the corner office

Wrote Distributed Operating Systems today. Not the best, not the worst. To say that there was a mountain of work to cover was an understatement. "Tanenbaum textbook," - "ah", says the peanut gallery, "say no more."

Fascinating stuff, but a lot of work to get through. My study notes for the subject weighed in pretty close to 100 pages, and they are a model of terseness. The purpose of study notes is to get the facts and concepts into one's head, and on a purely utilitarian level, that's all they're there for. Nonetheless, I feel myself weighed down with a sense of waste, of futility. It's silly, but it's thoroughly soul-destroying seeing that much effort and paper being banged into a file, never to be touched or read again (unless I have to repeat the subject, which hopefully won't be the case.) Sure, the notes will sit on my bookshelf for a while, and then one day I'll have to face up to the fact that they're just taking up space and throw them away.

I still have some study notes from my BComm degree, and they're pushing 15 years old, now.