Tech in the Trenches

Real

On June 20, 2011

Over at the Bridging the Nerd Gap, Brett Kelly wrote about being real. and it made me think. He writes about never feeling like a “real” programmer,

He writes,

“I bought books, annoyed smart people with questions and generally fumbled my way into a passable set of programming skills. Truth be told, Iâ€™ve never felt much like a â€œrealâ€ programmer.”

Additionally, he recently wrote Evernote Essentials which I own a copy of and can attest to its thoroughness and quality. Even through he doesn’t feel like a real author. I’d say 20,000 words about a software program in convenient book form makes you as real an author as anyone.

This resonated with me because that’s how I’ve lived all my life. I am a huge believe in self-teaching and if you want to learn something, go learn it. Don’t wait to be taught it or find a teacher. The knowledge is out there, go find it.

From an early age I taught myself most of what I wanted to know. I wanted to make magazines so I learned PageMaker and Photoshop.
I wanted to learn more about computers so I tinkered. I dismantled and I repaired. I learned how they tick and what made them work.
I wanted to learn the web so I taught myself HTML and CSS.

I’ve done a great many things and have random and varying passions. I’ve never really been a real anything. I was always the self-taught hack. I didn’t go to school to learn about computers. I played and experimented until I learned.

I was speaking to one of the Human Resources people at work as I helped them with a computer issue and was asked what my degree is school was. He assumed it was Computer Science or something technical.

Much to his surprise, I responded with, Creative Advertising. ((My running joke is I have a B.S. in Communications. Which is an asset to handling the politics of technical work.))

I believe I got my sense of hard work, experimentation and self-teaching from my parents. I had the privilege growing up to learn about the printing world from my parents.

Both parents at one time owned and ran their own businesses. I learned a lot about hard work from them. When you are the company there is no letting up. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

Learning is a life-long pursuit. There is no end to it when we leave the doors of the schoolhouse. I’ve been in the working world long enough to know many of the people doing jobs are not doing anything they have formal training to do.

Father’s Day

By Carl

On June 19, 2011

In Introspection

Today is Father’s Day. My wife and I will be spending the day with our fathers, thanking them for all they went through to help us grow up to be upstanding citizens in the world and not killing us when we were kids. As I’m sure we have them plenty of reason to do so. It is on this note, I am going to share something I originally wrote last December for the Reverb10 Challenge. The theme for December 5th was, “Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)” What follows is the first time I have ever put into words my thoughts about the hurt and anger I was carrying around inside of me for many, many years of my childhood and adolescence. These words still feel as raw and painful as the December evening I wrote them. My relationship with my father has grown tenfold in the months since and for that I am grateful. No one is perfect. I am so thankful to have my father today and to maintain a good relationship with him.

This is a raw topic for me this year. The moment I read it tears came to my eyes.

This year I let go of Divorce.

When I was in 5th Grade my parents divorced. They split for no other reason than they had grown apart as people do. It was very civil. There was no screaming or fighting, just absence. Dad was never around. Mom was always working in her own right trying to keep a business afloat.
When they split, everything changed.

I was spending my weekends and Wednesday nights in Leesburg being driven back and forth like so much emotional baggage. My brother and I both having to split our time with once was a single set of parents.

It was really hard on me and I remember meeting with Mrs. Hill our counselor in elementary school and doing… something. Whatever it was, it only helped a bit. No slight against her, she was wonderful and helped me understand a lot of what I was feeling.

However, what I was left with was those feelings of anger and not understanding. The comprehension of my 5th Grade self is not what it would be today. I was lost and confused and hurt. Even though I knew it was not my fault as they both reminded us often. But it didn’t matter. It still hurt. And the hurt didn’t stop.

That’s when I had the good fortune to meet an excellent English teacher who introduced me to poetry and writing. I had an outlet. I filled notebook after notebook with my private pain. My late night ranting. My anger. My hurt. I poured it all out onto the pages in angst-riddled middle and high schooler prose. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until I didn’t hurt anymore. Or at least I felt I had directed the pain outside of myself.

It felt good. It felt really good. I am so thankful to have been introduced to the medium and to have been able to embrace it so forcefully. I needed some way to cleanse my mind and that turned out to be the perfect solution.
I wrote. All through middle school I wrote. When I hit high school and a whole new set of pressures and decisions I kept writing.

I wrote a lot about my feelings of the divorce and growing up in a split parenting situation. I wrote a lot about myself from the perspective of others. I would put myself in a different place, probably a coping mechanism.

I wrote of loss often. Just being lost and trying to find my way home. But there was no map to take me where I needed to go. Long lost, it was forever gone.

But this year I was able to let that all go. I was able to finally, truly, honestly come to terms with the divorce. With the role it played in my life. With the way I felt about my parents because of it. I was able to finally start putting that behind me all these years later.

With the prompting and careful, measured advice from my wonderful wife who had always had the leveler emotional head than I what I was missing out on. She helped me to see things I had not considered before. She helped me get over my grudge I was holding and my pain I had clung to, that had identified me and my writing for these past many years.

