[spoon-discuss] A Rant.

["David E. Smith" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[[ You should probably just ignore this, as I'll likely regret having sent
it in the morning. ;) ]]


In my time zone, in the States, it's Saturday night. Has been for several
hours, actually. As I write this, in about a half hour, it will cease to
be Saturday night, and become Sunday morning.

Saturday night is, customarily, the night when people go out and have some
fun. It's the night to see and be seen, or to raise your BAC, or at the
very least to get out of the house for a while.

But I was at home, on the computer, working out the nweek 24 results,
because I can't put 'em off forever. (Yeah, there were some issues with
the Web server, but even if that hadn't been the case, I've started
dreading the end of each nweek, because it means I'll have to sit down
at the 'puter for several hours.)

>From my dialup logs:
Oct 19 23:03:13 bureau42 pppd[16254]: Connect time 215.0 minutes.
                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

That's right, folks, I was online, doing nothing but Nomic work, for over
three hours. My Saturday evening was pretty much shot to hell.

I certainly enjoy watching the crazy stuff you folks come up with, but
I've been doing this, investing two or three hours at a time, every couple
weeks, for almost a year.

Thus, I'm sadly forced to draw a line in the, um... Sand isn't a Grid
Substance... a line in the Mud, I suppose.

I want ways to either offload a good portion of the bookkeeping tasks I
have to deal with to other people (preferably without forcing anyone else
to have to do these marathons), or at least to reduce the amount of time I
have to spend in one sitting. (If I could think of a way to do so fairly,
I'd love something like "every time X new proposals are filed, a new
ballot starts the next day" where X is maybe 15 or 20, as opposed to 40+
for nw24, and 63 (!) for the nweek previous.)

Technical ideas are also welcome. Again, as soon as I can figure out how
to do so safely (i.e. in a fashion that doesn't invite rampant vote
fraud), online voting will be on its way -- that one's trivial to do,
since the database has been doing vote handling for a while -- and maybe
even online proposals.

But I want something relatively soon; if I can't recover at least a little
bit of my free time, you may need to start looking for a new Admin.

I can't escape the haunting wisdom of Joel's words on the old "A Nomic"
page, under nomic.net's Dead Games archive:

"Though it is clear that I would not have been able to keep A Nomic
running as long as I did without the tools I developed for the task, I now
believe that streamlining the bookkeeping process is merely treating a
symptom of a deeper problem--namely, that no matter how efficient my tools
were, I was still the bottleneck."

Just substitute "B Nomic" for "A Nomic" and put my name in there, and the
words make a lot of sense.

This is a GOOD game, and I don't want it to die, but I'm not sure how much
longer I can keep up with it, and still keep up with looking for a job,
and trying to maintain some vague semblance of sanity.

Yours in frustration,

...dave




-- 
David E. Smith   dave@[technopagan.org|metadave.net|bureau42.com]
I'm a white male loser -- the profile of the serial killer (RSPW)

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