Wet Hacking
I've just registered as an Apple Software Developer. Feels weird to be reading technical documentation again. Somehow, I can't ever escape the lure of -building- something. Decided to give in to the impulse and be building software again, instead of going crazy every few minutes thinking about instrument building.
I've been researching guitars and violins, and dreaming about building my own violin (soon). It's really cheap to start apparently, only 228 SGD for the kit, and I've got 4 months to make it happen. Only problem is, I don't play violin, so I wouldn't know what sounds good. Apparently, knowing how an instrument is supposed to sound only happens after you've played it for a long time. Some people never know what to look for (like instrument shop salespeople) even after listening to instruments for years! I know what to look for now in guitars, don't know if it will translate to violins. I hate the sound of most of them actually. Same thing with pianos. I hate the tuning of pianos.
I realized recently that the reason why I've been singing badly all this while is because I haven't been bothering to tune my instruments, and even temperament tuning is idiosyncratic, and I've not been singing to pitch because I cannot anticipate the 2nds, 4ths and 6ths, and that the consonance and the increase in volume actually shocks me. I can hear my heartbeat at night, and it's interesting to hear my heart slow and speed up with changes in position, and changes in breathing rate. Sometimes, it lulls me to sleep. Sometimes it keeps me awake all night, as I hear it change it's beat in response to my thinking.
I've been drumming, now I'm a level 40 on drummania, can't wait to break into the expert ranks. Still, it's hard to drum consistently. I tend to speed up or slow down at the boring sections, and totally flub the solos. Yet, it's great to drum again, it's great to work out those wrists and fingers, and make music with the computer.
I've been thinking about medicine like it's hacking. That makes it so much easier for me actually. I call it wet hacking. And it's so crude, so... barbaric. I understand that some of the tools used are really really amazing, and it takes real skill to cut people open and keep them alive, and put them back.
But humans heal, so no matter how badly the operation goes, there is always a chance that people will survive it. Maybe in my lifetime, we will learn to do less trauma to our patients, and more damage to pathogens. Actually, it's like hacking. How can we achieve what we want, without doing significant damage or leaving a trace. Sometimes we don't always need to finish the job for the body. Sometimes the body can do the job on it's own, and I'm really excited to develop new techniques for that. Still, in the meantime, I have to crawl the dirty passageways of the body's code, and look out for things that might not even be written in the books. That's the toughest part. The crawl through code that's not of your writing. Thinking from the perspective of a creator, or a process that isn't even human. I hate this part of my job. But it is my job.
It is my job.
