I'm taking a little break from work. I've actually been doing two kinds of work today. Work around the house and work for my job. My wife and I have been painting out bathroom. Part of that job has involved patching some holes because I took down an old cabinet that we are replacing and because of some "issues" from previous work down in that room recently. Patching, sanding, and in between waiting for things to dry. The new cabinet is together and ready to put up but not until the last coat of paint dries. I also had to go out and buy tools and stuff. My wife actually went for the paint and related supplies. I had to get a new drill bit for installing the special screws I bought to mount that cabinet on the wall.

While waiting for things to harden or dry or what not I have been reviewing some documents for work. My reviews on these papers are due on Monday. While I had, in theory, plenty of advanced warning of the deadline things just seemed to come up. So I am playing a little catch up on the weekend. This project is not part of my normal workload so while it is important it was hard to prioritize ahead of some other things that are part of my normal workload. But I made a commitment to a friend to do this I feel strongly that it is reasonable, indeed proper and necessary, to do it on the weekend. And now it is done which is why I am taking this break while the last bit of paint dries before hanging the cabinet.

I like the idea of doing things that matter while waiting. Mindless waiting drives me crazy. Life is too short for that. This is of course how operating systems work as well if you think about it. While one program is waiting for and IO operation to complete the OS will move over to a program that requires the CPU. When the IO completes an interrupt happens and that program gets the computer's attention again. Do you suppose that the people who came up with the first multi-processing OS thought about how they did things in real life or were they just focused on not wasting expensive CPU time? It is something to wonder about today.