Unintended Breaks

For the last 5 days I’ve been without my main computer. I swapped the contents of two rooms here, and somehow in that process my computer stopped booting up (nothing would happen when pressing power or manually completing the “power” switch on the motherboard). This is always the most annoying problem to deal with, as there are many things it can be. In the end I was able to take out my power supply and try one of my old ones which powered it up fine. OK, no problem, get a new power supply right? Well I install it, hook it up to 4 hd’s and turn it on (with the motherboard outside of the case) only to get… nothing? Apparently with only 3 HD’s hooked up it boots up, shuts down, boots up, shuts down. With 2 HD’s hooked up it boots fine though. This was a new power supply still in shrink wrap, making me reluctant to claim it as the culprit, but I should be able to hammer out the reason tomorrow. Hopefully I can get back to coding a little more in my spare time after that and not concerning myself with hardware issues. But on the bright side I’ve been able to get much more reading done than I would have otherwise. I’m almost done with book 3/50, which is proving very informative. One of the problems I’ve always had when finishing technical books is the urge to skip around from one book to another, never completely finishing anything. It’s no surprise that Context switching is a bad idea , but I’d always related that back to programming. Same can be said for reading, which is no surprise. To combat this harmful practice, shelve your books! Only allow one book to be off your bookshelf at a time and don’t allow it to go back until it’s done. I’ve found not having 10 “interesting” books that I’d love to read lying around I’m much more inclined to finish the one I really want to read. It’s a small change, but by cutting out the question “Which book should I read” you spend more time concentrating on the one you’ve already started.