We’re doing this “10-4” thing at work for one week out of every month; this week is the first one (i.e. 10-hr days for 4 days, and friday off*); that’s probably it. And one single specific timecritical project** that I need to have results for by the end of tomorrow (while constantly being interrupted with everyone else’s whiny-ass hardware/software problems) – I have a very short attention span, which I typically deal with by having 3-5 concurrent projects that I can switch between as neurons reach burnout for one or the next. Anyway, this week I’ve been way more tired and burned out than usual, and barely able to wake up in the morning, even though I’m only getting up an hour earlier than usual.
Upon coming home, I think to myself that I could use my limited remaining uptime to finish up one of many unfinished projects, etc… until realizing that I really, really don’t want to. I’m burnt out on computers, on logic, burnt out on electronics. I was going to spend tonight tracking down the elusive secret handshake that unlocks the E815‘s diagnostic interfaces***, but the mere thought of opening C++ Builder and writing out some test code made me cringe.
But beyond that, I’m burnt out on making myself lunches, and dinners; the process of coming home. I’m burnt out on noisy mental process: that “song semi-permanently stuck in my head (where ‘song’ = ‘everything’)” state, unresolvable indeterminates, and I’m burnt out on thinking about things I can’t change.
I’ll probably be feeling substantially better in a week or so, but meh, I felt like ranting.
* no idea what I’m actually going to do with a 4-day weekend (besides catch up on all the sleep I missed, and waste life on the computer), but it’s there.
** an R&D project which is, at least in theory, way cool – a method of weighing an arbitrarily large something, or determining the force on a beam, etc., just by vibrating it. No more having to lift some heavy thing up and park it on top of a scale; just slap two sensors on at any arbitrary positions and measure it. It would be kind of like being able to walk out to any spot on a bridge, press your hands against the asphalt and immediately know how many pounds of cars are on it. Actually doing all this turns out to be harder than it sounds, however: our running pet name for it, while it was still in the “idle BS talk” phase (as opposed to where it is now, the Real Project phase), was Hardware for Ascertaining Load Force by Applying Sinusoidal Sweep in Every Direction ;-)
*** kind of sad to realize that I’m more interested in talking to the phone than using the phone to talk to people. This realization changes nothing, but it’s still kinda sad.
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