An obsession with why
The man-made cadaver
When I was a little boy our TV packed it in. Mum and Dad dragged the gas-filled tube downstairs into our garage and missing it, I made my way down under the house to see what it had gotten up to without me. I always loved the knobs and sliders on the front and this particular TV had a little door that hid the tuning wheels for adjusting the frequency on the different channels.
I became so intrigued by this thing and my parents could see it, so dad pulled the tube out (compressed gas in glass plus small child does not equal relaxed parents) and let me have my way with it. I strapped on my little tool-belt and equipped with a plastic saw, screw-driver and level I went to work “fixing” my beloved box.
I pulled every single piece out of it, I even went so far as to rip the fuses and capacitors off of the circuit boards and when I couldn’t find the problem in the electronics I located dad’s (real) hammers and went to work on the wooden frame.
Needless to say even though the TV had died it wasn’t a very happy appliance by the time I had finished with it.
One plus one must equal two
When I was in high-school doing grade 9 science we were presented with the notion of evolution and the beginning of the universe, otherwise known as the big-bang. I remember asking the teacher: “So, what caused the big bang” and though I don’t remember the teachers answer I can’t imagine it was anything too significant (As I don’t remember it).
About a year later I started to take notice of this Jesus guy and his dad who had created the whole thing with a click of the fingers. And while my friends and I might have made fun of all that stuff at the time, the idea of a being so powerful it could create the notion of time and matter somehow made sense to me.
That was the beginning of another crusade to answer my favourite question.
The point is that from an early age I have had this obsession with wanting to “see inside”; to understand; to answer the all important question “why” and it often leads me to some funny places.
Having dealt with the gift from hades we’ve come to know as Internet Explorer for a few years now, I’ve been longing for a better place; somewhere where browser-sniffing, redundant code and conditional comments don’t exist. So, I started to learn Objective-c and Cocoa, the underlying language and framework (respectively) for building Mac OS X applications (As a side note, let me say it’s not quite nirvana, but it’s pretty darn good). This led me to learn a little about C (the underlying language to just about every piece of software in existence); just enough so I can now skim a document and roughly understand what its’ purpose is.
And so last-night I found myself deep in the depths of PHP 5.2.5 source-code trying to understand how you can create one language out of another (and possibly also to see how easy it would be to change the “->” operator to a “.” like JavaScript and get things namespaced nicely :P).
I guess it just leaves one last question to answer; Why, if I can fill my head with all of this information, doesn’t it explode? Actually, I wonder if that’s why I’m losing my hair at such a young age… hmmm…
