There was also the view. I could walk outside and stroll around the Broadway/Wall St. intersection. I could see the World Trade Center as I entered my bank. I could stroll to South Street Seaport.

And, of course, there's IRC. The stress-away-from-stress, as it were. Whenever I'm having trouble focusing on my own programming tasks, I can always help someone else have trouble with theirs. ;)

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

Nothing like unloading a full clip of 20 nerf darts into a coworker (or your monitor/computer/whatever) to take the edge off.

I have 6 Nerf Wildfire's so I can pass them out and we can play "Capture the flag" in the hallway. "Shoot the bosses" is another fun game. :-)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What grep didn't bother to mention was the image I have on my desktop. It's a picture of me with a demonic look on my face (nothing new there), creaming him at Stick Hockey. I was down 6-0 in the last period and beat him 7-6 :) So far, that appears to be our company's record for the best comeback.

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

Surfing the net usually makes things worse for me, since I get kinda uneasy by it. It would be cool to do something that I'll have to move for (more than just going to the kitchen), but, well, no, that's simply not it *g*.

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion

-- Frag.
--
"It's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time!"

Go outside, take a walk, and let the body get some sunlight. There's a reservoir nearby that gets good drop-in traffic from migrating birds. Watching them for a few minutes is a great way to clear the brain.

Though since I'm a manager, I sometimes make do with shifting my tension on to others. :)

"Incoming Management! Duck!"

In reply to mr greywolf, the ass clown comments are good, the bad monkey comments are damn funny, but the silly rabbit whack jobs comments are probably the best to beat the time when the only other possible solution to ease your mind would be to smash your head against the wall. (In a side note, we even have a news article on the wall of our web closet about a bad monkey jail, so go figure!)

Depends on the place. At work, I usually take a quick break to read web comics, The Onion, or other time-wasters. (High-powered nerf weaponry is on my to-do list.) Sometimes it helps to work on another unrelated problem; if I'm thrashing on a DB issue, I might switch to something graphics-related. Or I can SSH home and play rogue.

At home, I have more options. Playstation 2, idiot box, computer games (rogue is excellent for that sort of thing, since it's fairly brainless and you die quickly), guitar, arseloads of books, a wide selection of pubs within a ten minute walk, whatever. (That reminds me; when I get a decent amp, I should pick up a cheap guitar and set it up with the old amp in my office. Oh. Headphones. Sure.)

--
:wq

No, you die quickly. Speak for yourself on matters rogue-like.

Speaking for myself, I don't die quickly ;).

I should've qualified that: one dies quickly in rogue compared to a fairly good game of nethack.

--
:wq

Also, I tend to go over to use.perl.org, just to see what everybody else is doing. You can't know what's going to be in a journal entry; most of them range from two dry little sentences to great scads of personal information, or little funny notes, etc., so it's both work-related and casual.

-----------------------
You are what you think.

If only we had Amsterdam style coffee houses here in the states ...

Of course, nothing beats good 'ole rigorous excercise to really cast those frustration demons out.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
F--F--F--F--F--F--F--F--
(the triplet paradiddle)

JUST SAY NO!

MY MOM SAYS I'M COOL EVEN WITHOUT YOUR NASTY DOPE.

I work out of the boat, so I turn on Cartoon Network and play with the dogs.

--Chris

When I've been banging on a hard problem for a long time with no results, I find it helpful to change the environment (as everyone else has been saying, go outside). Then I come back and start from scratch. (Even if your new version is broken, you can sometimes gain some insight into why the first version is broken.) Sometimes I draw pictures of the problem or data structures on paper.

One time I worked for three days on a search algorithm and it kept having the kind of bugs that, when you fix them, cause others to appear. I finally got so frustrated I went home an hour early. When I got home, I slammed a working version out from scratch in 30 minutes.

http://www.nodewarrior.org/chris/

Also, I try to cut down on the coffee. It makes you feel focused, yes, but it also makes you narrow.

Cheers,
-- moodster

• Counter-Strike
• Quake
• Unreal

I also make a habit of also having a fun project lying around to work on - a simple video game or something of that sort, whatever you enjoy programming most.

If for some reason after trying all of the above you're still about to snap, you may have to resort to dthacker's suggestion - but only in extreme circumstances ;-).