For the longest time I had wanted to post this badly. :-p

If the feeling of missing someone is just pure sadness, then dealing with and getting out of it would be very easy. It’s just like any other sadness: just find the source and decide what’s the best course of action to deal with it.

But as we know it, the feeling of missing someone is far deeper and multi-dimensional: depending on our experiences with the personal and our level of attachment with him/her, the feeling itself takes on other tinge of flavours – sweetness, joy, happiness, bitterness, fear, admiration…

It sometimes feels like a roller coaster ride: at times I feel like I was in cloud nine as I recall the sweetness of our encounters, and within one split second a deep sorrow sinks in and your physical absence further fuels my hunger to need you by my side at that moment in time.

Maybe it’s just an obsession of mine… that I really wanted you by my side.

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it. – Thomas Fuller

Just recently I took up a simple freelance project, which involves interfacing with a USB camera. Considering the fact this is my first programming related project and having no prior work to base on, I took the naïve approach by using a rough mental estimate on effort and difficulty and then picking a number that sounds just about right based on that mental exercise.

As soon I started this virgin project of mine, I realize one critical thing that I had overlooked: The work involved is not just the programming, but also making the initial setup to my development and testing environment. The mistake of my oversight is made more pronounced by the need to interface with a specific piece of hardware – I’m nastily surprised when Windows 7 crashes spectacularly due to the driver that came with it. That eventually led me to having to bring up another computer and have Windows XP set up as my testing environment.

What I failed to take into account is the “initial setup cost” – the fixed amount of time, money and effort needed to set the project up in the first place. This is one of the key variables that the manufacturing or product-based businesses needed to know as a matter of survival: failure to factor this cost in correctly could prove to be fatal.

Maybe it’s due to the fact that we programmers doesn’t deal with physical atoms, we may naïvely believe that our work involves us bringing up our text editors or IDEs, start banging on the code and expect that we can come up with our software after a couple of builds. But in fact we may overlook some setup costs until we hit into our first brick wall: things from finding SDKs, to checking dependencies; from doing page-fault learning, to setting up the testing environment, etc.

I consider myself lucky that my guesstimate of the price is about right. Considering the fiery hoops that I have to jump through  though, I’m starting to keep a journal to keep track what effort I had put into any projects that I attempted. I couldn’t think of a better reference than that to get a handle of things in the future.

Photo credits: abbyladybug [flickr]

Honestly speaking, I didn’t get the masculine appeal of DIY (do-it-yourself).

But recently when the tap of my bathroom sink had a crack, my morning routine is always greeted by some unwanted fountain gushing through the cracks (without the laser show and synchronous music). I’m not sure how I had that twisted sense of logic being too lazy to call a plumber, I ended up deciding to fix it up myself.

After having a mild testosterone rush visiting the hardware store (realization #1) and getting the tools I needed, I got down to work. Immediately the absolute difficulty of accessing the nuts within a confined 13-centimeter space (which no normal spanner would be of any use in this situation) had garnered enough hate that I hereby declare the inventors and designers of the bathroom sink were bloody evil sadists with a porcelain fetish. (realization #2) But I digress.

Getting the first nut out is easy actually with a basin wrench. It’s the top-most faucet nut which even the basin wrench couldn’t access to that makes it a bitch. I’m pretty much left with my bare hands to get it out. I really cursed out loud as I desperately trying to pry a really tight nut, something my feeble strength couldn’t really make it budge. (realization #3)

I really wished that I bought a hacksaw at the hardware store (realization #4).

It ended up taking me a whole three hours to have the tap replaced. After the herculean effort I had made to replace it, I had the strong sense of accomplishment that I could do it… as well as feeling like a real man. (realization #5)

Hmmm, I wonder what other project would I want to take up next? :LOL:

I’m always under the impression that as each of us are unique individuals with varying experiences in life, we often have our own views, biases, understanding and assumptions when it comes to the world around us. And depending on our eloquence in expressing ourselves, we also have varying degrees of success when it comes to communicating with people. Especially when having two individuals from extremely divergent “worlds”, the demands of communications skills are far greater than one may be used to as compared to hanging around with really close friends.

It has been quite a long while ever since I had the habit of musing: letting my thoughts drift and experiment with philosophical ideas within the confines of my own worldview. And occasionally I end up gaining certain radical hypotheses in my worldview that I find myself particularly nervous to air such views when someone says something that I don’t quite agree upon at least on an intellectual level.

Maybe it’s just our own culture to avoid any sort of confrontation or conflicts as much as we could. Or maybe I’m just too self-conscious and not wanting to be perceived as argumentative, or even worse, a lunatic. But deep down, I really like some sort of a tribe of which we could engage in discussions and thought explorations without or minimal inhibitions.

It does made me wonder whether is just me feeling that way.