Woohoo! My hard drive crashed! Made for a miserable afternoon at work, but then the silver lining kicked in. Crashed hard drive means no functioning development environment. No functioning development environment means no no work tonight. No work tonight – oooh, whatever shall I do with myself? (Sleep is high on the list.)

Out on one of the various book vendor websites, looking for a location near work that might have a book I need ASAP. So, I put in my zipcode and ask for the nearest locations. Lo and behold, one pops up that lists itself as remarkably convenient to me: only 8 feet away! I knew I have a lot of books in my office, but…

Just a basic economics of software development question: do you ever find that the quality of your after-hours coding goes up in direct proportion (though potentially with diminishing returns) to the number of beers you’ve consumed? In the spirit of continuous software process improvement, I believe I need to test these working conditions further. Anyone willing to provide me grant money, all in the spirit of research, of course? Fair warning: my requirements for beer are a definite determining factor on the cost of this research – no Bud Light, Natty Bo, etc. I hypothesize that my code works better because I’m more relaxed and suddenly find things amusing to fix, rather than pain-in-the-neck annoying or beyond-the-level-of-frustrating to fix. Note that this is not my usual method of after-hours coding. Somehow, tonight just felt like a good evening to imbibe. More follow up analysis required, particularly as I look at the results of my coding in the light of complete and unblanching sobriety.

If you checked this page earlier today, you’d have found an empty blog! Somewhere in my settings, I must have set the main page to display entries for the last month. Generally, even in a bad month, that’s five or six entries. This past month, however, I’ve come nowhere near this page. The combination of two little girls and an overwhelming project at work has kept me well away from blogging. Sometimes even well away from sleeping. I promise that this blog hasn’t died – its author is just conserving strength and hours for sleep.