I've been working hard at TripIt, since day one - more to do than there's time for, really. Barely even enough time to decide what to do, there's so many interesting, productive things to get done. Which is awesome. But today, I found myself leaning back in my chair, feet up on my filing cabinet, reading... for fun. It was about 11:45 AM.
This midday interlude would probably not go down well in any workplace, especially in one where the person engaging in it sits in the physical center of the open-plan office, the only spot where literally everyone can see him (and his monitor) without so much as moving their eyes. So I can only guess that my choice of literature - Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X 3rd Edition - must explain why most of the staring wasn't from the business people (who expect me to be productive) but from the engineers, who were shocked - shocked! - to find that the business people can read!
I do make a game of pretending that I understand something about programming. Mostly to feel like the thousands of dollars spent on the eight Dartmouth College computer science courses wasn't totally wasted (though, I'll be honest, I didn't get much out of CS 68 - Principles of Programming Languages). But I do enjoy programming - I've been doing it since I was about 10 (when I learned BASIC) and it's sad that today the only programming I do is in Excel - if you can call it that. I think back to those nights spent in front of the white glow of CodeWarrior and wonder... will I ever be as entertained/captivated/held hostage as I was by those lousy bugs?
So, when Andy asked politely for his book back (because he actually gets paid to read that stuff) I realized perhaps I should get all set up so that the next time I steal it I can actually get something done. Xcode is now loaded on my work macbook, and hopefully - unlike my Ruby / MySQL misadventure (where I couldn't ever figure out why MySQL wouldn't boot up on my personal macbook, and eventually threw in the towel after only ever accomplishing the requisite "Hello, World!") I'm ready to roll up my sleeves again and get dirty. Not because I get paid to do it, but just because it's fun.
And even if it isn't fun, it'll be worth it to see the look on the faces of the TripIt engineers (who all sit behind me over my left shoulder) when they see the compiler going on my screen. Or, more likely, when they see me rebooting my mac just like I did four times an hour in college after writing to a memory block that wasn't meant to be written to...
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