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Last updated: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 12:01:00 GMT

It was hot today.

I nearly melted as I shovelled a metric ton of 20mm gravel from the end of my drive to the back garden.

I'm installing some land drainage. When it rains, my back garden is submersed under 2cm of water within half an hour. I spent the beginning of the week digging trenches around the perimeter of the garden. In these trenches I've buried 30 metres of 80mm drainage hose, all leading to a 25 gallon plastic drum. Inside the drum is a foul-water submersible pump with a float switch, and there's a 25mm plastic hose routed from the submersible pump, under the decking to a freshwater drain.

I'm burying all of this in 20mm gravel, which I hope will act as a prefilter, keeping some of the crap out of the drainage hose, and aiding drainage.

Whenever I do any sort of repetetive work I find my mind wandering, and in this case it wandered to the end of my shovel. I've always had an amateur, passing interest in geology, and I found the stones I was shoveling distracting. Shapes, colours, textures and -

What was that? Hey, an ammonite! Just a partial segment. A childish glee came over me. I'll keep that one for the lad.

And with each shovelful I paid more attention to what I was shoveling, stopping now and then to inspect a rock here and there. I found another two partial segments, nothing spectacular. I found a stone that bore the impression of an ammonite, pretty enough. And I found a small but nicely formed whole ammonite, still mostly cloaked in stone, but with a little effort I can free it from there, liberate a sweet little specimen.

Cool.

Or not. I wasted a lot of time. My neighbours must have thought I was insane. That'll make a change from them thinking I'm some sort of anti-social, motorcyclin' thug.

It pained me to think of the possibility of burying such little gems, such perfect fractal forms, using them as I would use rubble. But in the end, they do the same job, whatever they look like, and I'm here to get a particular job done, not fanny around finding fossils.

Compare and contrast with the beginning of last month, where months of eBay vigilance and hours of reconstructive surgery found me riding my bike to the MoT station.

Having made mistakes before, and motorcycling -- especially on sportier kit -- being an unforgiving arena in which to fail, my mind didn't so much wander as run around in tiny little circles.

Each unfamiliar vibration sparked a worry in my head, and after not having ridden for some time, a lot of those vibes were unfamiliar. In the time the bike had been laid up, I'd stripped the top half of the engine to measure and shim valve clearances, removed and replaced both wheels, replaced the chain and sprockets, stripped and refurbished the forks, greased many a bearing and stripped and rebuilt both front and rear braking systems.

Room for spectacular and painful failure, I'm sure you'll agree.

So it was with some trepidation that I set off for an illegal test ride, and only marginally more confidence that I set off the next day to ride 40 miles to get the bike tested, a certificate issued and make my bike road-legal once again.

As I rode, all senses were at maximum debug. In a corner of my mind I ran through every procedure I'd performed over the past six months, and I realised with some terror that I couldn't remember completing many of them.

The horror.

Had I replaced the split pins holding the rear brake lever to its shaft? Had I torqued up the front sprocket correctly? Had I secured the fuel line with suitable clips?

For a solid 60 seconds these thoughts raced around and I wondered what the hell I was doing sitting on top of a roaring bomb, protected by nothing more than a 1mm layer of cowhide.

And then I remembered that I had replaced those split pins, and that I'd thought to myself at the time how important it was to define a safe point to finish any particular task, and not to allow myself to be distracted until I'd completed the task to that point. I knew that it would take me a long time to get everything done, and that I couldn't rely on my memory.

And suddenly I could remember the safe points I'd decided upon for half a dozen other tasks, and I realised that all I needed to have confidence in was my method.

Method saved my skin, no doubt. Being able to commit myself to a system of components because I knew that I'd not have moved on without leaving it functional and safe made for a happy rider.

Now, if I was Joel Spolsky, I'd be able to turn all this into an excellent lesson in the rights and wrongs of, the scope of and the granularity of attention to detail, and the scale at which one should chunk concentration and effort.

But I'm not.

That guy tells a poignant parable. He excels at it. I always enjoy hearing what he has to say, and he's got a breadth of experience that I'd like to aspire to.

But, after having recently observed the installation and operation of FogBugz, I'm not yet convinced that I'd want the guy wielding a spanner near my motorcycle.