I reluctantly came to this fork on the road, I had to choose between my balloon work and my Open Source projects.
At least for the time being.
What's the link anyways? How could a balloon artist be coding any sort of software?
Well, these two domains are only different in outward appearance. In reality both demand a real creative process, a great deal of patience, attention to minute details and an enormous dose of inspiration and passion.
The dopamine burst and the excitement I get from a new balloon performance is no different from the one I ever got creating a new Live CD, a new website or a new application. I usually obsess for a few days/weeks and work non-stop day and night until whatever was in my head has materialized somehow. I already described that phenomenon in a previous article on creativity.
Then if it's all the same, why am I putting my Open Source projects on hold at the moment?
Hint: the answer is in the title of this article.
During the creation process, everything is easy, time becomes irrelevant and any insurmountable mountain becomes a molehill. Everything is truly possible.
But once the creating process is over, reality becomes an issue.
Strangely in the real world, a mere molehill can become an insurmountable problem, and more importantly, time becomes very (and I mean very) relevant. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day, only 7 days in a week, about 4 1/2 weeks in a month, only 12 months in a year, and only a certain amount of years in a life, quite possibly less ahead than behind.
And when you have a hand in every pie, this can become problematic.
Creating is the easy part, managing what you have created on a day to day basis is more complicated and usually require time, a lot of undivided time.
The choice is actually between running crazy trying to do it all, or learning to limit ourselves, do fewer things, but well and for the long term.
I know, I tried.
I will spare you the details.
But I have simplified my life greatly by deciding to prioritize my work with balloons and putting everything else on the back burner, probably for the next few years.
Thankfully SalixOS has taken over most of my important projects: LiloSetup, LiveClone and Live Installer. So this is where you should go if you arrived on this website looking for those tools.
For the moment this website will stay open for archiving value. I might even post a couple blog articles from time to time, until the eventual time where I'll be able to resume my contributions to FOSS again.
So this is not really an 'Adieu', only an 'Au Revoir'!
Until then, my contributions will be mostly balloon tributes, like at the 'Salon des solutions Linux" in Paris a couple years ago.