September 25, 2000

Burnout, Fallingwater

jfs: Check out OpenLDAP for a open-source LDAP server. They recently put out v. 2.0 which (I believe) implements version 3 of the LDAP protocol. (Haven't had time to play with it recently -- previous versions worked great.)

The book Peopleware discusses the idea that there is no such thing as overtime. However many hours you work over some figure (around 40 hours, varying some per person) for a week you will eventually have a roughly equivalent amount of undertime. Undertime is not just sitting around doing nothing (although that counts too), but doing things like reading advogato and for every person who has posted a diary entry checking out their description, homepage, branching off into links from there, talking to people around the "watercooler", taking long lunches, coming to work later and leaving earlier, etc.

Some people have a hard time separating this from laziness, but too little undertime leads to burn-out time. Of course, those same people probably thing burn-out time is laziness too...

I staved off burn-out time (a little) by going camping with B and some of her family this weekend around Ohiopyle. Also saw Fallingwater, which was pretty amazing. The attention to detail was admirable, as were some of the solutions they devised to get around some of the difficulties resulting from integrating the building so closely with its surroundings.

For instance, in one area water leaked through a rock formation that was also inside the house. The first time it happened after a big rainstorm, the water ran down a hall and through the first floor before making its way down to the stream. Instead of trying to prevent the water from running at all (which would have been futile), they simply put a hole in the floor next to the rock inside the house so the water could drain -- they worked with the water rather than trying to force it into a desired behavior. Nice lesson.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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