pphaneuf
wrote about it’s problems
with morale slump. There was a time when I believed
that this was the difference between professional
programmers and amateur ones. I was wrong, it just
happened to be very used to be productive. Then I had
my own shares of problems with productivity. As a
matter of fact I just slowly get out of one.

There where a few good comments on the phenomenon. I
only have to add one thing which really annoys me. Chemicals!
I have in my neighborhood a doctor which happens to be a family
friend. Once, seeing the kind of color I can exhibit (all day long
on front of my monitor, what do you expect ?) suggested to take a
few vitamins. A couple of pills an my mood, energy and productivity
was back.

During stress and long periods of intensive work, we often
feed irregularly and badly which makes our metabolism a bit unbalanced,
this can cause again depression and in the end get our productivity
down the floor, which again makes us feel even worst.

I don’t really believe in drugs, but here are a few things I found
to be very useful to me during bad times, and which are not very
serious drugs to make me worry to much about the fact that I use them
from time to time.

• Magnesium and B6 based vitamins
• From time to time we do use to make crazy things like,
  sleeping 4 hours a day and working 16 and this for many weeks.
  This chaotic activity doesn’t do much good to our neurons, plus
  that they don’t really grow back once they died. So here is Piracetam
  in small doses, which gives a pus of oxygen to the brain and protects
  the neurons.
• When things are getting even worse, and we are constantly depressed,
  there are the anti-depressive drugs. Now, this is a bit to much for me, but
  once again I’ve got a good tip from my doctor friend. Natural anti-depressive
  like Hypericum perforatum ( known as St. John’s Wort ). You can find some
  pills containing the plant and does wanders despite the fact that it’s the
  pure natural plant only and not some synthetic chemical.

If I only knew how to post an reply to an advogato.org
article I would be saved, but hell I can not find how.

Random output of the day

Alan Cox (the Linux kernel hacker) started to write poetry.
Check out his diary.
Oy, I like them so much. If you are interested read them
here,
here
and here.

People don’t notice us, they’ll never see
Under their noises a hacker may be
We edit by night and we sleep in by day
Writing up patches to send bugs away

Oh another one I like:

Reading junk, feeling bad
Another night going mad
x-jack drivers are so bad

But I just love the code I read
Another beer is what I need
Another bug, my ram is freed
We are the code crew

Go on Alan !!!