Rands in Repose, a blog I ran across while reading Slashdot headlines last week, introduced me to a condition playfully called N.A.D.D., or Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. The threshold Rands suggests for determining whether or not you’re a victim (or is it a beneficiary?) of the condition is that you’re working more than 10 windows on your computer at any given time. When I read the article, I had six tabbed terminal windows open to five different systems (one with a mysql session going) and four tabs going on my main browser. On my laptop (these first tasks limited to my primary desktop system), I had a couple of browser tabs, a terminal, and two email accounts open. And on my third computer (a PC, which admittedly I seldom use but keep handy for those times when I have to check some code on the platform), I had an FTP session, a couple of terminal windows, and two or three other applications going. Sometimes I also have a terminal services session open into one of our Windows servers with multi-taking going on there as well. I think I qualify as a sufferer (beneficiary) of the condition.

I had been planning to jot a note about this for a day or two but hadn’t had time. When I went back to RinR today to review the article, I saw that he had written another about checking his referer logs and even responding to another guy who had referred to the N.A.D.D. article. So now I feel like a copycat, not only for picking up the N.A.D.D. article but because by doing so now, I come across as if I’m making some cheap move to get recognition or mention in another blog. Not so, for whatever it’s worth.

In my own referer news, within two days of starting this little blog, I was googled. I didn’t figure it’d happen that fast. There’s apparently some degree of interest in “The Revenger’s Tragedy” that my synopsis attracts. Here’s hoping I didn’t screw it up too badly. This takes me back to my early days on the Internet: When I was first learning to post files in Web space while in early college (the Web was still in its infancy), I posted a bunch of little essays entitled such lofty things as “On Death” and “On Love” and “I’d Rather Be an Onion.” There was also an essay on William Golding that I wrote in high school. It was a bad essay. Really bad. As in I hadn’t even read one or two of the books I had written about. But it was a 10-pager, by golly, and I wanted something longish to post in my fledgling Web space. There wasn’t much about Golding on the Web at the time, so my essay got a fair amount of attention and I believe, sadly, has been attributed in “scholarly” works produced by foreign students of English literature. Once, a high school teacher in one of the Dakotas had the students in one of his classes write me their thoughts on “Lord of the Flies,” and I agreed to engage with them in the interest of teaching them to use the Internet as a research tool. I still find the occasional reference to the essay out there and hereby apologize to those who have used it as anything but a foil for respectable literary criticism.

In the course of writing this entry, I’ve checked into a couple of database issues, combed through some server logs, run upstairs twice, read several emails, collected a book I had loaned to somebody, discussed the merits of XML vs. database storage (coming down in favor of the database) with regard to an upcoming project, and discussed with a coworker the fact that my laptop’s CPU is slowly cooking itself. Yeah, I think I’ve got a case of N.A.D.D. Do you suppose I’m eligible for any kind of benefits?