View of Central Park from the roof of my apartment building. Okay this was taken a few weeks ago, just never got the chance to post it. The leaves are starting to turn a little by now.

I had a dream the other night, quite a horrible dream. My brother Neil was possessed by the devil. I don't remember if he was vomiting green fluids, rotating his head three-sixty degrees, or doing any of other demon-like activities we know so well, but I do remember pressing a wooden cross against his forehead and incanting over and over again "Be gone from him, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." I kept repeating it feverishly and his body started to decompose before my eyes; melt away until suddenly there popped out of his shrivelled shell an effeminate accountant in all-covering black spandex jump suit. The new man gave me an embarrassed smile before taking off.

That has nothing at all to do with the rest of this entry, but it was such a great dream I wanted to get down on paper so I don't forget it. The only relevance it has to the rest of this story is that the fear of going back to sleep that the nightmare induced in me contributed to the general shortness of good rest I've had over the last two weeks.

I don't think I've ever worked quite as hard as I'm working right now. As the evenings draw in colder, I half expect my head to be giving off steam as I leave the office each night. At the same time, though, I don't think I've ever worked as well as I am doing right now. To be a good software developer, you need a range of skills: logic, organization, attention to detail, perserverance and the ability to see both the forest and the trees. I've always had a great ability to code: I can sit down with an empty program in my text editor, and the code just flows through my fingers as fast as I can type. But it's only through many years experience that I've learned when to cut corners; learned when to abandon elegant, neat solutions in favor of quicker-to-develop brute force; and learned never to ignore warning signs that there's a logic problem hidden in your code. So these past few days, I've been completely in the zone. I'm going to blow my own trumpet shamelessly here. Whereas a team of three hadn't gotten us past the critical point despite three weeks of work; I got it accomplished all by myself in just a week after only half an hour instruction on how the application works, while at the same time fielding the other issues and problems that come my way as a senior member of the team. I have to say I'm damned proud of myself, for once.

But has it done anything for me apart from getting enough plaudits to make me blush? The big-shot department director who'd been angling to get me off the project on account of an innocent remark to one of our customers, is my new best friend. And since he'll be sitting on the national promotion committee at the end of the year, well, hell, maybe I'll get my promotion after all.

It's funny; maybe I'm the only person who feels this way, but when I'm in the elevator hearing office workers talk to colleagues about work politics, I always feel that the whole nine-to-five thing is an embarrassingly small affair. I wish I wasn't part of it; that I was doing something more meaningful and creative. Sometimes I even feel like a failure - I had such grand ambitions for myself growing up; I was to be a scientist, talking on Nova about my latest theories. And here I am, just a developer, albeit a senior developer for a big software company. So when I see these other people on the elevator, all bound up in their office life, I find myself thinking that their viewpoint is so myopic.

Yet when you get into the thick of your own work projects, and you're a hugely respected team-member, working alongside people you like, it all feels quite fulfilling and worthwhile. I get nothing out of this project, apart from, perhaps, a promotion. So what motivates me to work eleven hour stretches; or work all weekend like I did the past one? It's not the promotion at all. It's partly because I love to bring order out of chaos. It continually amazes me that a collection of these ephemeral things called computer files, filled with mere symbols, can work together to give someone answers to the most complex questions. So that's part of it. And the other part is that there are few feelings more powerful to me than getting the respect of my colleagues. Maybe I never got enough lovin' as a kid, who knows.