I'd forgotten how good I am. Look, there's very little that I think I excel at, unless you include some of my less important talents such as walking quickly through crowds and parallel parking :) There are many things I'm proficient at, and many more that I muddle through. But there's only one thing that I'm exceptional at, and that's computer programming. And I'd kind of forgotten that until this week. Over the last three years, my career path has taken me more towards project management and system design. So I haven't actually done that much programming during this time. But this week, with the chance to quickly build a complicated set of programs for a web application, I remembered why I love programming so much.

Yet it's hard to explain the appeal to others. For sure, I think it's always deeply fulfilling to be doing something you're very good at. But it's more than that; it has something to do with deception, I think. To the ultimate user of your software, all they see is a gleaming surface, hopefully - an application that does what is expected. They should have no conception that beneath its smooth skin, there lies a whole library of little programs, and databases, whirring and clicking, shuttling data items back and forth. The user doesn't see all that (unless they're using a Microsoft product, of course, in which case the ugly innards of the program get frequently exposed for all to see!)

So I think it's the act of reducing chaos to order, in programming, that gives me the most pleasure. Now you might think I'd therefore get the same type of pleasure from tidying my apartment this morning, but that's different :)

Last night, I watched "Anatomy of a Hate Crime", an MTV movie about the Matthew Shepard affair, which I recorded a few days ago. This morning, it's still on my mind. If you haven't seen it, I'd strongly urge you to seek it out: I know that it's being repeated several times this week

I'm not one of those people who think you should follow every gay cultural artifact just because it's "gay". To be honest, I find that a lot of "gay" movies, for example, have been pretty wretched; particularly the ones that tried way too hard, such as "Philadelphia." But this MTV movie is one gay movie that has sure-footed writing, exceptional performances, just the right balance of sentiment.

And more than that; it would have made a compelling story even if Matthew Shepard hadn't died. Matthew was a complex, unusual kid, struggling with depression and illness, yet (assuming the director and screenwriter haven't taken too much license) he was also beautiful, extremely bright, charming and cultivated - someone you couldn't help but take notice of. It's Matthew's complexity (a flawed golden-boy, if I can be hyperbolic), and the contrast of the hope you saw in his life with the dead-end, drug-ridden lives of those who killed him that makes the story so wrenching, and so powerful.