The way of Drifting

“Wilson!” – Chuck Noland, Cast Away

One among my truck load of personality quirks is, I don’t do trivial. Not that I don’t do trivial well; I don’t do trivial. So when I was learning computer programming, and needed practice programs to write, I was stuck.

If you’re going to go small, just don’t go at all.

One of my many personal mottoes. Another one is, “I’m not cleaning that up.” But that one does not apply here. Or does it..? Hmmm.

Anyway, if you’ve ever read a How To programming book^{don’t do it!}, you know the example programs they have you coding are well beneath trivial, fairly well into infantile. In fact, two chapters into one of the For Dummies programming books, I said to the book, “I’m not that dumb,” put the book down and went off to write my resume for a software consulting job I thought I wanted.

The point being, if I’m not going to write a trivial practice program, I’d better think up a very interesting non-trivial practice program to write, because non-trivial programming projects are a lot of work. The thing is, while I have a fairly fertile imagination, I’m simply not that good at pulling project ideas out of my butt^{the correct term is “anal retentive”}. While I was developing software for a living, I could crank out a program pretty well, once someone gave me a project to focus on, but on my own..? Not so much. I basically sat there coming up with ideas and trying to decide if they were worth the effort.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway

Now that I spend my time trying to write for humans, I find I’m the same person I was when I was writing for computers.

For the month of April, I managed to post something every single day… for the first 26 days, because I had that external focus of the A to Z Challenge – Not, which gave me a letter each day to (not) focus on. But now I am set adrift upon a sea of ideas, with no course laid-in, no port to sail for. So that’s where all my blog entries for the past five days have gone.

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, a sense of humor to console him for what he is.” – Francis Bacon

The thing is, I do have a star to guide me: I enjoy clubbing people over the head with tedious knowledge, imparted in a torturous manner. And I have my “Categories” to serve as “shipping lanes”, if we must extend this wretched metaphor.

So I shall whip out my… spy glass. 😉 And focus on the future. Because the future is not yet written, any more than tomorrow’s blog entry….

I really need to get out more

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TIA