Leadership coaching and my own Rails parameters

So I had an interesting discussion on the phone tonight... My friend L has been training/working as a career-type coach thing for over a year now. She was taking some other training this weekend so she enlisted me to be her guinea pig.

I've never done any coach thing with her and I didn't feel a particular need for coaching, so it started slowly, but over the course of 50 minutes I was able to re-surface and verbalize thoughts that I have had over the last few years:

1) I enjoy solving intellectually, technically challenging problems.
2) I enjoy helping other people solve their problems, more than solving my own.
3) I'm interested in working with other people more than I'm interested in working for myself, for my own sake.
4) Ruby on Rails is a toolset that I am learning in order to be able to tackle a specific set of problems. Eventally, either there won't be satisfying problems that I will want to solve with Rails, I'll find a better toolset, or Rails will just become deprecated. At that point I will let go of Rails. But right now it's a toolset to work on 1-3.

So that's kind of why I'm learning RoR now, and I have guidelines for when I'll outgrow it, or something. I feel better about that.

death train

Ahhhh an old friend from BBS times just died. We weren't close, but the guy is younger than me. Last time that happened was 12 years ago. Now I think it'll start to be more frequent... *shivers*

*** ETA: He died of a heart attack while playing floor hockey. He was probably 33 or so. I play floor hockey now. WTF. Getting in better shape ASAP so that it's not the only exercise of the week I do. Now off... to my playoff game. Sigh.