Tell them, my song.

I applied for a new job today. Actually, I’ve sent my CV to a couple of places, including a rather popular open source company.

While I was writing my cover letter to that open source company, I realized that it was more than just a typical application that I was writing. I was phrasing the real WHY I was doing it, and it came from deep within.

You should know that I currently occupy quite a comfortable and well paid position in a very popular public organization almost everybody on this planet has probably heard of before. I am very well aware of the fact that I am suffering from what you could rightfully call a luxury problem, because I honestly believe that some people living in not so fortunate countries might kill to get a job and life like mine. Now don’t get any wrong ideas: I am neither rich nor wealthy. I am far away from an important managerial position. But I have a solid income and go to a warm and cozy office every day and I have a job that is technically easy to do for me.

But you see, the problem is that I am in -my- shoes, and -I- am not happy where I am. A nice salary and a warm office are not everything in life; at least not when you were born and still live in a first world country as I do. Every day that passes, I more and more have the feeling that my brain is rotting and that some part of me is dying. I do not believe in the place where I work or its mission. I do not believe in its management. I do not believe that it makes a real difference. And the purpose of my job only is to make sure that the computers of everybody else are working so that they can do whatever it is they are getting paid for. I am not creating or producing anything that has a meaning for me, I just fill like a gear in a huge paper mill.

It is the depressing feeling of wasting my life on nothing. Every single day.

I have sleeping problems, and my thoughts usually don’t stop spinning at night. And now, once again, I got up and type this. I’ve been having this symptom for way too long now. It got a bit better in the last couple of weeks. I do not suffer from dizziness at the moment, and I do not have stomachaches when I go to work. I’ve had this years ago, and then I knew that I had to quit my job immediately. Which I did. The job that I did back then was almost exactly the same job that I have now. Well paid, cozy office, a few nice colleagues — and brain dead boredom every day.

I’m happier when all servers vaporize over night and I need to come up with a solution pronto. I like that kick.

I love working on computer languages and software development tools. I had such a job once, and it was a dream job. Only that the management of that startup drove the company against the wall, and in the end they could not even pay the salaries anymore. I had to live of my credit card for around three months before I finally got my money. They started another company afterwards, but I was not in the mood to join that endeavour. Time told that I was right; two years later, the very same that crashed the first startup also crashed the second one. Now they are in round three, and I doubt that this one has better chances than the first two.

But anyway, ever since all other jobs were depressingly boring. So on the long run it does not seem to help you a lot when you find a dream job only to lose it.

I should start my own business to stay constantly challenged. But there are two basic things that keep me back:
1. I was not raised to be a business man, and I never learned to be one.
2. I come from a tiny village, and my people raised me in the believe that we were born to work for others, and that we need a job with a safe income in order to get through life. Somehow, this has taken root when I grew older (I did not have that problem when I was a teenager) and the thought of not knowing from what to pay the next rent frightens me. That probably is what Tyler Durden in the movie “Fight Club” meant when he said, ‘The Things you own end up owning you.’

There is a third issue:

3. What do I want to do?

Well, this is where I get to realize that there often is a gap between the things that you love and -want- to do, and the things you might be able to make a living with. I love photography and writing. Both consume a lot of time, and both are hard places to generate enough income to put food on your table.

Then there are things that I am sure of that they eventually could become products that make money. The problem is that it takes a lot of time to get there, and I cannot do them alone, and I do not have any financial savings to cover the gap.

But the main issue is that I want out of my current situation. It is draining my energy, and when I get back from my job, I just feel tired and don’t want to do anything else anymore. It’s that vicious circle: You know that your job is rotting your brain, but the only things you still have the energy to do in your free time are also neither creative nor challenging and only make you more brain dead.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been trying the approach of only working part time at my job. I’ve reduced my contract to 60% and now only work in the afternoons. It actually brought some relief, but I still don’t have sufficient energy to actually use my free time for something creative. I should go out and take photos. I should ride my bicycle, feel my body again and lose weight so that I feel good physically. I should really write again and finish those novels that I started such a long time ago. I should write code again - in a language that I like, and not in a language that is “accepted” in the industry and might give me another boring job at another boring company that creates another boring product.

I often say that if I had to do it again, I’d become a medical doctor. Or a cook. The funny thing is that I actually know a few medical doctors who told me that if they had to do it again, they’d go into IT. So it’s certainly true that the grass is always greener on the other side.

Steve Jobs once held a speech in which he said that ‘you have to find what you love’.

I’m lucky. I have found a lot of what I love; not only in my interests, but also in my partner.

What I have not found is the independence from the job rat race. I know that this is my main problem. It’s not just the boring job. It’s being forced to play by someone else’s rules and not my own.

An independent software developer that I’ve known years ago once said to me: “You are like me. You won’t be happy until you start your own business.”

There’s that again, and I think he’s right.

I need to overcome my upbringing and my doubts and start believing in me again and just do it.

If it only were that easy.

Based upon a couple of other blogs that I’ve found on the web, I now finally have a working .plist file to start PostgreSQL 8.3 via launchd at boot time on Leopard.

This is what the file looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>Label</key>
      <string>PostgreSQL</string>
   <key>UserName</key>
      <string>postgres</string>
   <key>RunAtLoad</key>
      <true/>
   <key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
   <dict>
      <key>PGDATA</key>
         <string>/PostgreSQL</string>
   </dict>
   <key>ProgramArguments</key>
      <array>
         <string>/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres</string>
         <string>-e</string>
         <string>-i</string>
      </array>
   <key>StandardOutPath</key>
      <string>/PostgreSQL/logfile</string>
   <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
      <string>/PostgreSQL/logfile</string>
   <key>ServiceDescription</key>
      <string>PostgreSQL Server</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Make sure that this file is in /Library/LaunchDaemons. I named it ‘org.postgresql.postgres.plist’.

Run these commands in Terminal:

   sudo chown root /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgresql.postgres.plist

   sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgresql.postgres.plist

Other notes for compiling and installing PostgreSQL 8.3 from source on Leopard:

• I manually added a user “postgres” using the user preference pane.

• On OS X, you will use ‘make’ instead of ‘gmake’ (as far as I can tell, it’s actually the same thing).

• The ’su’ thing does not work as documented in the PostgreSQL 8.3 INSTALL file. You can use ’sudo -s’ to switch to a root shell, or you can just prefix the commands with ’sudo’ to run them with super user privileges. However, when you are in a root shell after ’sudo -s’, the ’su - postgres’ command will work.

• As you can see above, I created my database directory in /PostgreSQL. Do whatever you want on your system, just make sure that the user ‘postgres’ is the owner of that directory, as documented.

• I did a lot of ‘ln -s’ to create symbolic links for the stuff in /usr/local/pgsql/bin’ in ‘/usr/local/bin’, so that calling all PostgreSQL commands and tools like psql works without having to provide a path. There’s probably a much more efficient way for this, but I have not dug into it yet.

For the BlitzMax folks out there that use Brucey’s PostgreSQL module:

• Copy /usr/local/pgsql/lib/libpq.a to /Applications/BlitzMax/mod/bah.mod/dbpostgresql.mod/lib.
• The easiest way to try the module with your current user account might be to create a database for your user in Terminal:
• createuser <username>
• createdb <username>
• Change the connection parameters in the source code. If you don’t assign a password to your database user account, just pass an empty string (”") in the LoadDatabase() call. In my case, it looks like this:
• Local db:TDBConnection = LoadDatabase(”POSTGRESQL”, “Winni”, Null, 0, “Winni”, “”)