Thursday, December 12, 2013

I've been busy over the last few weeks.  I really have been trying to get stuff done.  It's all largely inconsequential stuff, but it's been stuff that's been sitting around because I wanted to get to it at one time or another.  "Inconsequential" is probably the wrong term here - it's not immediately important, but I consider all such things important.  And yeah, my inability to prioritize makes it that much harder to catch up.

Anyway, I've been working on bigger projects that have fallen behind the wayside - stuff like magazines, article archives, books, and stuff like that.  Movies too, as you can probably notice from looking at my tweets down there on the right hand side of the screen.  The DVR was at something like 95% for a long time.  I'd spend hours working on it, getting it to 90% or 80% and then ignore it as it went right back up.  I finally got mad and watched enough stuff to get it to fifty percent full.  It's a lot harder for me because one show will typically spawn interest in two or three others - mostly science and crime shows.  Then I'll record the occasional movie that I heard about two or three years ago.  Meh.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.  I won't ever catch up - the nature of information and my nature will prevent it, but I am getting the process under control.  To some extent, it's like food.  You need it to survive, but too much will make you overweight.  So it is with information - you need it to survive and work in the real world, but too much will paralyze you in mountains of data.

To some extent, I suppose this goes back to childhood - for both things.  There were large stretches in my life where both food and outside information were simply unavailable or not available in large enough quantities.  Now that I have enough or an abundance of both, it's easy to overdo it.  As I said, I'm getting control of it, but it's pretty easy to fall off the wagon.

Other things have mostly stopped as I work on this stuff.  It's not completely stopped, and I certainly spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but there's been little progress to report.  I hope to change that soon.

- Jim