I'm usually hesitant to fire up the home studio and work on music. Something happens when I get deep into the throes of recording — I don't want to concentrate on anything else. There's always something to tweak, something to adjust, something to edit.

When I get into that mindset, everything else is a distraction, the least of which is the means by which I pay the bills. I've tried (unsuccessfully) to set up the Windows XP VPN server so I can make a Remote Desktop connection from my work computer to my home computer. (Yes, I have a VPN connection from home to work, but I'd like to make the appearance of face time.)

It's these times that make me dread heading into an office, which then results in a spiral of doubt and fantasy. What would I be doing if I weren't doing what I was doing?

First off, I'm feeling restless with web development. As professions go, development has always been something I could do that doesn't annoy me, but my identity is not entirely wrapped up in it. I read these articles on dzone all the time bestowing the virtues of good developers — the ones who constantly learn, the ones who recognize the holes in their training and try to plug them — and I resembled a lot of those traits about three years ago.

(Huh. Three years ago. That's about the same time I started building up the home studio again.)

Now I've hit a wall, and I'm not certain I want to get past and/or around it. I could do much more to be better at PERL, PHP and all the rest, and I could probably even take a deeper plunge into Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But the time spent doing that means time away getting better with effects processing, mixing, rehearsing …

I don't even know if I want my day job to be "developer". Oh, I still want a day job — I like how music serves as a refuge. It would stop being so if it became the focus, and I would develop the same restlessness for it as I have for web development.

I think more than anything, this restlessness is more about mental stimulus than anything else. Solving problems with code is a great fit for me, but at some point, how many more ways can I look at the same control structures and data types?

Which brings us back to the question of what I would be doing if I weren't doing what I was doing.

I don't have a concrete answer. Some vague ones in which I might indulge at some point, but nothing solid.

In short, I don't know.