a while ago, it looked like you have plans of porting it forward to 2.5/2.6. Bummer 😦
So, what’s your current free software interest? How about an OSS-compatible wrapper for ALSA, so porting OSS drivers to ALSA can be done with a simple #include 🙂
Comment by moshez — June 16, 2003 @ 7:49 AM
Re: Best way
I did have such plans, but I got tired of being the only one to work on it. I may take it up again if another interested maintainer comes along, so I have someone to talk to about it 😉
re free software, that deserves an lj entry of its on. Watch this space 🙂
Comment by mulix — June 16, 2003 @ 8:05 AM
Re: Best way
I hope you’re not talking to me. I vowed to stay away from kernels a while ago…I used to tweak the kernel like insane back then, and I’m not cut out for this anymore…sorry.
Anyway, as you probably so, I actually am watching this space 🙂
Comment by moshez — June 16, 2003 @ 8:47 AM