Lonely Lion

This article popped up on the O’Reilly Radar today. It’s an awful lot like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance without the heavy parts I have a hard time understanding (the whole second half of the book).

The whole guy with a graduate degree that finds manual labor to be more satisfying than not-manual-labor thing is sort of trite, but I like it just fine. I’m of the mindset that software development is one of the last great vocational crafts. Stuff like this…

“My shop-mate Tommy Van Auken was an accomplished visual artist, and I was repeatedly struck by his ability to literally see things that escaped me. I had the conceit of a being an empiricist, but seeing things is not a simple matter. Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. There was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank.”

…happens all the time in the computer world. As much as I like Mac’s, I’ll always build desktop’s from parts. Not because it’s cheaper, but because I like screwdrivers. The other night I swapped a bunch of parts between my two desktops to even them out a bit. I ran into some problems, and “saw” what the issue was without going through a lengthy part by part diagnostic. Growing up, I never had money to buy a brand new PC, but there were always parts around. Twenty or so years of building game machines is pretty valuable and satisfying.

All that said, I have serious ADD when it comes to learning new things. This blog is evidence of how often I change my mind and head out in new directions. The idea of learning one thing very well is appealing to me, but I’m notoriously impatient and fickle. The wife and I were recently talking about “natural ability” vs. “learned ability”. Not to sound like an arrogant dick, but I’ve been told that I have a “natural ability” when it comes to improv. Totally fucking false. It’s just not true. Yeah, I’m hilarious, but not because of nature, it’s because I want to be funny more than just about anything. So I spend a lot of spare brain cycles constantly analyzing why what I just heard was funny, and how what I’m currently experiencing is going to be funny when I tell it to someone later on in the day.

Lame, eh? My new theory on “natural ability” is that it doesn’t exist. What does exist is “I love doing this.” If you genuinely love Chess, you’re going to be good, because you’ll play all the time, and build up a head-index of crappy situations you’ve been in. A lot of this was in Scientific American last month in an article about prodigies. That’s what kicked off the initial me and the wife chat.

Anyway, I digress. I liked the vocation article. I agree with the author (and Pirsig) that you should spend time figuring out how your stuff works, maybe fixing it on your own occasionally, and generally not being afraid of hand saws.