Sometimes, when I think of one thing, it takes me off on a chain of thoughts about things that I don't understand, until I get to the point where I've wandered about so longI wonder how I ever get anything done. Here's an example: I am helping some people set up a new level of an operating system, and one of the metrics I'm watching is how busy the page packs are. (Page packs hold storage that's not currently in use by the system or applications, but could be at any point. ) I found myself thinking about what the gurus say the optimal utilization level is for a given storage device (hint: its a number that's so low, I frequently find myself wondering if the number was suggested by the people who want to sell some more). I knew that I had it written down someplace, along with an explanation of why it's considered to be an optimal number, and for about the ten thousandth time I thought that I need a system for writing down these notes in some kind of searchable format. Well, that of course reminded me of databases, but that means there has to be a way of searching the database. Brute force would be okay -- I'm not talking about archiving the full Encyclopaedia Brittanica or anything -- but still, it has to exist, so I thought about keywords, and how you can either pick the keywords that you think would best describe what you were writing down, or you could use some mechanical method of generating the keywords (I don't know much about linguistic tools, but I like to read about them, so I know a little about how a keyword generator might work, in very, very simple terms.) Well, that got me to thinking about an article I read the other day which was written by a very bright woman named Ellen Isaacs about a system she prototyped at Sun (along with other Sun colleagues); the system was called Piazza, and it was an tool to enhance collaborative computing. Anyway, her article had several keywords at the beginning, so I sort-of wondered how she came up with them. And that made me think, very briefly, about collaborative computing, about which my knowledge level is virtually nil... and there I stopped.

Like I said, sometimes I wonder how I get anything done.