Deep under

As the end of my sabbatical is coming closer, the frequency and regularity of this blog are suffering. The reason is not that I have lost interest in keeping it up, but partly that it is becoming harder to find something new to write about, and partly that I have had very little time to spare. I have been quite monomaniacally working on an extension of GROOVE that I have mentioned in some previous post, namely recipes for rule scheduling.

At the time I was figuring out how this should be formulated theoretically, now I thought it would be a nice idea to actually code everything up, as a proof of concept. I started with this last week, but since Sunday I have really dived in, and I've hardly come up for air, food or sleep since. Time has passed in the outside world, but I've been breathing code and living on a different timescale - or so it seems. A little bit like the story levels in Inception (brilliant film!), although unfortunately the analogy is off in one very important aspect: in the world of coding, time does not pass 20 times as slowly. I do have trouble remembering what day it is.

It is very rare to have the occasion to spend days in succession on coding, but the feeling is like no other. It's very addictive: things are coming together, you certainly don't want to stop! It is a matter of keeping the appropriate patterns in your head, a mental image of the problem and its solution, which needs to be translated through your fingers, through the keyboard, through the programming language into the bits and bytes that constitute an executable version. Those patterns can grow so strong that everything you see or do is reinterpreted by them. Biking to the store becomes a matter of finding the right conditions, moments of choice, set of actions, path of execution. After a five minutes you notice it must be raining, since you are getting wet. Why is it so quiet on the streets? Oh, it's 21:00 - no wonder you feel hungry. Very strange dreams at night.

One of the reasons I've been able to keep this up is because I feel wonderfully fit these days. I am maintaining my various sports routines (the only non-essential I'm taking time for), and I have no doubt my current feeling of physical well-being is for a large part due to this. Did I say non-essential? Might have to rethink that.

So, let's hope that this will turn out to have been time well-spent, apart from enjoyable! I do know that this tool I keep going on about is one of the main pillars of my scientific reputation, such as it is. This has its disadvantages, as it creates an obligation for upkeep which makes it harder to move on to new pastures. Tool maintenance is generally acknowledged to be one of the most time-consuming and unproductive of activities. What I am currently doing is not maintenance, but in a sense even worse: I am creating functionality that will have to be maintained, so increasing the obligation. Such are the ways we kill ourselves.

On a different note: after receiving a small dent, this evening my faith in humanity was confirmed and restored! What happened? I accidentally left my new, glowing yellow bicycle vest in the locker at the Sports Village on Monday. The next morning I went to inquire, but it hadn't been found, and locker 144 which I thought I had used was empty. That was the dent.

Today I used locker 142 next to it, and who will picture my amazement: there it was, shining yellow as ever! For 2 times 24 hours it has hung there in an open locker. Whereas it would have needed only one dishonest person to take it, there must have been at least 50 honest humans who refrained from doing so! (None of whom found it necessary to hand it in at reception, but that's another issue.)