Just a Tad Depressed

I'm a tad depressed.

I think that I'm one of those people who really prefer stability over change, but am willing to take in the change and adjust accordingly if the change comes over smoothly enough.

Sadly though change hardly ever comes smoothly---it comes amidst a quadrillion other changes all at once.

I'm in the middle of a four-week series of changes, and living through it all has been quite straining on my psyche, to say the least. The few anchor points of my life are now moving their positions about, and as such, I feel like a kite with its tether slackened severely, to be tossed about by whichever way the winds decide to blow.

I can handle change in work or in my hobbies singly, but to have both happen at once is very draining.

I've not reached the point where I just mentally say ``fuck it'' and dive head-first into the maelstrom, mostly because I've not had enough mental reserves to do that plunge just yet.

As the old saying goes, ``this too, shall pass''.

And that's my rant for the day. Amen.

An August Post

This wasn't planned. Well, the others weren't really planned either.

I just felt the urge, nay the need to write something just to vent.

The last time I wrote, I was talking about how things were going swimmingly well. Things still are, but there are some rather significant changes since roughly a month ago.

I stopped to do a stock take on myself, my life, my aspirations, and everything else about me that I hadn't looked at in a while. What I've found was that I was running myself ragged with all the things that I want to do. Then the reality of me being not super duper crazy efficient hit me and I realised that I have to scale down everything that I do.

The question is, what ought I to scale down?

When I was single and somewhat depressed, all the activities that I did had the overall effect of giving me enough things to do that I didn't have to stop to think about how life was sucking and such. Now, things have changed. My hobbies are suddenly taking on a much stronger slant towards responsibilities that cannot be easily taken care of with the paltry two to three hours per week on a single Saturday evening. I simply couldn't do all the things that I had did before, if I wanted to actually be well-rested and contented with life.

This time, I reluctantly chose to let go Aikido, perhaps to pick it up again some time in the future. It's not because that I no longer like the martial art, but really, under the current circumstances, I cannot bring myself to do it. I found myself either being physically unable to due to sickness or injury, or mentally unable to acknowledge that I was going to do something very physically rigorous for two hours after a 10-hour work day.

It does not help that I've been stagnating at my current belt level for nearly five years now.

In short, I found myself burnt out in a different sort of way. So it is with great sadness that I am letting go of Aikido for now. I will need to figure out ways to ensure that I don't lose too much of the conditioning and reflexes that I had learnt from Aikido and Aikijujutsu.

Work-wise, nothing much has changed---I'm still in the business of building large systems. It seems that the [new] management is starting to see the relevance of what we have been working on, which in itself is a great burden removed, though pending another deployment, we'll just be building up the system at a rather relaxing pace.

In other news, I've been copying music for the new dizi solo that I intend to showcase at our next major concert. It was, to say the least, tiring. It is at times like this that I wished there were some less shady-looking, less regionally oriented jianpu software to use instead of the pencil job I'm doing. I think I do a pretty good pencil job, but it's still rather tedious and sometimes the entire piece looks a little natty, especially when I'm not paying too much attention.

It is when I'm copying out the music and the parts that I'm slowly having the realisation that there will be a point where my CO is going to find it extremely difficult to accompany me, especially when I start to pick harder and harder pieces to work on. But that problem will only come in the future, so it is still pointless to think about it now. The CO has surprised me before---I'm sure it can surprise me again; all I need to do is give them a little chance and a nudge in the right direction.

On a less musical front, I had to part ways with the company that has been hosting my personal Subversion repository. They were having a new price increase that was more than 40× what I am currently paying a month, an amount that is unacceptable to me. So I did the next best thing and got a virtual machine instance and set up my own Subversion repository instead. Since I didn't have access to the file system in the original repository, I had to transfer the information out somehow.

Enter rsvndump. It's a tool that dumps the Subversion repository from a remote server armed with only regular svn access, into a form where svnadmin can easily use to dump into a new location. Once the dump is completed, all I had to do was to issue svn switch --relocate $oldURL $newURL and I was done, all without having to redownload the entire repository.

And no, personal experimental code is not something I want published on an open and world-readable repository. I like and support open source, but there's a limit to what one open sources---incomplete personal work is something that falls squarely in the ``not ready for open source'' list.

I think that's about all I care to write for now. Till the next update I suppose.