Beta addiction
My relationship with beta software seems to be cyclical. When I got my first Mac (an LC running at 16MHz baby!) I was a bit paranoid about the software I put on it. I didn't want to break anything. As I became more comfortable with the system, I experimented with software. Beta software. Of course this was in the days when beta still meant something. Alpha and beta have lost their meaning, but that is another rant, for another time.
I felt privileged to be giving feedback on beta software for some reason. At one point I even made it into the Apple QA program, where normal users got access to pre-release Apple software products, so Apple could see how they ran "in the wild."
Then it all fell apart. A piece of beta software trashed my drive. No backups. Of course, at the time I didn't have anything worth backing up, so it didn't hurt that bad, except for the time in getting set back up. Never again I said. No more beta software.
Then I found Hotline. Soon I was back to installing developer releases of Mac OS, desperately trying to find that perfect install that gave me both speed and stability. During this time I also acquired five Mac the Knife mugs. If that doesn't mean anything to you, I'll just say that these mugs were very hard to get. You couldn't buy them. They were signs that you had an 'in', that you somehow got information that you shouldn't have gotten, and then blabbed about it to an anonymous press writer. Looking back, maybe it isn't something to be that proud of. But I certainly wouldn't give them up.
Then it happened again. Never again I swore. Not until I had another machine at least. I went through a few more cycles. I even paid for the Mac OS X Beta release. What can I say...I'm a glutton for punishment.
Currently I'm in the beta swing. But now it's worse. Now I track nightly builds of Chimera, and cvs versions of fink. I file bug reports, feature requests, patches, and test cases. It's worse because not only will I pay the inevitable price in time wasted on a screwed-up system, I'm also spending time doing all this that I could be spending riding a bike, petting the dogs, or anything else that doesn't involve a computer.
I'm a junkie.
I spend too much time reading on a computer. I'm always gathering information for some problem I might run into someday. I'm on mailing lists for things I will probably never use again, like DocBook. I'm always fixing some dumb problem, either with my own code, or with some project that I use a lot, like phpicalendar. If I can fix it, there must be a near infinite amount of people who could fix it better than I could. I buy books about Cocoa Programming, even though I have no Cocoa projects in mind. I might someday though. Really.
It's time to figure out how to unplug. But it's not just that I don't know how, I don't want to unplug. I like solving problems. I like having google just a click away. The first step in fighting addiction is acknowledging your addiction. Fine. I'm an addict. I don't care though. I like being an addict. Why would I want to not be an information junkie? Ignorange may be bliss, but knowing the answer is just as sweet.
