Code. I used to write it. C was the language, kernel hacking was the game, and while not quite as glamorous as being a rock star, I liked it. There's nothing like hearing the pent up excitment boiling over into a hooray when a compile comes clean. Yeah, with -Wall and -pedantic, baby. Hardcore.

Having learned to program on far more limited machines (Apple IIs), I grew to appreciate the value of a good tool. It was always worth mastering the toolchest available to you so that you could focus on your work at hand and let the back of your brain take care of handling the steps themselves. Simple example: knowing your debugger well meant that at the most frustrating time of development, you could get answers to just about any question around the state of the executing code. The result were shorter debugging sessions.

When I moved over to marketing, I took the philisophy with me.

Over time, I've become a reasonably strong user of Windows, especially the MS Office suite. I'm still by no means an expert, but I have taken the time to learn these tools (amongst others) well. The result has been that I can generally express whatever I want, edit whatever I want, or calculate whatever I want, without a lot of thought.

And that's the key: without thought.

Those crazy cats that love their LaTeX (disclaimer: I used to be one of them) have this part right. Being able to get yourself to the point that the tool (or the look, as it were in LaTeX) is second nature to you means that you can stay focused on your work and not put any thought to how it happens. Whether this is animating a slide, manipulating an outline, or even fudging a picture, the process is moot.

To this day, it amazes me when I see people that either refuse to learn or never bother investing a few cycles to learn their tools. The fact that time gets lost each time these folks fumble with getting something simple done appears to be completely lost on them.

Tools. If monkeys can use them, we can use them.