[MUD-Dev] Re: FW: (Fwd) Bouncing mail

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Mon, 11 May 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:

> On Wed, 06 May 1998 13:50:00 -0400 (EDT) 
> s001gmu <s001gmu at nova.wright.edu> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 4 May 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> 
> >> On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Koster, Raph wrote: > [J C Lawrence:]
> >> 
> >> <<...personal details deleted here...>>
> >> 
> >> > I have begun to fear however that the list is also functioning to
> >> > dissuade as much advancement in the field as it is fostering it,
> >> by > burying its members in endless mental masturbation without
> >> ever having > them actually go out and produce that next great
> >> server/game/idea etc.
> 
> > 'endless mental masturbation'?  heh... interesting way of putting
> > it.
> 
> A friend, currently a missionary in China (last I heard I he was
> ducking bullets just off Tianimen Square), came up with the term to
> tag most of what goes on in Usenet.

Best of luck to him.  I was a bit shaken up when I was flying out of
Seoul, and we taxied past guard towers with machine guns and armed guards
on patrol.
 
> > I will note that since I have joined, I have completley scrapped my
> > original project, and started over from scratch, and have, in fact,
> > made some progress.  
> 
> Per repute, this is a list tradition now:
> 
>   Have great project and am busy working on it.
> 
>   Join list.
> 
>   Doh!
> 
>   Scrap project and restart.
> 
>   Read list.
> 
>   Doh!
> 
>   Scrap project and restart.
> 
>   Read list.  
> 
>   Doh!
> 
>   Forget project and wait for next "Doh!".
> 
>   Repeat.
> 
>   Start new ambitious project.
> 
> I've more or less scrapped Murkle three times since I really started
> working on this list.

For me, I think it went something more along the lines of:

   Had an interesting project idea
   Worked on it under the guise of academia for a while

   Join list

   Doh!

   Scrap large parts of the project, sit back and read for a while

   Doh!  Doh!  Doh!

   Doh!

   Doh! (had to throw one more in for good measure)

   Tenatively restart project, in small, modular pieces, easily
   swapped out when the next big "Doh!" comes along.

;)

I wonder if part of the problem comes from the standards on this list
being as high as they are.  Well, at least that's something I've run into.
On more than a couple occasions I've not posted things because I felt they
were sub-par for the list... not that the ideas were bad, but that they
weren't thought out as well as they could have been, and I wouldn't be
doing the list any good by posting them "half baked", as it were.  I
probably have about a half-dozen half composed messages sitting in my home
dir on my account here, waiting for enough time/energy to finish them and
post them.

That paper I wrote for my honors thesis is one of those posts.  I
promised I'd post it many, many moons ago, but I was never happy with it.  
I have, however, been working on that, and I think I know what it is I
didn't like about it.  So (keeping fingers crossed here), hopefully, I
will have something presentable before mid-June.  I hadn't taken a
Software Engineering class at the time I wrote it, and now that I'm in
one, I see that I combined a description of the project with an attempt at
technical specs.  I'm gonna go thru and rip out large parts of the specs,
draw them up as formal specs, and re-work what's left of the paper into
something readable.
 
> > I just need to get this pesky graduation thing out of the way
> > first... and then jobs and then moving off campus... and
> > then... (blarg)
> 
> I've found that small children are very effective at persuading me
> that they are more interesting than C++ code I can barely remember
> writing.
> 
> <sigh>

heh... Children are quite a distance off, atm.  Maybe eventually, but not
yet.  I still have a lot of things I want to do.  Like write up a mud. ;) 
And then there's that detail of finding someone to have the kids...
last I checked I wasn't physically capable.
 
> Mechanical proofs to the side, methinks I'm going to have to give up
> the nicer features of time travel.  Its a gorgeous concept, but
> without massive RAM, or incredible bandwidth to the backing store, its 
> just not going to happen at the leve I need/want.  I'm looking
> currently at limiting it to concious object's IO for the longer term,
> and killing everything else within hours (ie cache rollouts).

Bummer.  :(  I was looking forward to seeing it in action.  Mayhaps in
another couple of years, when technology has taken a few more astronomical
leaps (forward?).

-Greg


--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.