This Must Be Tuesday

And, paraphrasing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I never could get the hang of Tuesdays. Monday was so-so, without the usual conceptual discontinuity associated with moving from an environment where things mostly make sense to another where... well, let's just say that anything can make sense given a frame of reference.

Anyway, here's what it boils down to: I have something like 300 RSS items to go through, have around twice that in work e-mail to file, and, more to the point, every time I look at one of my flagship projects, feel like I have been essentially flogging a dead horse for the last couple of years.

To give you an idea of what my current mindset is like (and I'm going to assume my audience is mostly techie, so I'll try to draw some parallels) imagine you're a Comp Sci graduate, a couple years' out of college, and that after a round of run-of-the-mill projects you're suddenly asked to find a way to marry with Cobol in the hope of designing the next big thing in Web 2.0 (complete with a cobalt-blue Ajax UI).

Running off an AS/400 box, of course. Oh, and the customer wants to run a browser on his 3270 terminals (you know, the ones hooked via coax).

Next thing you know, he wants the pages rendered on a dot-matrix printer, because... Well, these are all computers, right? And don't computers print?

Yeah, it's almost like Jurassic Park all over again, but in an alternate telco-oriented universe where the raptors play poker and sit around looking at all the funny little mammals running around chittering about this new thing they're grokking, which is called a "treenet".

So I'm now sitting here waiting for my legendary self-motivation superpower to kick in, and trying to find a funny twist on things, but all I can think of is that an extinction event would be just dandy.

Ah well. Who the hell put kryptonite in the drinking water?