Monitoring and Logging Your System
Only the first half of this post is pretty technical, but it is still readable if you have rudimentary computer experience. I assure you, it is very relevant to the good bits of the post.
For those of you who don’t know, my day job (if I am working right now) is being a computer programmer. I used to write a lot of software to deal with networking protocols.
In the world of networking (the big Internet for example), network administrators often have to deal with odd things that happen. Even if there are no problems, they often need to keep a record or log of the network activity, for posterior analysis. So any software that deals with network traffic will require monitoring and logging capabilities.
Let’s define these terms.Monitoring is the act of looking at the data in real time as the traffic flows through the network device. Besides looking at the actual traffic, regularly updated statistics tells the human network operator about the health of the system. If the number of errors start climbing, better go call for help!
Logging is journaling of the network traffic into log files. Typically, reports can be generated from the log files at the end of the day. A more important function for log files is that they allow for reconciliation should the network device dies in the middle of a transaction.
Are you still reading? I sure hope so, even though I am getting into mumble jumble technical jargon.
The fact is, our own minds work also in a similar fashion. Your brain is constantly receiving data from the environment. While you probably don’t run at the same clock rate as the network devices, you too can add monitoring and logging to your “system.”
When you are monitoring what you are doing, it is a matter of just stepping outside of yourself and really look at what you are doing. Pretend that your consciousness has stepped outside of your body, and you are looking at your own physical and mental processes. Ask yourself: “What are you doing?” “Am I in pain?” “Is this anger that I am feeling?” “Is this girl reciprocating my advances towards her?” “Am I procrastinating on homework by reading silly blogs?” When you are in the middle of a situation or a task, sometimes we zone out and go on auto-pilot. This is just a matter of being conscious of where you are at and what you are doing. If necessary, take over from your auto-pilot and correct your trajectory.
When you are logging, you are recording the day’s events. For myself specifically, this means writing in my private journal at the end of the day. While logging in the networking sense usually means recording every single byte of data, your journal entry should try to make some sense of the day’s thoughts and feelings. As well, writing gives you an outlet for stress and a chance to reflect (i.e. doing reports on the day’s raw data). Who knows, you just might need to have materials for your memoirs one of these days.
Getting back to the networking metaphor, a network operator’s job is not simply to sit and watch the computer screens and making sure nothing screws up, his job should also be about looking for inefficiencies in the system and make adjustments as appropriate. Naturally, your own monitoring and logging should also serve this function. Whatever you put your attention into will certainly improve; and there is no better place to place your attention than on your own life.
