Lets all be good little automatons

This is a sort of interesting article and scores some points for referencing "Be Here Now" (and loses many more for not completely understanding the text) but it's also got some serious flaws, not the least of which is that the study was conducted on self-reporting iPhone owners and I hardly think that's a group representative of the entire population.

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16tier.html

That said, I think I mostly agree for me personally... Sort of... I use being busy as a method for not being depressed. "I can't be depressed. I have too much to do right now." and it works. I can forget being unhappy for a while and I can enjoy whatever task I'm doing. But it's not the same as real and long-term internal happiness. I think that kind of short term happiness is what they were getting, not overall quality of life. that they claim the happiest people were those in the act of having sex sort of bears that out IMO. People are that version of happy when their pleasure centers are being activated. Whether it's because they're engaged in something and enjoy it or lost in the stupor of an opium-induced dream, they feel quite 'happy'.

I would perhaps enjoy letting my mind wander if I had more free time available but I am not independently wealthy and in terms of time, my responsibilities greatly outweigh my 'free' time so it's hardly surprising I'd be depressed when letting my mind wander in that situation set because I am in effect squandering a precious and irreplaceable asset (time). If I were in a situation where I worked far more or far fewer I might expect the outcome to be somewhat different.

I think the real problem in this study is that I suspect most people haven't sufficiently thought about the question to form a meaningful answer. I'm not sure most people actually know what happiness is. Then again, if my definition is the minority one, perhaps I'm the one that doesn't understand. Anyhow, if they really believe they're happy, who am I to tell them that they are not?
Maybe I'd understand more if I were a mindless cog.

For me, happiness is something else. Something that doesn't quite connect up to the fleeting version of happiness. There's some weird bit of me that enjoys everything, even the bits of my experience that I truly dislike. Its the part that brings me back from being depressed or angry, some weird internal mechanism that's able to spin any situation into something I can learn from, grow from, form new ideas from. Maybe it's not so much 'happiness' as fascination with novelty.

Anyhow..

Workflow Problem

Dear interwebs,

I have a workflow problem that it really seems like someone would have solved by now but I cannot find a clean solution.

Imagine 3 entities: The master repo (hereafter called MASTER), a machine where I build and run this code (we'll call it RUNNER) and a machine where I have an IDE but cannot run the code (IDE)

What I really want is just to run my IDE directly on RUNNER but because it's located elsewhere, I can't do that and trying to run Eclipse over X over ssh tunnels is full of suck.

Since I can't do that, the next best thing would be to keep the code on RUNNER and IDE reasonably in sync so that I can use IDE for browsing hierarchies and quick references to variables et al but still be able to run stuff on RUNNER and sometimes make quick ghetto changes on RUNNER and then port them back to IDE.

I _could_ simply do this with mercurial clones. We're using mercurial and it would work, it would just fill my changelogs with "Another Debug Change" messages and would make me sad.

I'd hoped mercurial queues would work but no such luck for this situation.

Apparently git allows you to change history pretty easily but mercurial doesn't and I don't want to convert to/from git for work.

My best solution at the moment sucks. I wrote a shell script that uses bidirectional rsync calls. It works but really somewhat defeats the purpose of version control.

( click here to behold very unsafe and crappy rsync script in all of its primitive glory )

Anyone got any better ideas? I'm open to suggestions and script improvements.

* Yes, I could break down and learn emacs. I could also immolate myself so spare me your emacy flames. I like Eclipse and I like vi. Deal with it.