It was that time of year again.

Time to put all computer related worries out of mind and strike out somewhere to enjoy some down-time with friends and family. This summer’s trip was to Fort Worth to attend the world premier of Jorge Martín‘s opera of Before Night Falls performed by the Fort Worth Opera, catch some of the local tourist sights, go to some of the local galleries, and eat some of the food.

Everything went well, the opera was a delight, and by the end of the week I could have been getting used to the heat. Maybe.

Last weekend my wife clipped a review of The Case for Working With Your Hands or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good from the Weekend FT. The title of the book and the brief review got me thinking, and I’ll have to read the book when I can get my hands on a copy.

I’m not sure if the author knows what it is like to “fix” software as a job, after many years maintaining software I would probably rework his subtitle to include … fixing real things ….

There are endless things I should do around the house, and I often excuse myself from starting on something by worrying about the quality of the likely result. I hadn’t really thought about the pleasure I get from the process.

Tonight, however, I hope to bask in the fruits of the manual labours of others – the Stick Men hit Toronto tonight!

This week’s Philosophy Bites podcast struck a chord with me. I have often felt that I might have been more suited to another time, even though the late twentieth and early twenty first century have many comforts and distractions which seem to make now a good time to be living. The podcast was Susan Neiman on Morality in the 21st Century, it appealed to me because I consider myself to be an admirer of enlightenment values.

I’m always happy to play the post-modern cynic for laughs, the willful abandonment of reason and responsibility means I can make outrageous and imbecilic claims to irritate and amuse. In more serious moments post-modernism’s main use to me is a quick litmus test – if something claims to be post-modern then it’s most likely a waste of my time and effort to engage with it seriously.

The podcast comes as close to articulating my feelings about how I consider living my life today as anything I’ve recently heard, and helped me refine some of my thoughts about enlightenment values.

Today is good because the sun is shining, the flowers are coming up, and I feel a reverence for nature and spring’s arrival fills me with a sense of hope and happiness.

Time and time again I condenm myself to a seductive trap – using things I am comfortable with, and convincing myself that I’m productive because I’m happy and comfortable. The problem is that the old tools and methods may well be adequate for what I think I need to do, but there might be whole new ways of thinking that my current tools just don’t expose me to.

As the Pomodoro technique is forcing me to think about and sometimes even change how I work at work, sometimes swapping tools helps me evaluate both the tools and my abilities to use them. Occasionally there is an even bigger benefit – perspective. Here are a couple of examples:

(1) Ruby and Perl. Perl is a tool I like a lot, and most of my work in the past decade seems to have been maintaining code which appears to have been written quickly by people not entirely familiar with better practices in Perl (or in my own case way too familiar with some new feature in Perl!). Maintaining these code bases tends to let me trap myself in the Perl of a decade ago, and given the sheer volume of stuff appearing on CPAN and newer Perl releases I know I’m falling behind. Given my limited engagement with the Ruby community it seems that they are younger, more dynamic, and more open to going beyond emacs or vi and testing. Returning to Perl for fun (cleaning up the Toronto Perl Mongers’ web site) some of the fun things I see in the Ruby world make me dig a little deeper into CPAN, or look a the echo chamber that are Perl blogs to find modules, tools, and techniques which do more than incrementally improve my Perl.

(2) Editors. I’ll confess I’m a vi user, and I use maybe 2% of gvim’s potential. A few months ago someone suggested I try emacs. Try I did, and now I am back using gvim as my main editor … but now I have a perspective which is making me much more active in exploring the details of some of the vim add-ons. I’m also interested in what “real” IDEs can do for me, and how vim / emacs provide other ways to achieve the same goals.

Bringing it all back to something I really care about, I guess that stagnation is OK – the song on Trespass which has survived all the way through to 2007′s Old Medley – and, as Peter Gabriel sings “… nothing fades like the future, nothing clings like the past.” I find myself editing Perl using (g)vim, but at least I have the dust of “other countries” on my feet, and dreams of other futures in my heart.

Last night I had a chance to catch up with some colleagues from Exegenix, about four years after leaving. It was great to see them again, and it reminded me that, for me at least, the most engaging aspect of work is the opportunity for relationships with other people. It also showed me how much I forget, and how generously my memory lets the less pleasant aspects of things gently fade away. The past somehow always seems a little more pleasant that it was, and the pace of life seemed to allow for more reflective activities.

That led me to think about all the ways we have these days to keep up with people, and how I need to limit the energy that I put into the technology to leave more for the relationships. I looked at Facebook for the first time yesterday, and I am amazed but not surprised by its addictive shallowness. I have a hard enough time keeping on-task without the distracting siren’s cry of another “funny” or “got to see” YouTube video. For me it looks like another technology to put on the pile with all the other “might be helpful if it didn’t involve being at a computer and having to expend energy ignoring distractions” technologies until I master focusing. So the ways I stay in touch with people are essentially email (or Christmas cards) and occasionally the phone if it is really urgent.

Reflecting on the last couple of paragraphs it seems that a key skill I need to develop is not getting caught up in the urgency of the moment by default, instead I can learn how to pause and consider interruptions and learn to defer or ignore those which don’t need my immediate attention.