Life’s tough and you never really have enough time to do all the things you want to do and all the nothing you want to sit around and do. Of course, since there’s never enough time, you just have to try and prioritize and put in your best effort into the things that matters and hope that the half-assed effort you invested in the other “supposedly less important” things somehow works out alright. Anyway, let’s see what’s on my plate (in no particular order)…

• work stuff
• read this book on Lisp/Scheme that I got from McQ
• open source
• anime
• blogging

There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be read and researched for work in the hope of making an educated decision on what our project should do. Beyond the technical feasibility, there are also business considerations to be factored into the equation. All this planning business certainly isn’t my strength so I’ve been keeping pretty quiet throughout all of our meetings. I think I say less than three sentences in a meeting and often only when someone is addressing my directly.

I’ve always been intrigued by Scheme ever since I first heard a software engineering student from the class of 2006 mention it at CUSEC in 2005. The book itself is spans a respectable 500 or so pages. I can’t say that I’ve actually planned it all out just yet as to how much progress I’ll make per day, but I’m hoping to get the book finished. I mean, it’s only right for you to finish a book that someone has lent to you, right?

The Europa simultaneous release for Eclipse beckons day after day. There are some interesting problems that need to be tackled in ECF and some of them are at the API level. Due to our heavy usage of interfaces, this can all get pretty dirty since there’s not much you can do about bad API design once you’ve released something since you can’t just change interfaces around (minus deep analysis of the problem and superinterfaces and subinterfaces) without breaking API. It’s tough. It might look good during the design phase and all, but once it’s out in the wild, who knows how someone will implement it.

I’ve got a lot of shows to watch. I could easily finish a series or two every week, but it’s of course questionable as to whether I really want to do that since it eats up a lot of time. This is certainly the most relaxing of my tasks but is probably also the most useless since I’m not really doing anyone any favours besides myself. Could my time be better spent on IRC answering questions on #eclipse? I don’t know.

Blogging takes up a lot of time too, surprisingly. If you don’t blog you obviously wouldn’t know, but it actually does. For long entries like this one, I can easily spend well over thirty minutes on it since I don’t usually have a direction for my post before I start writing my post (well, minus the anime blog entries since they all follow the same format of three paragraphs’ worth of text embedded within four sections of images). I end up doing a lot of deleting and rewriting, actually. Prior to posting I’ll read it over once to check for mistakes, and then again after I’ve posted to make sure I haven’t missed anything. It’s amazing how many mistakes slip by, really. Or maybe it’s sad how many mistakes slip by?