Birthdays, disk quotas and difficult decisions

Today has been a very complicated day. First, the problem that we had yesterday with the automated delivery of data packages turned out to a problem of disk quota: through the repeated delivery of packets we had simply filled the 20 GB of data that were allotted to us, so we were allowed to create new files (with size 0) but not to fill them with content, so they remained empty. It is unfortunate that the system administrator (or even better, their monitoring tools) did not notify us on their own when we reached our limit, but luckily they found an answer rather quickly when poked. Once we made room in our server, things started to work again without a hitch. All we have to do now is to remember to empty the storage every now and then.

Photo by Will Clayton.

The second complication of the day was Jason's birthday. Fortunately the gifts were mostly out of the way, since I have already been working together with him the last couple of days to set up his laptop, but we still had his favorite lunch, the cake, and all the calls for relatives far and near to congratulate him. At age 16 he is already aware of the amount of trouble associated with preparing the cake and a meal, so he suggested bringing in schnitzel from a very renowned place in town and bake our own cake, which he prefers without icing anyway. That meant that Karen took care of the cake while I picked up lunch and the disturbance around midday was not that bad... until it was. The schnitzels were delicious and huge, and while we enjoyed every bite of them, we all ended up in food-induced stupor for over one hour after we were done with lunch. That is were the difficulties started, because I had a really hard time getting back to my office to work some more before the evening video-conference marathon started.

I have read somewhere that willpower is not a reliable source for good habits, because it runs out over the course of the day in the same way that your muscular strength or your mental acuity drains depending on how much you demand from them. Similarly, if you spend your day pushing yourself to do the "good" things and avoid the "bad" ones, at some point in the day you will be out of willpower and start to "fall' for the wrong decisions. The piece argued that building your daily/weekly agenda so that most activities do not require the decision of "shall I do it now?" eases the pressure on your willpower. In my case, I have set that once lunch and coffee are done I shall simply go back to my office and work on until 18:00. But today, with the food coma and the heat, I dawdled on my coffee and it was almost 16:30 by the time I finished. But I have to admit that I managed to sit again in front of my laptop and go over the article I am writing for my PhD thesis, so the overall balance of the day has not been that bad.

We have already had three video-calls by now, sang "Happy Birthday" five times (the grandparents wanted repeats) and there are at least two more calls pending. But it has been quite fun all in all. I will see you all tomorrow.