My watch ticks past 7am, and I sit on the train once more waiting to leave Marlow - bound for London. A light rain is falling, moistening the air. The world is “soft”.
In a few moments the train will pull out, I will check my email, then walk between platforms at Bourne End to continue the daily trudge into London. Once safely installed in the Paddington bound train I will untangle my headphones, unfurl the Macbook, fire up iTunes, and switch on a Podcast.
Podcasts have become my saviour. Picking radio shows as you might magazines from a shelf is appealing. This morning Leo Laporte and the rest of the TWiT gang tried desperately to find tech news not involving the iPhone to talk about - they repeatedly referred to it as “the elephant in the room”.
My unlikely early morning companions have become Leo Laporte, Cali Lewis, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, Amber Mac, Patrick Norton, and many others.
The podcasts have become a crutch. While not working in the open office atmosphere of my full time employer - surrounded by other developers - I am missing out on the “have you seen this?” discussions. Luckily TWiT, GeekBrief and MacBreak Weekly provide much the same experience - only without the inane jPod-like conversations involving “who can make the best sounding name with two meanings (e.g. Sue Mowrestler), or who can start whistling some inane tune and get it into everybody elses head.
Don’t get me wrong - working in London is great, and the people I’m working with are great - but I’m used to working with my own kind - people for who the internet and computers are more than just their work.
Perhaps it’s a damning reflection on software and web development that it requires more than an average career. It is not enough to just “turn up” at the office. Perhaps it also reflects well on people such as myself though? Apart from having no life, I regularly show almost outlandish feats of concentration - dissappearing into myself while hunched over the latop for 18 hours at a stretch - only rising for coffee or food when I realise I’m shaking.
Weekends can be my enemy. If not careful they turn into a 48 hour development bar-camp. Luckily I have a failsafe device called W that reminds me of another world - one inhabited by friends and family, and reasons to shut the damn computer down.