She helped me work through my issues with my father. She helped me open up and see him for who he really was, someone who cared for me and loved me dearly.
He was not the scratchy faced man sitting in the living room, as he and my mother explained to us they were splitting up, and then walking out. Going to wherever he was going on that day.

He was not the cause of my pain but Just a player in the story of my life. He was no more evil than I or anyone else.

I finally saw that. I finally realized what I had missed. The relationship I had put on pause. The arm’s length I’d keep him and many others at. My trust issues with him and other people in my life. I saw the root of those and let them go. I’ve taken down the last walls with him. I’ve finally let him in again. I’ve finally been able to accept him for who he is.

I’ve let it go. I’ve let it all go. The toxic thoughts dwelling deep inside my head played out in the angry industrial raging beats of the music that inhabited my life as a preteen and teen. The long nights of listening Trent Reznor’s tortured vocals and seeing myself starring in the private tragedy as he provided the soundtrack.
In 2010, I was finally able to let that all go. And I have never felt freer. It was not worth keeping all that inside of me. But I couldn’t get rid of it on my own. I needed help. And I got that help. Whether I wanted it or not, it came.

I have been a better person for it since and I have lived a happier life. I have rebuilt a previously very strained relationship. I have vanquished the thoughts of skipping out on family events on that side. I have let all the hurt go where it should have gone those many years ago.
Streamed down onto the carpeted floor of our old living room. Of that house up on the hill in Berryville, that old blue house where I grew up and lived most of my life till college. That house wrapped in so many memories good and bad. So much pain and so much ecstasy.

Those tears I shed on that day as I clutched my mother tighter than I thought I ever could. We cried as a family but also as individuals.

All those years of what I had to endure. All those years of trying to make sense of it all when I knew in the end, there was no sense to be made.

All of that is gone now. All of that is over. I am free.
I am free of the burden of pain.
I’ve let it go.
That’s what 2010 did for me.
That’s what my wife helped me do.
I look forward to 2011 with a better, stronger relationship with my father. I look forward to all the things I missed out on before because I was too busy being hurt.

Calling For Help

By Carl

On June 18, 2011

In Introspection

I am blown away continually how little respect people have for my time. Most of my days are very busy filled with complex and simple issues alike.
I do not have hours of time where I am sitting around waiting for people to decide their day has a small hole for me to help them.
That’s the primary thing that bothers me.

You, the user, has called the help desk or contacted me directly for help.

I want to help you.
I am here to help you.
I try to help you.
You tell me No.
Or later.
Or my personal favorite, “I’ll let you know.”

This is code for “I will never contact you again and will wait until this issue becomes unavoidable to contact you again.”

Your poor planning becomes my emergency.

It does not bother me personally you are having computer trouble. ((When I go home, I will not lose sleep over it.)) I could not care less of you cannot print, save, access or use a resource.
It is my job to help you but I am not invested in your job. When your poor planning and poor organization turn simple things into critical issues, they are not my problem.

I am not a magician.
I do not have a unicorn.
Computers are not run on pixie dust.
They do not speak to me in an ancient tongue.

Fixing problems takes time.

I know this may come as a shock but I am not a computer. I do not speak 1001100010011001 to it and have it reply.
I do not know what you’ve done to it. ((Purposefully or not.))
I do not know if what you’re telling me is true and correct. ((Again, purposefully or not.))
When I ask you a question about what you were doing when you had a problem I am not assigning blame.
I am looking for answers.

If you spilled water on your laptop, tell me.
If your child knocked it off a table, tell me.
If you “cleaned up” the registry, tell me.
If you “deleted some stuff in Windows”, tell me.

I will not blame you. I will not admonish you. I will not lecture you.

I am in search of information.
The more I know about a problem, the quicker I can diagnose and perform a repair.

In the search for information and troubleshooting. If you did something to the machine, I will find out. It will save is both a lot of time and effort if you can provide as much information as possible up front.

I am not here to belittle or judge your level of tech savvy. I am here to fix computers.

Of Desktops and Writing Environments

By Carl

On June 2, 2011

In Observations

I can’t use a desktop anymore. Growing up and all through college I used a desktop. It’s all I had and all I used. When I wanted to compute, I sat at my computer and I computed. Sitting in a chair, at my desk, in my room.

Now, I can’t bring myself to be tethered to the desk. I have a couple of desktop computers around my apartment. They mostly sit and do repetitive tasks which need always-on and always-connected status. They download files and backup data. They keep my information safe. They sit and serve. They are not what I used everyday. They are not the device I reach for when I get home.

At work I have a desktop still, primarily because there’s no “business reason” for me to have a laptop ((If you ignore the netbook the company bought me as a test group to see whether it was worth getting for other employees. It’s not.)) and that works out.

When I get home, the last thing I want to do is sit down at another desk. I rather grab my iPad or a laptop and sit on the couch or out on the balcony, or even lounge in bed with comfy pillows. Sitting at a desk is constricting. I can’t sit next to my wife and be with her. I can’t interact with her because I’m stuck in a single place.

I prefer the mobility of laptops and the iPad. It fits my lifestyle. It fits who I am and what I want to do.

