Tech knowledge is like your muscles — if you don't use it frequently, it starts to atrophy. I can get on my bike for an hour a day to get my legs out of flab, but being more reporter than tech these days has me worrying about whether I'll have to take a week off just to re-introduce myself to code.

Not that not doing hands-on tech stuff these days is necessarily a bad thing. That's why this particular rat swam away from his last job–the tech market is, as I've pointed out before, not exactly a booming publishing segment (see “Pressure Drop”). Maybe clearing room for some other, more high-revenue-potential journalistic specialty (like covering extreme sports, or fashion, or porn) would be a good thing.

I can identify the moment I started losing my tech muscle with extreme clarity–it was when I threw my PC off my desk and replaced it with a Mac–a G4 Cube. I try to keep the blood circulating through that portion of my brain where all tech lore is stored by droppping into a command-line Terminal session every now and then, but it's just not the same–it requires a substantially smaller number of brain cells to use Mac OS X than it does to use Windows 2000 on a daily basis.

It also doesn't help that I have yet to load any Java (or any other) IDE on either my Cube or my Ti Powerbook. The only code slinging I've done in the last six months has been in UserTalk.

But I digress.

Rumor has it that my employer is looking to expand into the extreme sports magazine business. Maybe what I need to do to ensure my continued professional growth is spend more time on my bike.