One of the worst thing that can happen in somebody’s life is when your dreams are scaring you out of your own sleep. As it turns out I’m in one of those situations. A nice period of my life ended just before Christmas, and now I’m in a bit of a pinch, with a late job, and no future (stable) job in view. I’m also out of luck with publishers since the last article I submitted to LWN was not even worth a reply, it seems.
I should be at least well happy about my health, one would expect, given that I am feeling better after the surgery and I just need to visit the hospital for some check-ups now. But even that is out of schedule, since I was supposed to be in for January, and it’s middle February now. The professor I had to reach is unreachable, so I had to pass through another doctor in the staff (whom I’m very grateful to for my previous staying too!).
But as it is said in Italy “one Pope dead, a new one is made”; I admit I’m not sure what the English equivalent would be but I’d expect it to refer to kings.
I’m currently feeling in quite a bluish mood but it’s going to be just fine as soon as I get some good nights’ sleep; relaxed sleep. The problem as I said is that my own dreams, or rather the content and the characters of the dreams I’m having lately, chase me out of bed. Even though I cannot remember the dreams by themselves, the general mood follows me when I wake up and, even though they should be pleasant dreams, they upset me very much.
Luckily I learnt to fight dreams, and nightmares, since I went to the hospital. My way of keeping them away from my mind is to listen to something that turns my attention to something much different just before sleeping. Podcasts have helped a lot about that, but sometimes I need more, longer content I haven’t listened to before. This is especially true when, like right now, Bill Maher is not on HBO so I cannot listen to new Real Time’s podcast episodes. For these times I corrupt a bit of my soul and buy audiobooks from the iTunes Store, yes with the freedom-hungry DRM on.
I was thus quite pleased when an anonymous sent me The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy CDs from BBC Radio (and I have to say I envy British people for BBC Radio 4, News Quiz is one of my favourite shows). Even though it also sprouted for me a technical problem: how to convert the CDs in a format that makes use of 100% iPod’s features using just Free Software? I’m afraid I’m unable to answer that question just yet but I hope to be able to soon. Also thanks to the (for now unknown since it hasn’t arrived yet) person who sent me “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” CDs. I’m not sure what it is but I find the British humour refreshing. Yes I know this is neither normal nor sane …
The problem is that, the way this is going I’m unable to rest, even when I sleep, and thus I cannot work for more than a few hours on Free Software without my head starting to ache. And it’s difficult to sleep in the first place. While I would like to try cutting down on coffee, it turns out that I’m quite addicted to caffeine to the point that twice already in the past three weeks, when I tried to stay a day without getting one I would get a migraine so powerful I would be unable to crawl out of bed.
Anyway so that you know, even if I haven’t blogged about it in a while, nor I have opened new bugs, the tinderbox (or tinderflame to make it distinct from Patrick’s) is still working and crunching data. The new disks do help, since there was one (I’m afraid I know which one, I’ll write about it specifically in the future) that would make the system go stuck on pdflush, which as you might guess is not the nicest of the things. Now it seems to be working better.
Anyway, if you wish I made a special list to see if I can solve my sleep deprivation (although I’m waiting already a few things I ordered myself, so I should be set for a while), but even more importantly, there are two thing I’m going to ask users and developers reading me alike.
If you’re an user, try to raise concern with upstream projects about problems like proper --as-needed usage, parallel build and similar, I know my blog isn’t exactly the nicest place to look up information from but it should have enough to go around with issues like that. Any upstream package that fixes parallel make, --as-needed or autotools by itself is one less package I’ll have to look at when I decide to push forward my agenda of having proper packages around.
If instead you’re a developer, please help me by at least reviewing what I write, correcting me if needed, and especially submitting patches to my projects if you see they are wrong or incomplete. Having people collaborate on my projects is one thing I always miss.