The pressures of time keep weighing on me, especially since I wake up at 6 each morning now to get to work. Habitually night-time has always been my productive time. On a normal night I'd go to sleep at around 12:30, but if I was in the middle of a project I would stay up until 2 or 3 on occasion. Now I simply can't do that and be up to make the train, with whom no excuses can be made for tardiness (well, almost. I've found that, on occasion, having missed the train at Emeryville by just a few minutes, I can beat it to Hayward station, 20 miles down the way, and catch it there, but that's another story).

So without the luxury of sleeping 'till 8 I have to set a boundary on my nighttime productivity. On train days I get back home around 7:30 in the evening. To be rested by 6 I need to get to sleep by 11, midnight at the latest. This basically gives me four hours of personal time a day, counting dinner, getting ready for bed, and any [gasp] weekday socializing.

What's the solution? Ditch the arduous palm V/stowaway keyboard combination and make the powerbook earn its keep. I'm actually glad that I don't have a net connection because if I did that's exactly where my two hours of train time would go. Starting today those two hours are Fury time, devoted to writing and, more importantly, coding projects.

The full effect will be realized once Apple releases OS X 10.1, which I'll finally install, moving forward from OS 9 for the first time in nearly a year when I installed and promptly removed OS X Public Beta 1. Once I install OS X, I'll be able to put in mySQL, Apache, and PHP, letting me have a full coding and development environment in a 6 pound package. Technically I could do the same thing now with OS X 10.0.4, LinuxPPC, or VirtualPC, but I'd rather have a more stable and elegant environment. I'm all for the bleeding edge, but not when it's jagged as well.

Well, that's all for the moment. I hope you enjoyed today's verboten work quickies, but I spent less time writing them then I would otherwise spend on email, so I'm secure in my internal justification. Besides, I don't smoke or take coffee breaks, and I usually eat lunch at my desk, so my tiller is still on the rise. Now I'm getting back to implementing underblog, watching the beautiful bay wetlands go by (no, I'm actually not being sarcastic. They're pretty nice in their own way). Well, that and occasionally spying for rabbits fleeing the great steel beast.