Tinkering Towards Failure

It is Tuesday.

Tuesdays are work days. Work is thesis work.

Breakfast. With coffee. Another cup of coffee. Getting stressed. Too much caffeine. Too little confidence. Too little overview. Too little insight. Too little structure.

Coffee. Jitters. Uppers and downers - try rooibos - try ice cream. Tummy ache. Don't know where to start, continue - or whatever it is I am doing.

General tinkering. Reading. Writing. Rereading. Deleting.

I'm lucky. I'm only worrying about my thesis. Hanneke has additional issues. We're not each other's constructive company today.

Is this general confusion and nervous apprehension going to end up in a successful thesis, a job (the paid kind)? Are we Tinkering Towards Success, as Karin Knorr-Cetina wrote in an article I never read too carefully, or is this going to end with Failure?

I guess that is up to me...

Another tinkering project that recently has come closer to failure, is trying to fix John's iPod Shuffle, that stopped working. As any attempt to remedy the situation by following various recipes for success have failed, John has moved on to hardware inspection.



John is a software guy, and after carefully disassembling the shuffe into as many pieces as you can, while still being able to reassemble it, there are really no more options. The shuffle is a compact piece of plastic with no movable parts, no dust, no apparent busted parts. The shuffle is a so-called "Consumable" product. And consumed it is.

Failure is relative, and you shouldn't kill the rookie.

Instead - all you need is love ("kärlek" - these two grafittis were next to each other)


Love is not that easy though. And when you open the love black box, commonly popularized through television, I guess it's as hard to understand what the individual parts do, and which buttons to press in order to make it work again - and what caused it to break down anyway?

While the internet is full of benevolent suggestions for fixing your iPod Shuffle; explaining what's wrong with a Thinkpad battery, and how to recondition it; there's not that much helpful material on how to mend love when it's not working properly. I'm afraid that the otherwise wonderful Howstuffworks.com, while brilliant at explaining how the common four-stroke internal combustion engine works, is not going to be terribly helpful when explaining love

I guess all we can say is good luck, Hanneke.