Day 94

In the beginning, my brother Paul talked a lot about the power of positive thinking. I'm wondering who talks about its danger. Positive thinking is a tremendous thing until it leads to its natural corrollary of positive exhaustion. The root positive thought is "I can do it" which convinces us that despite all indicators to the contrary, the doing of an idea is possible. That leads to the thought "I must do it" because somehow all that positivity leads to bravado - a sad turn of events if there ever was one. This quickly devolves, upon execution, into various muddled groanings of "Why did I decide to do it? what possessed me?" before it bottoms out in "I can't do it" which turns into "Nothing really matters - we're all going to die someday" which nobody really wants to put into a blog, now do they? And all because the power of positive thought got carried away.

Thus did the great idea of a History Browser turn into the terrible idea of actually writing a History Browser. And that's how the days became a burden, not something I wanted to count, much less report on. It's hard, irritating, exhausting work to write that software, virtually alone. The first prototype proved to be wholly inadequate, and had to be completely replaced with a second prototype, which then turned out to be close, but still woefully broken.

And that cycle continues today. I'm deeply humbled by the steepness of the slope. I've written thousands and thousands of lines of code, and thrown away nearly as many. I'm learning new coding techniques with every new implementation problem. My eyes are blurry. My senses are numb. I'm a wreck.

(to be continued...)