The slacking worked

Had one of those days where I couldn’t get started. I guess it was probably something to do with the beer last night. It was Darren’s birthday and we went to Namco on the South Bank and played on the arcade machines, drank beer, drove Dogems and generally acted Darren’s age ;) Since I couldn’t get going with what I was supposed to do today I sorted out the next socket server release and did the Windows Update dance with all of my boxes. As Paul Graham says, sometimes it’s useful to keep some boring routine work around for times when you stall on the important stuff…

Anyway, went for a walk, got back, wrote code.

It’s been one of those “in the zone” moments. I call it a moment because that’s what it seems like. I finally got going at around 1700 this evening and now it’s nearly 2200. I surfaced for a while at around 1900 to make a call but other than that I just wrote code and listened to the same CD over and over (that’s actually really unusual as I usual code better in silence…).

The code consisted of some mindless integration to get me going then some new functionality for the online game server which uncovered a latent bug in my SSL socket server code which was found and slain with some code that looks SO right that I wonder how I never put it in in the first place. Then came the 1900 resurfacing; followed by some more mindless integration which resulted in me fixing a corresponding bug in the SSL test harness. Cool stuff. Happy bunny.

Now, given that Michelle has some nightmare case that has to settle before Monday, I expect I’ll just have some more wine and see if I can slip back into the zone…