My wife, however,  had no such difficulties. She’s working for a German multinational, and of course, they had their Business Continuity stuff together and they can still carry on superbly.

I finally made it to an Internet cafe with machines too slow and dingy for modern games.  Emails and social networks checked, balance is restored. Well, not exactly.

I am deeply disturbed that I felt like a fish out of water, that all the things that needed to get done couldn’t move forward without a TCP/IP connection. It wasn’t like this when Milenyo struck years ago. My workflow (and my social life) was mostly built on tangible artifacts and actual events: pen, paper, coffee.  The computer was where I played games, or typed in words after they’ve been written down on paper first. In the intervening years (with wifi and wireless broadband exploding),  I must have built this web-based, hyper-connected edifice, and now it has all come crashing down. So much for cloud computing.

Seriously considering a re-write of my fundamental operating procedures. Time to buy those notebooks. Time to spend some real face time with friends.

Best of all, programming tools have gone down the price curve to cheap or free.   But make no mistake – despite the shoddy prices, these are very solid tools. I am particularly impressed with the latest iteration of programming tools from the Free Software Foundation.

I’ve recently been preoccupied with rounding up my toolchain. Most of it consists of newer, shinier versions of my old development kit from ten years ago. But there are interesting new faces in the lineup.

The first order of the day is to install a solid editor. For me, the obvious choice is Emacs – Neal Stephenson calls Emacs the ‘thermonuclear word processor’. It doesn’t look much. But don’t be fooled,  Emacs is one of the most versatile and extensible text editors in the planet. Every now and then someone will write an extension that can make Emacs do other stuff – like play media or spoof a psychiatrist. With the right extensions installed, I can use it to write code in any language, send and receive email, even act as my organizer. I can even use it to draft my legal pleadings (with LaTeX mode) – it’s the only editor that respects me as both programmer and lawyer.

Emacs doing email

I do solemnly swear [or affirm] that I will faithfully and conscientiously fulfill my duties as President [or Vice-President or Acting President] of the Philippines, preserve and defend its Constitution, execute its laws, do justice to every man, and consecrate myself to the service of the Nation. So help me God.

Although it is not the source of any actionable right, it’s a useful clue to determining the President’s core duty.

The President is essentially a caretaker, a sysadmin. The constitution and the laws of the land provide him with tools to maintain a well-ordered society.  The code in these legal sources create the police, military, and bureaucratic machinery to help him with his core duty: to execute the laws.

It’s not really building so many miles of roads and bridges, the way “Infrastructure Icon” President Gloria Arroyo goes on and on about her “achievements”. Of course, laying out more infrastructure is always helpful, but it’s just one narrow band of the executive portfolio.  Institutions and practices, the conventions and precedents you establish, and the example you set, are equally part of  a President’s legacy.

If PGMA were my sysadmin,  I would have new wifi routers, but my email inbox will be full of penis-enhancement ads and all my sensitive data would have been sold to scammers. By PGMA.

If PGMA were my caretaker, I would have a new driveway, but the living room is trashed, all the utility bills are unpaid, the roof is on fire and the sink would have been shat on.  By PGMA.

What I did in particular was server-based web applications programming – and the order of the day was to figure out how to dynamically generate web pages and interface them with large corporate databases. That might sound ridiculously trivial now, with robust, open source content management systems and MVC frameworks popping up everywhere, but this was the early 2000′s. Either you cooked together a batch of Perl scripts (blech) on your own, or you coughed up a couple hundred grand for Vignette.

Things weren’t so hot at the client side either. Flash was still too underdeveloped to be used for anything other than splash screens, standards-compliance among browsers was vey low, and the best bet for adding rich interactivity at the client side was through Java applets (gosh, remember those?)

Programming was challenging in the beginning. We were out there building a new industry and things were always new and sexy. But after four years, I’ve had enough. My problem with the job was two-fold: First, the tools were so primitive, and it was as if advances in object-orientation, code re-use, rapid application development, and graphical user interfaces never happened. The upshot of this is that the bulk of programming time was spent ‘yak-shaving’ – preliminary drudge work you’d have to slog through – rather than actual creative problem solving. Second, the company I worked for was content at treating the web as an extended magazine or catalog (this is media!), rather than a full-on application platform (this is software!). This meant that project after project, I was dealing with the same set of problems, shoveling bits between pages and databases.

So, to sum up: crappy tools to solve the same ol’ problems. I got mightily bored. So bored that I preferred the cold terror of unemployment, law school, the bar exams, and now – practicing as an attorney.

I never really got rid of the programming bug, however. Time has not only given the opportunity for good tools to mature, it also shook out the bad ones. The past few years has also seen the commodification of operating systems, which meant that powerful, full-featured development tools  becoming very cheap or free.  So now, it’s time to install stuff.

Next: The A-Team.

I’m particularly iffed by the way different WordPress versions handled images through the years: 1) uploading it via ftp and hardcoding the address into your entry; 2) uploading through a plain web form in one folder; 3) uploading through a fancy AJAX form into a hierarchical folder structures. That means my images are going to be all over the place, and radical, maniacal restarts towards cleaner structures are what I am all about right now. So rather than slapping on another upgrade on top of the mess, I cleared everything out. As soon as I find a way to republish the archives sanely, it’s going back up. Or I’ll just repost some of the good ones for later. Maybe.  For now, writing without the burden of history can be liberating.

The story so far (for those who may have missed it):

* Fell in love with Ruby
* Took the bar
* Passed the bar
* Got a job in a Makati Law Firm
* Quit the aforementioned job
* Moved back to a smaller, saner law firm in QC
* Married Ruby
* Going back to teaching
* Slowly but surely getting back to programming

Still rehabilitating my writing muscles. Hopefully I can cover these past milestones, even as I go ahead with new ones.