Swing Your Hips

I've been coding again the past couple of days - first time in ages. It's reminded me just how different it is from other sorts of work:

• it makes you think in a different way (see - I'm bullet pointing my post. I need structure, preferably expressed in code.)


• it's tremendously enjoyable. It's like doing crosswords all day. It quickly becomes meditative. That problem-solution-problem-solution hit is addictive. Plus there's a power law distribution of problem sizes, even within a single day's work.


• you can do it for eight hours without even looking up


• it subtly increases your base level of anxiety. My eyes are twitching ever so slightly.


• it's very very frustrating when it doesn't go your way, or you have to wait for the server, or (god forbid) you have to communicate with someone else to get something done. It stimulates the bit of the mind that just wants to get on and do things on its own.


• it's really difficult to snap out of at the end of the day. So I guess if you keep doing it day after day, week after week, eight hours at a stretch, you stop wanting to talk to other people so much.

On Monday I spent most of the evening wandering around Phil's head. Since he left Runtime he seems to have become a kind of conduit for all sorts of strands of net.thinking, a really valuable filter.

Emergent democracy lead me to blog co-operatives where I ended up posting about the Runtime experience. There are many things there we've never tried - liquid democracy, remuneration by reputation and so on. There's an ideal runtime in my head that combines all this plus alternative money and ends up as something like a virtual country.