A Better Day

Attitude Adjustment

The evening after the horrible afternoon I spoke of in my last entry, I bought myself I bottle of wine and kicked back on the ol' meditation cushion for awhile to get some perspective back.

I mean seriously... getting this worked up over something so essentially silly is, well, silly. I think this tends to happen to anyone when they work somewhere for awhile: you start to get tunnel vision at work, and perspective starts to narrow quite a bit. You really have to make an effort to remember that it only helps to worry about things over which you have control. When you answer to a boss at work, you don't have 100% of the control.

My mood has also been helped by working on the project I really want to be working on today, tightening up the code and making the libraries I've been building more reusable. This was mostly just moving functionality around, but it is always fun to look back on a huge volume of code you've written and make it better. It's a lot like rereading an old poem you wrote and tightening a few lines here and there.

Breaking Up the Band

Speaking of writing, I had been working on an original D&D campaign setting for the last couple of years with some friends, but the group dissolved about a month ago for a variety of reasons. But the experience served to remind me of two difficult lessons that are applicable in a lot places:

1) It is hard to work with others, because compromising isn't fun
2) There is a critical point where new ideas start to become detrimental to any project because they keep it from moving forward

The aforementioned group has been essentially split in half and I find myself in both camps, now apparently working on both projects. But I'm not sure how this split will actually solve either one of these problems. People may make fun of management types, but if you put a bunch of creative people in a room to work together and one of them isn't in charge, you might never get out of there with anything concrete. Even if they don't have the title of "manager", there has to be at least an unspoken arrangement whereby final decisions end up getting made by one person... all the neat, abstract ideas in the world don't put a product in somebody's hands.