May 19th, 2008
Herding Cats vs. Holding Kittens
Today, I spent almost ten hours performing a rather silly task. I re-architected a wiki. I can already hear the geeks among you giggling. Wikis don’t have architecture, of course. They’re completely flat with no directories, no hierarchy… just a bunch of pages all mashed up in one big stew pot and crosslinked to hell. They’re organic and ever-changing—anybody can go in at any time and add a bit here, revise a bit there, make a new page… that’s the whole point. Re-architecting a wiki, therefore, is like herding the proverbial cats. It’s almost an oxymoron.
And I felt like a moron doing it. But I promised I would. Actually, I promised I would deliver it weeks ago, and by this morning my boss was almost out of patience. So I hunkered down and spent the entire day trying to impose a hierarchy on a couple hundred half-baked, frequently contradictory, often obsolete and always poorly organized pages of text. Building a castle out of Jell-O, if you will. Granted, that wiki was a mess, and if the plan I came up with is successfully implemented, it won’t be a mess anymore. So I suppose there was value… unless it becomes a mess again, and it will. Entropy, thy name is wiki. Meanwhile, I didn’t listen to a single note of music today. I didn’t write, I didn’t walk, I didn’t do anything even remotely enjoyable until I got home at about 8:00. I just wikied my iki off.
On the other hand, this is what my wife did today: she cuddled kittens. Seventeen itty bitty purring mewing cute as anything kittens. Messy, sure, but c’mon… KITTENS!!! Man, life is so unfair. I think I’m going to make a demand at work tomorrow: I want kittens in my cube! Live ones, mind you, not those drippy motivational posters. No kittens, no work! Give me purring or give me death! Dogs are fine too… Puppies for productivity! No labor without labs! Atta-boy! Atta-boy! Let’s start a revolution! Who’s with me?
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