Or, just joelsleep. Or better, Samildanachsleep.
Odinsleep is the healing sleep that Odin, and later, Thor, go into after getting gravely injured in battle. That’s what I just slipped into this afternoon, a deep, comatose-like healing sleep. After four weeks of working a minimum of 16 hours a day, and sleeping for a maximum of only 5 hours a day, I finally had to pay off my sleep debt. I’m still taking stock of my mind and body, to see if I’d actually made up for all that sleep deprivation and exhaustion. Hopefully it was enough to normalize things again, so I can be more productive at work.
I’m having second thoughts about still putting in some work today. It is, afterall, a Sunday, and I really have worked too many hours already for the past four weeks or so.
Speaking of Odin, Thor, and all things Asgard — I finally got Thor Vol. 1 and Vol . 2! I also got Astonishing X-Men Vols. 1 and 2 as well! I used to collect comics back in college, but not I tend to collect hardbound volumes and graphic novels instead. I’ll see if I can blog about my newly acquired eye-and-brain candy sometime.
In the midst of all the rush for this new project we’ve been working on, I received two resignations from the team deployed on-site with our Clever client. I just wish I wasn’t a zombie when I got their resignations last Friday; maybe I would’ve reacted more normally. Instead, I think I didn’t react at all. I was just numb from not sleeping for over 24 hours.
Actually, it wasn’t really unexpected. I’d warned management about the Clever situation months ago. And the “special” announcement they were waiting for in July didn’t happen. So yeah, this was expected. I really can’t blame them either. Hostile client environment, stupid tech, and stupid use of tech, and… well, economic downturn and all that… I’m actually grateful they lasted this long at the oxymoronic Clever client at all!
If my spidey-sense is anything to go by, there are potentially a couple more who are looking to file their resignations soon as well, both from our on-site team, and from among the guys in the office. I wish it weren’t so, but that’s just the way it is. The entire big-picture scenario is kind of complicated, and its a pity we (management) haven’t had a good enough job of convincing everyone to keep the faith just a little bit longer — at least not good enough to convince these guys to stay.
For the past four weeks, I’ve been pulling 16-hour workdays — minimum! — to catch up with this big project we’re doing. It’s not really big, as in a gazillion lines of code, although it could be that already; rather, its big in that it has the potential to bring in big business for our company. The only problem is, the timelines are impossibly tight, and I can’t seem to extricate myself from my management duties long enough to code at all during regular work hours. The result? I hack into the wee hours of the morning, and I hack during weekends. Like today.
I now average only five hours — or less! — of sleep everyday. Unless I burn out and wind up a mindless zombie. It actually happens, no exageration — I’m awake, but I can’t squeeze one coherent thought out of my noggin anymore. I just wish they’d exempt me from all these meetings!
Anyway, most of the initial overhead I encountered was just familiarizing myself with the tech I needed to use. I wanted to use JSF for the UI, and I wanted to use Ajax-y widgets, so I picked Icefaces for my component library. Took me a while to grok the library, and my zombiefying burnout schedule didn’t help me grok it any faster. Now, though, I think I’m getting the hang of it, and learned quite a bit more about JSF along the way as well, and this week I’ll be able to concentrate more on the actual application itself, rather than the technology I’m using for it.
Now if only I don’t get called to any more meetings…
So this blog is still up. I’m still keeping it for now. Based on the stats, nobody reads it anyway, so I can stll be relatively Heisenberg-free here. In any case, this is my blog, and I don’t really give a rat’s ass about what anybody else thinks — I’ll write what I want to write, and that’s all there is to it.
Heisenberg kills freedom of speech. Heisenberg kills freedom of thought. I hate it.
When I was completely anonymous, I could freely write anything I wanted to. My self-imposed constraint was that, if I was going to blog under a pseudonym, then everybody else I talked about in my blog was also protected under a pseudonym as well. I could rant and rave all I wanted, and in the end I only rant against people with pseudonyms. That way, there was no harm and no foul.
Now I’m no longer completely anonymous. Because of this, the people and entities I want to write about can no longer have the protection that anonymity affords. I can’t even tweet without someone reading all kinds of paranoid crap into it — and giving me grief for it!
Freedom is something I value so highly that even in the way I manage people, I encourage original, individual thought — I do not like to have a bunch of mindless robots working for me; I want people who think for themselves, that way when they tell me something, I can trust them to tell me the truth of the situation. A ‘yes’ always means ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ always means ‘no’. My guys always trust me enough to tell me frankly when they would have difficulty in solving some technical problem, or when they tell me they’ll be able to finish some task in x-number of days, then I can be fairly certain that they’re being honest, since they speak always frankly and of their own free will. I don’t like it when someone tries to tell me only what I want to hear — that person is only a frackin’ robot, and I HATE stupid robots.
Now I can no longer express myself as freely as I used to. All because of Heisenberg. Well, now — everybody else can be frickin’ sheep if they want to, conforming their thoughts to someone else’s opinions. Not me.
I’m going completely anonymous again. I’ve already deleted my Twitter account. My Facebook will probably follow soon. This blog will close down in a couple of days for sure.
