10 years? 6 years? 3 years? Who now?

I dunno how it happened, really. I think it was the few days our office network was down and I had to do some work at home on my laptop. Old code called to me and I knew it was time to set the toys down and pick up the hammer. It's been a pretty good effort overall, as small as it's been. Things compile and some of the libraries run decently. A bit of debugging should put the fruit of the labor back on good ground.

One of the things I'd started doing back in the day was tagging source with the year it was written. It was supposed to be like a copyright thing but it's more or less become a timeline for me to look back on (note to self, always have a changelog so you don't look so much the fool). The oldest code I have in there is 6 years old. The most common source was written 3 years ago. If I look as far back as I can, I still have code from 10 years ago in my repository. There's a clear, half-assed attempt at fixing things up in 2005.

What's really interesting is that I can stick important periods in my personal timeline into those dates. Code written in 2004 came during the greatest summer (it serves as a reminder of why it was also the loneliest summer, or the summer of many books), which is why there was so much. The half-assed attempt of 2005 came during the winter of destruction. Anything from 2001-2003 was written during the time of great confusion. Code from pre-2001 is all from the time of learning. I wonder how I'm going to tag all this 2007 code when time has passed and I'm able to look back on it. The time of being too old to give a shit anymore? The time of the great move? It's too early to tell I think. It'll probably just be the time of great half-assedness redux.

I like to think that the greater story is told during the times of code, but it's always the periods of code drought in-between that keep me up at night. I think that if Rekal were ever to become real, I'd take a trip back to the greatest summer. As rough as parts of it were, it's the only memory I have so far that I'd like to hold on to. So much productivity, so much fun, so much learned. I know the exact times that I'd take the trip for also. Maybe not the exact dates, but the general times.

I should end this with something funny, so here goes: Dr. Phil is a tool of the most commercial type. I hope he finds a special place in the dankest pits of hell, alongside Jack Thompson, for the way he chose to demean the victims of the VT tragedy.