Isn't it nice when you have an idea of something that would improve your life (and possibly the lives of many others) and you think to yourself "well if I were to do it, it would take me lots of time and hassle, someone should do it" and then you discover no less that someone has already?

A while back I was praising ant for being an improvement over make. And it is, it's smoother, it's nicer, it's more suited to the needs we have from a build tool today, make is ancient afterall. But then ant has it's problems.. the xml configuration scripts are a bit cumbersome and unnecessarily complicated (I mean who actually enjoys writing xml?) aaaand it's java based. Nice for portability, bad for speed. If you're building eclipse and you set up ant to do it, big deal, it takes forever anyway, the overhead in a java build tool won't bother you. But if you have a dozen java source files and you're working on some small project, you could still use a build tool to keep building more streamlined and organized, but ant won't feel like such a great choice anymore. Because making one small change in a source file will launch ant to rebuild that class. And even though compiling java doesn't take that long, launching ant itself probably takes longer. So there's a tangible overhead. Launching the vm itself takes a little while.

So if I'm writing a java application, I'll still use ant (probably), because it's a java environment anyway. But if I want to automize building latex documents or conceivably anything that could use the power of a build tool, I'm going back to make, it's quicker both to write the script and at every launch. But since make is far from ideal, how about a python based build tool? Python is quick and powerful. The first time I thought of that must have been a few months ago. Fast forward to today and....

Enter scons. scons is a python build tool, just like I conceived. As I started looking at the manual, it seemed very c-centric (with java support as well). But, it turns out that scons ships with build definitions for many languages and compilers, including jar, qt, latex, tar, swig.. well you get the idea. Not only that, build definitions are just simple python files which are easy to write. So the next time I need a build tool, I'll definitely see how far I can get with scons.

Yes, that's what I think my social strategy needs, if not requires. I tend to be fairly focused in my social interactions - when I meet a new person, it doesn't take me very long to classify this potential new relationship into one of two categories. Yes, this looks promising. Or, no, I don't care about this at all. The second type I think we all have a lot of the time... people who put us off with a bad sense of humor, who have radically different opinions on things important to us, who carry themselves in a way we don't approve of, who don't seem to get us - in short, people we don't really like. That's quite simple, unless we are made to spend time with them, we can just cross them off the list immediately.

But the former kind of people, those who seem to have a lot of potential, are very tricky to pursue often. Even if a person does seem interesting and appealing, there are still many obstacles in the way of friendship. This is where circumstances can completely ruin the chances of this going anywhere. For instance, you may not have time to pursue this relationship, or even though you're fairly certain that this has potential the other person may not be, or they are not looking for any new friends right now, or well you get the idea. So there's a fairly big step going from just meeting someone and thinking they are worth pursuing, to getting to a point where both of you agree that you want this, to actually going anywhere with it. Now, sometimes you will get to "stage two" of that cycle and it will just never materialize, not for a lack of good will, but because of circumstances. This is very frustrating. By that time I will have invested myself emotionally into this and when it fails to go anywhere, I get quite disappointed. Miistake. This is where some cold blood could help.

Even though I have this binary classification system, it doesn't really reflect reality. I have a lot of relationships which are neither the zero nor the one, neither hopeless nor solid friendships. They are just in between, mostly promising relationships that stagnated at some point, or good relationships that faded, but not completely, just to a point where they are still useful. And so I'm starting to think that my approach is wrong. Instead of trying hard and getting disappointed when it doesn't work out, I should probably consider relationships more like a stock broker would handle stock. With a robotic disregard for individuals and just trying to maximize on investment at any given moment. Pursue any relationship of interest to the extent that the present situation allows, and at the same time accept loss with cold blood. Instead of making it a tick in the "loss" column and letting out a big sigh, I shouldn't even care, just move on to the next one. And maybe a week later try to revive the one that wasn't going well and see if it does better. No building, no long term concerns, just short term strategy.

In Norway, in the juice section of the supermarkets they use to sell these 1l cartons of grapefruit juice in a green container. That was good stuff. Then they switched the juice that was made from yellow grapefruits to the red grapefruit variety, and that was a really bad move. Juice from yellow grapefruits just tastes better, you can't just suddenly pretend otherwise. At least they could have introduced the red grapefruit juice alongside the existing one, but no, they just replaced it.

But here I am now and so far in the Netherlands I've yet to see yellow grapefruit juice. I bought a carton of red today and it's not bad, but I miss the yellow stuff.. :(

Here we are again, this is familiar ground. Much too familiar, in fact. An escape from the strange country up north, where everything is on its head, sort of. Here I am, in the heart of Europe, in a cozy little town where the people are nice and the weather is currently making me feel like I'm on vacation. But in this strange and funny country, where I don't speak the language (yet slowly begin to understand), there is no escape, no escape from one self, even here. There was always a great hope in my heart that I would make this move and my life would change into everything I've wanted it to be. Well, maybe that hope was a little less idealistic than I just described it, nevertheless it was big. In some ways it is different here, some things have changed for the better (in fact I keep pondering blogging that sometime). But some things are the same.

It's not easy to blog with a heavy heart. I usually find it comfortable to blog when my head is clear and all I have in mind is some trivial thought which I try to spin in a way that makes it funny. But when I undertake a heavy thought, I often scrape the blog before I get halfway, too often it goes nowhere and the main idea gets completely lost. This may be one of these times, although I've taken a stand to finish this one, I feel the need to put it together.

I'm sure we all feel inadequate in many ways, but the biggest source of my lack of self esteem is not fulfilling my professional/academic obligations. So far in life I haven't worked much, so it revolves around school. I wish I knew why and how it all fits together, I've been over it enough times trying to figure it out. But I suppose it starts at some point with a feeling of enthusiasm about undertaking some piece of work. A thought of "oh this is interesting, I look forward to it". Then a time comes when the enthusiasm wanes, or rather some distraction comes into the foreground and the thought of working at the material is left for "later". I'm rather good at making time go by, I seem to find a way. Tv, movies, internet, where there's a will there's a way. Sometimes it's a feeling of accomplishment and "I got this under control" that triggers distraction mode. But the longer it goes on, the longer work pries on my mind, the more guilty I feel about not working, the less I want to get started. In everything I do I sort of intend to work but never get started. Days go by and I keep feeling bad about it. By now enthusiasm is a distant memory, I just feel a heavy burden. Once I hit distraction mode, there seems to be a treshold, past which point if it goes on for that long, I can keep it up indefinitely. How do I spend the time? It doesn't really matter, it's time wasted. It can go on for weeks sometimes, doing pretty much nothing at all. I usually have an idea of what my commitments are, when my deadlines are, I'm not completely disconnected from the world. But in these periods I gradually feel worse about myself, once I go into them I don't check my deadlines anymore, I don't want to think about it. My self esteem falls, I don't enjoy being around people. I don't want to face anyone, I feel inadequate and I feel vulnerable. In those times I usually fail to show up for a lot of things, I neglect people. Not that a lot of people depend on me, but if they did I would let them down. At some point I either recover, cut my losses and do some damage control or I just flat out fail, miss deadlines, fail exams, get really depressed.

It's been about 2 weeks since I did any work, I have deadlines coming up and here I am again.

Do you say "my bad"? I do, not that often but on occasion, sure. Here's a story about where it might have come from.