I have two personal anecdotes here:

First I read a lot. A lot of technical books, ORA and New Riders (for the Win stuff) dominate my bookshelf. When I was a kid in the early 80s I knew every idiotic "D&D" rule there was because I read those books (they weren't really "books" then) and learned everything about the game I could.

This rarely creates inspiration for me. In fact shortly after trudging through DNS and BIND I found myself thinking, "What the heck am I going to do with this information?"

Ulitmately I builta FreeBSD Box to host DNS in my house. (No really.) Well the point of this anecdote is I made a situation where I could use my new knowledge. BUT I was able leverage knowledge I had garnered before to do this. So reading a lot is/was good.

Second: When I got stumped as a Sys Admin, either with Lotus Notes or Perl I did this... I got on a train. Within a few minutes of riding a train the answer came to me. It got to the point where my boss actually considered buying a train seat for my office. (No really.) So by getting _away_ from the problem I was often able to "figure it out."

Beer and music are probably _not_ your friends for this endevour. I like beer and music as much as the next guy, believe me. There are many times I'd like to pull a Guinness and crank KoRn to destructive levels (oh wait that's just to get rid of the sales people) but I don't think that this will help you code. In fact, take this challenge: While you're sober go to FreePerlCode.com and randomly pick a script. Write it sober. It is irrelevant whether it works or not when you are done. Now do the same after a few pints and crank up the weird part of "Whole 'Lotta Love" and try it again. Report your results!
--
ellem@optonline.net
There's more than one way to do it, just don't use my way.

In reply to Re: Where the inspiration comes from ? by ellem
in thread Where the inspiration comes from ? by shadox

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