Another beautiful day, and more strange thoughts. I have been thinking about the sandwich line story I wrote last night. Many will think I was going off on being impatient. Actually I wasn't. I was going off on being where you are and doing what is necessary to accomplish the given goal at that time and place. If you walk into a sandwich shop and your head is elsewhere the menu is the last thing you will consider. Same with life. If you go through life being someplace else other than where you really physically are you are wasting your life. Driving with a cell phone in your ear is another variation. If you do one thing you can dedicate yourself and your mind to it. Doing two things means neither one gets even 50% of your attention. When you do things like that while driving you are a menace plain and simple. Doing things like that as a matter of practice during your life means you are wasting opportunities daily. Be where you are and doing what you are doing. Multitasking is not only over rated, it is lying to yourself. You are doing neither activity well and the results will prove that out. Life is sometimes all too brief, it can end suddenly, and there are absolutely no guarantees on life unless you were one of the lucky ones with an ironclad contract from God tattooed on your butt when you were born. I checked, I don't have that contract back there. So these days I am rearranging my life so that I do things that are more conducive to living life rather than just passing through while it being somewhere else.

I sort of took today off and tried to let my mind get some focus on where and what I am. It was dangerous because new thoughts came into my head. Music lyrics provided some of those. Things like having to know yourself before you can appreciate other people, corny stuff like that. Other thoughts came from realizing that I have some sort of anxiety that distracts me from concentration. There is evidence I have had it all my life and it just got worse recently. I will have to learn how to deal with that. Self analysis sucks, and it can be very difficult to make it productive. First step might be to keep a tablet handy and write some things down as they occur to me. I started a things to do list like that a few weeks back, it took me several weeks to work through that list. But I did. Now I need one just to record my thoughts so I can get them organized.

I am reading books on some software I want to learn. That's bad enough but the software is from Microsoft and I have to say those guys are insidious in self promotion, and rather crappy at putting together a product right the first time. I am reading several books on some of their software that changes massively from release to release, even to the point of being incompatible between versions. Not to mention that the latest version is like heroin for the user because it purports to do so much behind the scenes that the user actually cannot change the code once the M/S software emits it. I write about this because I see a very big problem with code emitters and code maintenance, like code maintenance being nearly impossible in that realm. It has made my opinion of M/S programmers sink to what I think of COBOL 'programmers', "when they make it so any fool can do it, any fool will". If you think I am being harsh realize that most major banks cannot process your transactions immediately because their critical code is written in COBOL and they have no idea how to figure out how to rewrite it in modern code to make it interactive or ready for real time processing. The guys who coded it are all gone and the new guys have no idea what the code really does. Just like the people writing in the new M/S offering. They really have no idea what their code does behind the scenes so if it goes bad, they have no clue how or where to fix it. Just a bitch about M/S. And life in general too. How many people have given their lives over to modern conveniences and fashion and have no idea how to really do things for themselves?

It's late and I need to go to bed. Tomorrow I will ponder the job market and more programming. And try to keep a tablet nearby to write down my random thoughts so I can accumulate them and sort them out. You can't really appreciate someone else until you understand yourself. I changed and I need to know where I am so I can appreciate life better. This new world I am living in is very challenging.