Today’s Joy of Tech comic bestows a name on a long-suffering affliction of mine: good weather guilt.

If anything, I have it much worse since moving to Spain some years back, though I do in fact get to enjoy the great outdoors quite a bit more than back in dark gloomy Finland. I suspect that the phenomenon is not unlike when someone who grew up poor later has trouble handling the overabundance of previously scarce resources.

So, while there’s certainly no shortage of sun and beach during the balmy spring, fall and winter here, and despite the local summer being best described as an overheated tourist rush accompanied by a near-lethal UV index, the guilt still just piles on this time of the year.

I’ve long maintained that location must have been an oft-ignored key factor in the genesis and early evolution of Linux. It’s not as if Linus had opportunity to suffer from good weather guilt, with its manifold distractions, for any more than perhaps two months a year at most. In between the brief guilt trips, latitudes like that offer a ten-month virtually uninterrupted and highly productive season while inhospitable elements and twilight darkness hold sway outside the lab (or, as it may be, the den).

Anyone up for founding a geek outpost in Antarctica? That should serve to focus the mind. Take a leaf from oil rigs on how to run the logistics. Combine the concepts of Wizard School with SeaCode, and sprinkle with some Silicon Valley. Put in your six months of highly-paid, focused work to invent the future, get the rest of the year off — with free Geek Cruises in the Caribbean to keep you properly motivated as well as up to date on stuff. A private Airbus A380 should be roomy enough to ferry the crack team around the globe as needed.

Oh well. This is a losing battle. Off to the beach it is, with a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. As every hacker knows, the truly productive hours don’t start till after sundown, anyway. Maybe there’s room for compromise.