Can't get my brain in gear. Got a spare laptop today to work on my lab this weekend. Hope to get it 2/3s wrapped by Tuesday. Flying to RTP on Monday. Not looking forward to the trip. Not that the work is hard or bad, just long and potentially useless. Made a mistake with my lab selection for this year. It is very hard to do a good job with a lab if you don't have some sort of passion for the topic. Struggling to find some passion this year. So many other ideas feel more interesting right now. I still think Virtualization is critical. It is the win. But I think the Cloud computing model provides a much better reflection of virtualization's potential. Running multiple images on one machine -- nice, saves energy and effort; Running many images on multiple pieces of hardware smoothly transitioning from failed hw -- priceless! Of course nothing comes without cost and overhead but still.

I'm falling behind on the year of IC. At the end of March now. If I can finish up my lab, I'll have a piece for Jan/Feb and a piece for April. I may count this blog as a piece for March. I have a few ideas that I want to try and publish. As either a patent or as a piece to publish. I need to write faster. Both code and the other stuff.

On the otherhand I think I need to think about work a little bit less. I focus on work and Z, but I think I should be spreading my brain to other areas. My brain needs a change. Less development and work and more variety. Been reading a few different books lately, which help. "In Defense of Food" By Michael Pollen was pretty good. At first I didn't understand the title, but Pollan points out correctly that a lot of the products that we see at the grocery store are not really food. The cult of nutritionism has convinced us that it's not the food that it is important but the component parts. While I've followed nutrient guidelines for a long time I never gave this much thought. But at the heart of this is the idea that foods are simply components that can be well understood reduced to parts rather than pieces of a complex whole that is more than the sum it's parts. A fairly good read with decent advice on eating. Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants. Simple and to the point. I'm finding different ways to simplify my life right now, and this was right up my alley.

At some point I think I need to talk this out a bit more. But not tonight.