Reading (or is it re-reading? I can’t even remember if I ever finished it) Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and, being someone who works with computers for a living, I keep catching myself using it as an analogy for how I respond to computers and computer maintenance. It’s like I’m doing a mental search-and-replace as I read the book – ’s/motorcycle/computer/g'.

This piece, in particular, grabbed me

A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.

Macs aren’t renowned for their customizability. In fact, it’s part of what I love about them. With a Linux/Unix machine, it’s possible to spend your entire time tweaking your system and not actually get any work done. Macs are limited in this regard, each one is pretty much alike, so the operating system effectively disappears and there’s almost no friction between you and your work.

All the same, I have still managed to modify my MacBook (through a combination of Moom, Alfred and Keyboard Maestro) to the point where someone using my computer will eventually go “whoa” and back away from the keyboard. But it makes total sense to me. It’s the way I work. The same as yours, but different.

There’s something nice about that.