Hi All…
At the moment, stresses are running high. Exactly why, I’m not sure, but it seems everyone is on edge. And I don’t just mean the Gentoo Development community — I mean elsewhere too. Everyone seems to be edgy for reasons I cannot fathom.
I’m not going to speculate about what could be causing this stress… I know in my case, the tense atmosphere has had an impact. I’m nowhere near the point of doing anything irrational like suicide (I know this will create more problems than it will solve), but I am noticing that I’m not in my usual “stable” mental state. I think in my case, there are a few factors in play…
- At university, I’m doing a subject entitled “Core Project Initiation”, which heavily depends on groupwork. We have to form groups of 5 people or so, choose a project, find a project supervisor (typically other lecturers at QUT), then work towards implementing a prototype. The first assessment item, is due this Friday, and more or less requires the group to be formed. After having two attempts at forming a group fail, I’ve been in contact with the lecturers and am in urgent need to get into a group. Basically, if by Wednesday, I’m not in a group — I’ll pull out of the subject, it’s just not going to be viable for me to continue.
- Last semester was rather stressful, having had two major stuffups by the university (in one case, a lost exam paper; in a second, a breech of examination procedure), and winding up failing a telecommunications subject for seemingly unknown reasons. A total lack of feedback was a big factor — there was nothing to suggest I was offtrack, yet, I got a 2 (7-point scale) as my grade for the subject in question.
- I’m still looking around for work. I’m quite conscious that I’m basically living out of my father’s back pocket — have been for some time now. This has been playing on my mind a lot lately. I know that without any work, I can forget passing my degree, I can forget moving out of home at some point. And luxuries like attending LCA2008 are definitely out of the question. I’ve applied to several positions over the last few months without success.
- The weather has been rather hot and humid lately, enough to shorten the fuses of most people. Add to that the fact that Brisbane (like much of Australia) is in drought, and that the dam levels are dropping to alarmingly low levels.
- Then there’s the censorship debate that’s been raging on for the past fortnight on both gentoo-dev and gentoo-core.
Some of these problems are aggrivated by communications issues stemming from my Asperger’s Syndrome. Stress is not something I handle well, with depression being quite common in such circumstances. I’m in the happy position that I haven’t needed any medication to keep things under control however — I intend to keep things that way if I can. Right now, I’ve just detected abnormalities in my behaviour, and thus know something is up.
At this point, I’m certainly not planning on resigning from Gentoo. My builds for MIPS1 (little endian) are progressing, having just started Stage 2 this evening. There’s no major issues to deal with at this time, and I hope to have these out soon. I’ve also picked a fight with µClibc trying to bash out updated stages — managed to mess something up rather badly there, but I’ll hopefully get that straightened out and have some netboot images for you.
Presently, I’ve got stuff in my personal life that needs my attention first. Thus, I’ll be “away” for the next fortnight whilst things settle down locally. I’ll be contactable by email, and may be on IRC sporadically — but I don’t expect to be doing a hell of a lot. I need some time to reduce some of the external pressure, get myself mentally ontrack again. Hopefully when I return, not only will things have calmed down around here, but people within Gentoo, and perhaps others globally, might have settled down too.
In short, I’ll be around, just laying low for a while.
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