Fun:Yak shaving

Yak shaving is the art of doing something that you have to do before you can do something that you have to do before you can do something that you have to do before you can do something important. It's how geeks put difficult tasks off while telling themselves they're not being lazy. If I were a yak, I'd be very nervous around computer coders with a deadline to meet.

The term originated with the Ren and Stimpy episode "Yak Shaving Day" and was popularised by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the 1990s.

Useful examples
Remarkably, sometimes shaving the ol' yak produces useful side-effects.

The second greatest piece of yakshaving in the history of computer technology was arguably TeX. Don Knuth was working on The Art of Computer Programming and realised his typographical tools didn't let him do everything he wanted. So he spent a minor several-year diversion writing an entire page description language and a font manager for it. To this day, anyone attempting to establish their nerd cred will always write everything they ever do in TeX, just because they can. (In practice, scientists simulate this process by writing their paper in Microsoft Word and changing the font to Computer Modern.)

The greatest is Unix, otherwise known as that thing Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wrote so they could play Space Travel on that discarded PDP-7 sitting in the corner of the lab.

Seth Godin gives this little story to explain the term: