For the last few months, I've been either getting a project out the door, fighting fires or tying up the proverbial loose ends on nearly six years of my working life. Which doesn't leave much time for in-cubicle "play-time." Outside of work, the joy in coding--particularly having my head handed to me by another language--just wasn't there. So it was easy to let the mundane requirements of adult life take over and decompress by reading with the balance of my free time.
To me, coder's block is no different from writer's block--in terms of symptoms or treatment. Sometimes you have to force things; other times, busying yourself with something unrelated while your subconscious mind works it out. And inspiration can come from the unlikeliest places.
Take the pet store, for instance. My simple mission was to pick up a bag of finch kibble. I've never trusted a store to provide optimal housing for any birds--particularly not after the shameful conditions I saw at the PetCo north of Rochester (MN) in 2000.
So I took up my self-appointed role as Finch Inspector at Large at the Onalaska PetCo. Mixed results there--particularly where they crowded too many Spice Finches and Society Finches in the same cage. (I'll be going back tomorrow to make sure that the Spice Finch with the bald spot was, indeed put into isolation as promised. There will be Gre'thor raised with the manager if it hasn't.)
But I knew they wouldn't put the little white-capped Zebra Finch "in iso." just because it was being bullied all over the cage. And the sleek little African Silverbill was already all alone...
And I'll bet you'll never, EVER guess what happened next.
Sigh. The spirit of Charlie Brown adopting the pathetic little Christmas tree strikes again. Naturally, both birds Houdini'd out of their carrying boxes when I brought them home, which only served me & my sappiness right.
But as I settled them into their quarantine cages, I thought that this weekend would be a good idea to get a starting weight for them. As we let the flock of Gouldians live out their natural lives, we--sloppily--fell out of the habit of regular weighings. But with two new young'uns, there's no excuse for that.
Which, I realized--less that a second later--would make a splendid first Android application. And, ultimately, an equally splendid excuse to break down and splurge on a 'droid tablet--something I promised I wouldn't do before I'd written my first non-"Hello, World!"--i.e. non-trivial--Android application.
And--whaddya know?--there's my extracurricular coding mojo! Standing right there! How've ya been, old friend? Let's boogie!
(P.S.: Thank you, little ones. May your kibbles always crunch.)