What I reach for when I arrive home all depends on what I want to do. The iPad is mainly for reading. When I want to read, 90% ((Not counting Instapaper reading time)) of the time I pop open the Kindle app and dive into the latest book I’ve borrowed from Lendle.

In that remaining 10% I turn to iBooks and read one of the PDFs or free eBooks I’ve downloaded. I will fill my water bottle and settle into a comfortable place and watch the pages fly by.

When I am in the mood to write I reach for a laptop. Even then, there is some question about what I grab. If I want to write ((as I am now)) and not be distracted or have to lug a heavy weight with me, the Google CR-48 Chromebook it is. It is super light and has great battery life. ((Currently 7 hours remaining at 92%))

I will open a new window and start making the clackity noise in either Simplenote or my new love, Pillarbox.

When I want to do more serious writing which requires research, referencing and piles of tabs and notes I reach for my main laptop, a Lenovo T61 ((I yearn for the day when I can afford a MacBook again)). It is a serviceable machine. WIndows 7 works well enough though it is no Mac OS.

I turn to Windows only when I need to get serious work done. Usually this means I will open Simplenote in half the screen and WriteMonkey on the other half. It is not the “distraction-free” nature of the writing environments that draws me to them, it is their simplicity and stark design. I like having a color palette other than black text on white background. I like the ability to see the word count and little else.

I can stay on task well enough, flipping between my Simplenote notes and Writemonkey’s clean, dark backdrop to my words. I write in Markdown so I prefer plain text to any fancy WYSIWYG editors. I am a big fan of simplicity and portability since I am a very nomadic writer and often use my iPhone to write on my commute. ((I write far more on the iPhone than I do the iPad, even with the external keyboard))

Stop Romanticizing the Past

By Carl

On May 25, 2011

In Observations

The past is filled with what seem to be my greatest achievements. The past is when I got the job. The past is when I wrote the brilliant poem. The past is when I first kissed the girl. The past holds all the selective memories edited down into a greatest hits collection. The past is only the best parts of myself and my choices I’ve chosen consciously or not to hold on to.

I do not remember the longest day at work before the last longest day at work. I do not recall the long hours sitting in classrooms, taking tests, reading books, getting teased. I do not remember the low points and the sleepless nights.

I do not remember the worst that came with the very best. ((Exception being the **very** worst of the worst.)) Overall, I look back and I think of all my accomplishments. I still sit and kick myself everyday for losing the backup of my old Xanga.com blog I started writing in 1997. In my head, it holds a lot of great things I wrote when I was a younger, more idealistic man.

I wish LiveJournal had any decent kind of search so I could go back into the many years of writing I still have sitting up there. In my head, there are, again, some brilliant things I wish I could go look back to, revise, repost or at least remember.

But I can’t. The Xanga writings were exported to a now-lost ZIP file and the site closed. LiveJournal is a unsearchable nightmare though the writings still exist… Somewhere.

But the past is not all of our best work. The months and years of history have turned the memories of those great writings into fairy tales. My writing as a 15-year-old poet is not the writing of the 30-year-old geek. I have grown and learned.

We all have.

The people who look back on their high school or college days as the highlight of their life make me a little sad. I can see the appeal of the relatively care-free days and the ignorance of youth. But there’s so much more to life after school.

There are so many more opportunities for greatness and to make cool things. Life does not end at 18 or 21 or 25 or even 30, 50 or 70. Life does not end until you gasp your last breath on this earth. ((What happen after that is up for debate.)) But as far as what you can make and share and produce, you have many years ahead of you.

*Stop romanticizing the past.* Sure, you may have had some successes, but they are nothing to what you are still going to achieve. My past victories are always falling to my current achievements. We all think you’ve hit a pinnacle when we’re in our teens. The first kiss. First drink. ((For some)) Smoking. Tattooing. Voting. The Lottery.

Sure, there’s not a lot of age-based milestones once you get past 21. There’s still car rental and car insurance drops at 25. We don’t need the world to tell us how to be great and when we must accomplish things.

When I was in college I was convinced I knew what I wanted to do. I chose a major and immediately changed it because it was not as I imagined it. I completed my degree and went off into the world with a Bachelor of Science in Communications. ((Yes, I have a BS in Communications.)) I worked extensively for the school’s publications. I was the Production Chief of [The Commonwealth Times](http://commonwealthtimes.org) for three years. I headed the Millennium literary magazine and even dabbled in assisting other publications.

I went to school to learn what I did not want to be when I grew up. The last day I used my degree was the day it arrived in the mail. It’s not even hanging anywhere.

I work as a Sr. Desktop Support Technician now. I support those reporters and writers and designers and photographers just as I worked with their younger peers in college. I am still active in the media world but in a very different way. I am a writer. Something I have always had an interest in but never thought I could do anything serious with. I now write monthly for a publication my father helps to run. From that, I was asked to submit an article for publication in a print magazine in Ireland.

Do I still look to the past? Yes, very much. The past is who we were and dictates where we will go. Each day is open to new achievement and success.

Do not live in the past. Embrace the present and look to the future. Your best work is still ahead of you. Never stop working and never stop learning.

You may be surprised with where the world can take you, I sure am.