You don’t want to know. Or maybe you do. I’ve spent 14 to 16 hours a day programming — rearchitecting, in the argot, a project I’m working on. The application tracks resources, for construction companies, in real time, and there were quite a few things to fix. (Note to Cosh: this is what I do for a living.)

Don’t misunderstand: I’m as lazy as the next man, probably lazier. My exertions were mostly geared toward maximum future leisure. The application is in beta now, and very soon it will go into production. The beta users want new features, and the production users will want more new features. Your choice is, fix the server design now to make these features relatively easy to implement, or do ten times as much work down the road. As the FRAM oil filter guy used to say, you can pay me now, or pay me later.

I’m also one of those guys who will work forever if something interests him and idle for weeks otherwise, which makes me, as you might imagine, a less than satisfactory employee. In this case we decided on more or less the server design that I wanted in the first place, so I was forced to work around the clock to prove that I was right. Which I was. And isn’t that what life is really all about?

Microsoft, about which I rarely have a good word to say, certainly earned its keep this week. It turns out that C#, unlike Java, can transparently proxy objects over machine boundaries. This means you can create complex objects on the server with references to their subobjects, pass in a proxy that knows how to construct the subobjects, and then fetch the subobjects dynamically, without the callers having to know a thing about it. The nasty synchronization issues associated with client-side caching disappear, turning event-handling from a nightmare into a breeze. If you understood this, what a thrill, right? If you didn’t, I’ll write about poetry again soon.

I shall return later tonight with an explanation of why David Lee Roth is the world’s most eminent living sociologist. If by some chance I don’t, see above.