I've never felt like this before when I'm about to leave for a vacation. I always have some kind of specific expectation about what I'm getting myself into. And this time it's fairly straightforward, I know whom I will be seeing, what I'll be doing. But I feel puzzled about the whole thing. Worried about work once I get back, worried about the next few months which by and large are yet unknown, about things I've told myself I would do and still not started, about things I planned to do but never felt like doing, asking myself why that is and why I really look forward to something at a time when I can't do it and then lose that passion when the moment comes. Whether I should stop planning anything at all, so that at least I won't be going through a list in my head of stuff that never got done. Impulse decisions, when successful, are the ones which give the highest rate of satisfaction afterall. But that means I have nothing on my plate, nothing to think about and that isn't good at all. Because then I just end up wasting time.

The last two weeks were so much like many many summers before. Home alone, with a lot of projects on my mind, few if any I ever started, none completed. Without direction, without passion. Summer is supposed to be fun, right? At least work has a purpose and that's good to have, but then a bunch of plans I should be excited about and I just feel indifferent. Why is that?

Put your press pass and tape recorder away, it's old news, but it's definitely worth mentioning. What am I talking about? Project Gutenberg, an online repository of free ebooks. They pride themselves in having released 10,000 books online for anyone to read. That was by 2003, so the total number I don't know. But if you think it sounds a bit sketchy, here's a list of the Top 100 books (in fact several top100 lists), where you can verify that they have plenty of goodies on display.

Now, great as this initiative is here are two points of criticism:

1. The books are not accessible enough. If I want a specific book, I can search for it but there is no categorizing into genres. The only meta info they provide is when the book was released by Project Gutenberg. So if you have some other outlet of books which lets you context search, search by genre, "customers who purchased this also purchased the following" etc, then you can use that and come back and look for the book you want. But that kind of meta info is very helpful in finding new books you may enjoy.
2. The books are all in plain text format. Well, it's either plain text or html, but both look unformatted (no css) and very dull to read off the screen. Wouldn't it be great to also have .tex releases (or some other markup, I don't care which one) so that we could compile or own pdf's or other more user friendly formats?
   (To be fair, the html version has markup and I believe all books are marked up exactly the same way, so you could just write your own css but that has concrete limitations.)

So today I officially started my summer job at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Till now I've been using an empty office, the guy who had it moved to Oslo (wouldn't we all want to..). In the office there are 3 monitors and two desktops. I had been using my laptop all this time, cause it was the easiest for me. I also worked a lot from home during the project but now that I'll be at the office, I decided it would be more comfortable to have a desktop computer. So I asked if I could use one of the two in my office, and the boss had no reason to object. I was gonna put Ubuntu on it for a fast install, but the socket on the cdrom didn't seem to match the IDE cable. So I go talk to a co-worker and I explain the problem about the socket on the cdrom drive being too wide for the ide cable. "You mean like... scsi?" "Right" Hell, I had never actually seen a scsi drive, it never occured to me that's what it was, I thought it was some wacko non-standard crap.

So I burnt an Ubuntu installcd and went from there. The install took a while, considering the computer isn't state of the art (dual Pentium3 500MHz w/ 512MB SDRAM). But when it was time for X to come up on the screen, all I got was a blank screen. Xorg didn't kill the session and report an error, the image just wasn't there. I checked the logs and there was nothing anywhere to suggest a display problem. Now, I'm not good with hardware because I'm not at all hip on hardware. To me hardware is just an obstacle in order to get to the software. But while I was moving the case around a few months ago, I noticed it was connected to two different monitors. I didn't think much of it at the time, but now it suddenly struck me. For some reason this baby had two video cards. So I plugged in the other monitor and what do you know, there's X. Weirdo. I switch back to console, it's back on the monitor in front of me. So I got X on one, console on the other, but not at the same time.

After a while, my co-worker comes by to check that I got it working and we start chatting. "You know if you'll be working here for a while, I really recommend one those 21 inch flat monitors we have.." Well, duh. "Well, I'm just satisfied using what is already here." Now get this, from the time I first took the office, there was this big box from DELL lying in the window. I never even thought about opening it, figured I'm just a temp, I'm not gonna mess with their stuff. So my co-worker spots it and walks up to the window. "Dude, this IS one of those flat screens". Turns out back when they bought them, every office got one. It had been just lying there in a box all this time. So I start unwrapping it and now I got my own uber-cool 21'' beauty. :cool:

I never get tired of observing how humans have severe difficulties at staying on the logical path.

Friday, 14:03. I call the print shop to find out about how I can get my project report printed. "Hi, I would like to print a lengthy text in book format, it's about 315 pages and I'll be needing it in 4 copies." "Well is it black&white or is it in color?" "Most of it is in black&white, a few pages are in color." "A few pages? What does that mean, a few? That doesn't tell me anything." So I try to make up for the 'appaling blunder'. "Okay, let's say 30 are in color. Do you know how long it will take to print?" "Well that's pretty straightforward." Yeah, great answer there, chief. But that doesn't tell me anything, so I keep trying. "What if I bring it by in half an hour, how long do you think it will take?" "You can't bring it in on a Friday afternoon and expect to get it done immediately." Oh my god, really?? I understand it's gonna take some time but I'd like to know what kind of time we're talking about. Time for a coffee? Time for a long nap? Or for a two month vacation? "Yes, I realize that, but do you think you can get it done today?" They're open until 18. "I can't say, if you bring it in, we'll put it in the queue and we'll see how long it takes." What is the queue a black box? Don't you know what's in it? Don't you work at a printer? Don't you have any idea of how long it will take to process what's in the queue? "If you're lucky, maybe we can get some of it done today." I realized this is all I was gonna get.

meta
/me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ A prefix meaning one level of description higher. If X is some concept then meta-X is data about, or processes operating on, X.

If you can't follow that, just remember that a meta-something is a description of something, roughly paraphrased meta means about.

I just noticed today how funny it is the way we deal with complexity. Have you ever tried getting into a subject and there's an overwhelming volume of books, tutorials and manuals about it, and finally you're relieved to find one that reads "What you should read first"? Imagine how much time it must have taken to write all that documentation, but if that wasn't enough, someone had to document the documentation, just so that Joe Schmoe could find his way around it. But then what if the documentation keeps growing, have you seen books that give you a "Chapter guide"? That's going even further, explaining what you will find in each chapter. Imagine you wrote that book, including the chapter guide, and someone would ask you to write a short explanation about why your wrote the chapter guide the way you did(!) That is now the 3rd level of abstraction, as in meta-meta-meta.

Why do I harp on this, you ask? Because I'm starting to understand what it's like. I'm edging closer to completing my big project and rough estimates show there's going to be 250 pages of documentation! You'll be relieved to learn that 100 pages of that is auto generated, so I've "only" churned out 150 pages myself. And the thing is, when you're writing a 30 page document, you should ideally have a pretty good reason to spend that much time on it. So not only do you invest all those manhours into producing good documentation, you'll also have to expect to justify doing it. See where we are now? meta-meta. That's right, I've written a chapter guide, no joke. Why do all this? The short and sweet answer is to keep my teacher happy and get a good grade on the project. The diplomatic answer is to provide a well documented product for whomever might be interested in it (most likely noone).

And the document index is growing ever longer.