I spent the morning moving things to the curb. Before I could move things to the curb, I had to open the gate. That should have been the easy part.

With my projects, there is no easy part!

We have been missing the key to that lock. It has gone on walkabout with no forwarding address. I spent time looking for the key. I looked in all of the likely key repositories. I looked in the cottage. I

looked in my office. I was, not surprisingly, unsuccessful. So in a bit of lateral thinking, Heather suggested the hacksaw. It wasn't all that lateral. Yesterday she bought new hacksaw blades that we used to cut the new threashold for the front door. She also offered the opinion that we could just cut off the flipping lock.

It was not a scene out of Gone In 60 Seconds, but it went surprisingly well. I hacksawed until the sweat let loose, then the lock came off. I then used our friend Mr. Dolly to move our smaller chest freezer. This is the one that is not really large enough to fit a whole human body without folding. We have a home for the body sized freezer.

I moved it out to the street in front of the rear garden. Then I moved more stuff. Two large refrigerators. Three (3!) washing machines. And one stove.

Then I hooked up the travel trailer and pulled it into the rear driveway so that it will be more visible to those who might of a whim drop $3,000 bucks for an old trailer.

A good morning's work.

(later)

I have been pushing myself to use the vi editor. The theory is that the change to my habits and finger memory is a good exercise, and that in many ways vi is far superior to my DOS/Windows based personal favorites.

The big advantage is to keep the fingers on the keyboard. To improve the interface between me and the computer. Tom Christianson, co-author of the perl 'Camel Book,' and noted perl figure, has a quote: 'the computer is the game.' He also wrote a long article on the merits of manly programmer editors, like vi.

In my slavish attempts to model the gods, I am pushing vi.

Tools shape our perceptions and our works. I think that this is one reason why the Microsoft develpoment tools make me feel so queasy. The Microsoft way brutalizes a lot of principles that I hold dear. One of those is the notion of history, of permanence. Another is the place of commerce in the creative process. If code is an act of creation, than it compromises that creation to rely on tools whose creation, upgrade, power, functionality, etc, are dictated by the pure demands of commerce.

Tools shape our perceptions and our works. Programmers create 'block structures.' For example, when I want to base the execution of a bit of digital slop on a condition, I will create an 'if block.' This will look like this:

if ( $year > 1999) {
	overheat_reactor_core_ending_civilization_as_we_know_it();
	#do clean up code
}

In this bit of structure, the year is checked. If it is greater than 1999 then the code within the curly braces ({}) gets an opportunity to do its' mischief (I believe that this was an actual bit of production code from the South Stropshire Reactor Center, fortunately this was fixed during a costly y@k remediation program during which the previous programmers where given huge bonuses to entice them out of retirement).

I am accustomed to editors in which 'mode' does not matter. In these cases I would write that code by writing the condition, and then the opening curly brace, then add two returns, type the closing brace, then move to the open line to write the middle bit.

Under vi, with its insert vs. command modes I am learning to write the opening brace, then write the inner bit in sequence before ending it all with the closing brace.

I have noticed that this process causes me to think differently about the code. Rather than the open, and out of sequence, style that has been my custom, this forces a linear structure on my process.

I make no conclusions as to whether this is better, but it is different. Different isn't bad, just different, and tools shape our perception and our reality.