Feeding Creativity
Well... dealing with boredom is certainly one of the more difficult things I've had to deal with lately. When you've designed and built large, serious systems, it's hard to stay mentally challenged doing web pages. Especially when they are all basically the same - some data source feeding a graph or a table. Yet it's really important to feed and care for your Creativity.
I'm getting the impression that I'm not doing a good enough job of taking care of that part of myself that is the Creative side, and it's costing me more and more each day. I believe what I do is basically creative, that the job of building systems is as much art as anything else. Yes, there's certainly a lot of science, but there's a big difference between only using science and using art as well.
But like any tool that's not used daily, creativity will get rusty and you need to exercise it for those times you're really going to need it. Seems obvious when you think about it in the same terms as any other skill, but I'll admit to having neglected by creative side of late.
So I need to do something about that. Don't quite know what it is, but it certainly doesn't have to be something to do with programming. I built a fence a few weeks ago and it was a lot of fun and exercised those same creative forces/muscles which felt very good. But I can't keep building fences - they're just too darn big. I need something that's portable.
So I'm going to go on the hunt for something that's more reasonable and in the end serves the same purpose. I've searched osx.freshmeat.net and haven't found anything - yet, but I have a feeling I'll do some more searching before I give up. I've really enjoyed working on the OpenSource projects that I've worked on in the past, and they always needed more help than they had.
If that doesn't work out, I'll go back to some of the projects I've set down in the past and pick them up again. Sure, they're not the most interesting things to do, but it's something and exercise is like that - it's something.