Rui CarmoI've been trying to get a grip on a number of issues of late (ranging from run-of-the mill planning issues to more prosaic stuff such as my dedication to international projects within my company), so the past few days have been tough going. I've only made a couple of pauses to check out Russell's rant on Slashdot and add my Eur 0.02, as well as wondering if Magneto will be any more usable.
These days I'm more concerned about what sort of thing I want to do with my life, and mobile phones and gadgetry seem very mundane concerns. Heck, I couldn't even get annoyed at Paul Thurrot's latest iPod post. So what if his attitude sucks? There are more important things in life, and less biased blogs to read.
I'm a very self-motivated person (which in telecoms is a major advantage, especially in this age of international consolidation), but there's a lot to be said to working solo in several fronts at once. I can't fault my current team (and definitely not my current company), but I keep wanting bigger challenges - and not just technical ones.
In fact, allow me to re-iterate that - I loathe working alone, but that is precisely what I think I've been doing for the past year or so, and it's catching up with me. Working alone is fine for some things, but debating things across international boundaries over e-mail and tacking notes on random, unfocused documents is taking its toll.
Too much trivia and Dilbert-like situations, and you burn out and start looking for other stuff to do. An old friend of mine jokingly pointed out that I could make a lot more money publishing my opinions as a telecoms consultant, but I have some difficulty imagining myself doing that today - not that I wouldn't like it, it's just that it would have to be in a very different setting, and it might be better if I just started doing radically different stuff.
Take materials science, for instance, an interesting field where there's a lot to be done. I admit to knowing very little about chemistry, but a civilization that took this long to improve tires just has got to be missing out on something.
Ah well. Maybe if I read another of those 3GPP recommendations, or draft another summary of the umpteen pieces of documentation that cross my inbox every day...
Minor Unrelated Update: Skype 0.13.0.5 finally works properly with a Bluetooth headset on my Mac, which means I'm going to be using Skype a lot more from now on, despite the fact that their buddy list management still sucks.