Baby Mountains of Majesty

It's now been two days. Two LONG days. Clearly, this baby is sick. Her countenance wouldn't betray the fact but the four dirty diapers in an hour are a pretty good hint. I'm officially tired of cleaning up baby upchuck and baby downchuck. It's high time for some mental exercise. Well... as close as one can get to mental exercise... you see, my life is pretty dull and I bet yours is too.

I think the assumption society makes is that there are two parts to a person's life and that those parts play completely opposite roles. Person goes to work, does stuff, thinks, comes home, sits, does nothing, relaxes (or plays in some way). The work part is supposed to be hard and the not-work part is supposed to be easy and relaxing. After work is time for refueling, 'sharpening the saw' as the Covey people say. But I'm completely not buying that. It seems apparent that most people are a LOT smarter than their jobs. My wife goes to work and does pretty much the same mundane thing year after year. Her actual job isn't mentally stimulating that I can tell. She's not pressing any new neurons into service as she putters through each day because of her job duties. The things that really get her going are completely contrived and unrelated to her work. I have to wonder how many other people are in similar situations.

For my part, my job is immutably dull. The main crux of what I do is to pump out website after website that is 90% the same as the proceeding one with as much efficiency as possible. Every morning I get up and once again it's "time to make the donuts" to use a now archaic phrase. Like my wife, the entertaining things are the ones I take it upon myself to just DO because they need to be done. My boss scratches his head at me when I take special pains to attend some vague "Planning Meeting" like I'm some sort of tech-head droid that's run amok. Why the hell would a technical person want to go to a meeting? Isn't that against the geek law? I think that technically it may be but honestly the technical questions are really too easy. The real nasty thought-provoking questions are much more complicated. They involve people. Damn. Can't get much more complicated than that. People add a simply delightful level of complexity to life that one misses if one's head is bent over a computer screen for too long.

I realized recently that I'd been programming for 20 years. 20 years. I'm pretty sure that aside from basic biological functions I've not been doing anything else for that long. I've long ago given up every hobby that old. My first computer was a "Color Computer 2" and while I'll admit I had one game for the thing the BEST part was the "operating system." Now those were the days:

10 BEGIN
20 PRINT "HI!"
30 END

Or if you were a daring self-assured sort:

1 BEGIN
2 PRINT "HI!"
3 END

Yeah, those were some great times. Wonder if I have any of those old tapes. Somewhere there's a Bananarama tape with 90 seconds of *SCREECH* *SCRAW* *EEEEACK* recorded over the beginning that was a damn cool program.

So yeah, after 20 years, a lot of the mystery has gone out of the old programming experience. Guess I'll go type up those book notes from the other day and get back to the old Greek. Nothing like studying a language that on the surface makes absolutely NO sense to keep the wheels turning.