Natural Order Development

Sometimes I wonder why it is my mind takes me around various corners. My afternoon started with a JMX research task and ended by reading a great story by Bryan Hayes on the possibly apocryphal anecdote about Gauss frustrating his teacher as a child called Gauss's Day of Reckoning (http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/gausss-day-of-reckoning/1).

Just so you can see what I mean here is how my afternoon went.

1. Received email asking me to look into some new JMX Metrics being proposed for our product line.
2. Spent some time reviewing product documentation on existing JMX MBeans for metrics.
3. Realized we were violating a few recommended best practices.
4. Started to write an email recommending some adjustments to both the proposed new features as well as to the existing elements.
5. Wanted to include references to the JMX standards.
6. Hunted down where Oracle had stuffed the JMX documentation.
7. Noticed that the JMX home page (http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/core/mntr-mgmt/javamanagement/) hadn't been updated since February 18th, 2008 with the nice bold red letters of "NEW RELEASE!"
8. Started looking for some other more current JMX references.
9. Landed on a page talking about some complex things to do with JMX (http://blogs.sun.com/jmxetc/entry/how_to_retrieve_remote_jvm) which I noticed was written in 2007.
10. Poked Amazon for some JMX books to see if anything had really been done recently with JMX.
11. Ran over a random reference to Carl Friedrich Gauss.
12. Recalled the famous story about Gauss as a child in school depriving his teacher of a 30 minute break by perceiving the formula: the sum 1+2+3+...+n-1 is equal to n(n-1)/2.
13. Of course I needed to confirm I remembered the story correctly so then searched Google for "famous story Carl Friedrich Gauss".
14. Which landed me at the great American Scientist article: Gauss's Day of Reckoning (http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/gausss-day-of-reckoning/1). In which the author (Bryan Hayes) recounts both the "famous story" anecdote about the boy wonder as well as how the story has gained a life of its own.
15. Naturally after that wonderful article I needed to write a blog about it.
16. Finally leading me to try to recall what I was supposed to be doing in the first place.