Why my good man, I just stepped off that Zepplin

Personally, I really want to get into doing some handiwork, you know. What's that old-timey word again...craftsmanship?

I have read some of Gibson's work and cyberpunk was interesting, but it wasn't something I could get into. Here's the stuff of the future, and it's all...inaccessable. It's not something that I can point to and say, "wow, that's neat stuff", because that "neat stuff" is just a bunch of ideas in an author's head. When I first heard of steampunk, I heard of it as a form of fiction. Who would know that it would take off in popularity, and the retro-techno-fitting of just about everything with that...craftsmanship. Suddenly, a light goes off in my head - this is accessible. It's more than just accessible, it's doable, it's something that will challenge what skills I have, and it can be made to be beautiful, even if that "beautiful" is pseudo-Art-Deco mixed with Victorian Brass.

I think the real appeal of Steampunk lies in its pre-industrial-revolution charm; a kind of accelerated technology that is still accessable to the common person in the street. You can't just open a chip fab and start churning out your own microprocessors. You can get your hands on some brass and do some milling, and come up with something both beautiful and functional.

The downside is that I don't have the skills, or the time, or the money to get started. (sigh)

Little Billy in a Dark Place

I have a secret theory. I think that Bill Gates was traumatized by a teletype machine.

Don't believe me?

Why did powershell take off after he left the company? Especially since it was in development during his tenure there? Why make it the tool of choice for administration of Exchange 2007, after years of pointy-clicky?

A co-worker has confirmed this suspicion (and was actually the first to point out the sudden command line culture appearing in Redmond after his departure).

Ok, so there was DOS to contend with. But maybe that was also part of the issue. The entire "letters on a grid on the screen" subculture pretty much lived there in PC-land for 10 years. When people think of command-line, they usually think of minicomputers, but those inside the industry usually think of Unix. And we all know how he just looooves Unix.

Odd, how everything in the last 15 years with software development is marketed as "Visual Crapulence version Ten-Zillion", yet dotNET shows up as a compiler that works on a command line.

There's a time and place for GUI interfaces. When the metaphor is right, they reduce effort and make it easy for millions to use their computers in a (relatively) sane manner.

But programming usually isn't one of them.

Living on the Edge...of Computing

So, I've decided to embark on a little journey in computing.

With the exception of the few games I own, I plan to live "outside" of Windows.

For a year.

(A muffled gasp from the back row, followed by quiet mutters of "He won't survive! He'll starve to death! He's gone mad! We'll find him reduced to picking berries and digging up tuber roots in a month's time!")

Now, I've already been running a non-Windows desktop for about 4 months now, and it's been pretty painless. But I've noticed more and more that I get less and less done while I'm in Windows. And frankly, I only use Windows because my games were written to run in Windows.

(Yes, I am aware of Wine and other ways to get games to run inside of my non-Windows sessions. But this is about "getting things done", not "screwing around".)

So what's it been like after 4 months?

Strange as it may sound, relaxing. I don't worry about things. I just worry about doing what I want to do. Isn't that what everyone claims to want - I want to just get things done? But isn't it funny that I get more done "outside of the box"?

We'll see how long this can last. I plan to go the additional 8 months. Can he do it? Can he hold out? Only time will tell...