Ryan's Journal

The thing about computers is that they take up as much time as they save. I've spent parts of the last five days trying to get myself back to the point I was at five days ago, when nothing on ryanlee.org was broken, and I don't think I'm there yet. The list of things has finally shrunken to a point where I can think about something else without getting distracted immediately looking for ways to fix what's broken.

I'll have to leave the computer world behind in the future because there's no end to it. I like to see projects finished. With computers, projects are never finished. You can't leave even the simplest site alone. The hard drive will die. The computer will blow up. The network will fail. The software you were running it on will become obsolete.

The number of things that can keep me, sitting in my apartment, from communicating with my server over blue yonder is astronomical. I can still talk to it 99.999% of the time. It's the .001% of the time that I can't that bothers me. It's the small chance that a relatively young computer will just stop working one day. This is not an occupation for perfectionists. Perfect software, perfect uptime, perfect persistence cannot be achieved at any price.

This is not to say any other occupation doesn't suffer from the same problem, merely that computers aggravate it far more than any other field I can think of.

("You should have started with 'The thing about icebergs is...'" - Big Fish)

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