Summer Blues
God. Almost a week since I last posted. And, yet, so little worth writing about. Still in Boston, still crashing with Simon, still doing less than I should. Still wishing desperately that I was doing more.
Ben came up for the weekend, and we hung out in Cambridge last night, waiting for Shuli to get off of work. Except we didn’t do much besides wander out from Harvard Square, drink beer and eat ice cream, sit and talk. We had a nice, though meandering and eventually rather fruitless, discussion on politics, revolution, and the American system. And lamp shades.
Other than the occasional visit from (or to) Ben, I’ve been doing little but gorging myself on Futurama, West Wing, plundarr movies, and programming. But even the programming isn’t engaging me as much as I would hope. I feel as though I’m in a bit of a funk; nothing exciting or enticing me. Nothing much to do that seems very relevant or productive or meaningful.
And, yet, I can rationally say that all the work I’ve been doing with RDF has the potential to be exciting, and all the work I see others doing with RDF certainly seems exciting. I just can’t seem to muster the energy to dive in and tackle something big. I almost think that being in LA made working on RDF easier since with the eight hour difference with the UK, it made it possible to stay up late and talk with the folks on #rdfig and #foaf in the morning, instead of the five our difference in Boston which dictates waking up early, and catching them all in the afternoon.
The one thing I’ve been happy with recently was diving back into web development in an attempt to write a passable web-based photo annotation application (pity my ignorance of Cocoa) and having success with both the Javascript XMLHttpRequest object and DOM-based dynamic page generation. Combining the two features with the RDF API to WordNet allows rather cool dynamic word lookups without a page refresh. I’m still not sure if my annotation app will end up being better than the existing CLI scripts I cobbled together with Perl and GraphicConverter, but at least it’s keeping me busy.