pa0r

I have just discovered the time leak effect. After the gas leak, the fresh water leak, the oil pipeline leak and the famous memory leak (what?? you still program in C++?) the time leak is one of the the biggest nuisances you can come across.  We have to fight it on a daily basis  here (we are still in Spain, and the sun is rewarding us for it every day now).

When I still had to work for someone else there was no such thing. You had your diary and your local time on the Palm, and except for the days when you were 'completely interrupt driven', you followed the path your secretary had written into your machine, and in the end your boss was happy, you were happy and your xyl was reasonably happy. Especially when you were away for a contest weekend. And you had the feeling time did not exist,it was just a figure (8 divided by 15) on the front page of your Palm (TM).

Now that I do my own planning there seems to be a constant lack of time. The xyl is of the opinion that my planning skills are not on par with what I try to achieve, but it must be something else. When we drove down to the South of Europe I had a todo list for tlf and for PSKmail. I also wanted to write a database program (in PERL of course) for the locations we can park the camper for a free overnight stay, so I can feed them into gpsdrive. It was a waste of time. The planning that is...

Until now I have spent all my time on testing pskmail. Writing additions and changing stuff so it works even better. This camp ground is an excellent test bed for the program. I am 2200 km from the server and the internet facility (4 old desktop computers with W98 of which 3 are constantly out of service because some virus has to be removed) is in use all the time. At least at the occasions when you could fit in into your planning.

The pskmail link to Stockholm works all day. From 8:00 UTC (no use getting out of bed early because the bread shop is not open before that time) until sometimes 22:00 UTC. During mail sessions I use 80 Watts and in between my APRS beacon roars along with 20 Watts input. If the computer is not in use for something else :)

Then we have to go shopping. There are 3 supermarkets in walking distance, so we tend to buy a lot of stuff which I have to carry back to the camper (a bottle of good wine weighs just short of 1 kilogram). Then we have to go walk on the fantastic beach, and watch the sand castle artist rebuild his castle which has been ruined by the dogs during the previous evening. Then we've got to have lunch, mostly sitting outside in the sun. With a glass of good cheap wine. After that we have to do the spanish lessons. We have 3 different courses on CD, DVD and accompanying books.

Then the weather is so fine that it would be a shame to go sit inside to write some software, so we sit outside in the sun and I do some reading in my favourite books (Programming PERL and PERL Cookbook). After that it is time for a drink and some nice food, and we go to the beach again. When we come back it is time to download the second email batch and start preparing dinner.

Somehow I have the feeling something is missing. The 4th dimension strikes back. Time has leaked away without any positive effect on mankind. Or has it?

I noticed this time leak thing has a positive effect on creativity. It tends to make your todo lists longer, thereby creating the need for more time. Which is not a circular reference; I am afraid it is a recursive function without a return condition...

One positive outcome has been a so-called crapmail filter for pskmail, which filters out all references to MIME stuff and advertizing and please unsubscribe this and that and our ADSL service is faster than yours...

This has already saved lots of time downloading the mail...