Sometimes, You Just Have to Start Over

I have no sense of direction. That basically means that I get lost easily (of course, with the new GPS device that I just bought, I should be okay). So, sometimes, when I take the wrong direction, I have to back-track to a known location and "try again." Of course, getting back to a known location can sometimes be difficult.

The same goes for reading: I love to read, but sometimes, my attention wonders. That's kind of embarrassing when you're reading (the good thing is that, usually, nobody notices). But, it happens: I'm reading along and realize that I don't understand what's going on in the current paragraph because I wasn't paying attention in the last couple, so I have to go back and figure out how I got there.

Same goes for building things. If you build a paper airplane, and you get one of the folds slightly off, most of the rest of the folds will get messed up, which means poor performance when you launch the thing. I hate that; especially when I'm trying to impress one of my kids with my great airplane-making skills (I have none, but they don't know that...at least, not yet).

The same goes for programming. After receiving a few enhancement requests for my open source project (iScreen at i-screen.org), I realized that in order to do some of them, it would take more than just a quick patch or added code. I'd have to revisit some of the basic approaches I took with the project. So, sometimes you have to just start over.

Of course, not literally. There's no point not leveraging what you have that's good (if you can). So, I won't have to rewrite the entire framework from scratch, since I'll be able to leverage most of what's there. But, I'll have to "start over" on some of the basic approach. Ouch. Guess that airplane's performance wasn't as great as I'd hoped.