Madness to my method

So, the quarter is coming to an end.

Also, I have "Good Vibrations" stuck in my head. Curse you, J. J. Abrams!

At the company where I work, as I'm sure it is at many other such companies, the end of the quarter is when most of the really fun stuff happens: management gives employee reviews and hands out bonuses, employees rush to meet quarterly goals, pressure to produce results flies everywhere, craziness ensues.

Now, I'll admit that I work best when I have a certain amount of external motivation. Having said that, I do research, and I think it's really best to follow a certain methodology: first see what other people have done along those lines, then try some stuff out, find what's wrong with it, refine what you've done and/or scrap it and start along a different path, rinse and repeat. If that doesn't happen in about that order, then a lot of my effort tends to be wasted in repeating other people's mistakes and trying stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Which is what I see happening to myself these days. My method has been largely scrapped in an attempt to favor "fast" over "good," and the result may be neither fast nor good. Stuff falls through the cracks, I can't remember what I was doing two days ago and I didn't have time to document it, that sort of thing. Madness.

As an aside, what occurs to me at this point is that at the end of last quarter I was writing about similar end-of-quarter craziness and optimistically hoping that it would be better once the new quarter started, and to the best of my memory it really wasn't much better. It's been like this for months.

Sigh.

Don't you think?

Monday bleary-eyed free-association follows.

There are a lot of people who think that, whatever it is that they're doing, god is on their side, and not their opponents'. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that's pretty much a common characteristic of theists, to self-justify into thinking that they are divinely justified. The fact that their opponents think exactly the same about themselves isn't relevant to that line of thinking. "My opponents may think the same thing," they say, "but I'm right, and they're wrong." Mayhem ensues, naturally.

Now, being a nontheist, I don't think that god is on my side.

However, the next thing I sort of habitually say when I start talking about these sorts of highly-questionable matters is, "Of course I could be wrong about that."

That leads to today's USRDA of irony, which is this: I could, in my nontheist refusal to claim that god is on my side, actually have god on my side.

That is all.