a bit ago, I was noticing out loud to Jim that I hadn't used a unix machine in two months. I was wondering if, when I got back to one, if I would be rusty, or if it would just all flow through my fingers. Just now, I logged into ofb, typed a commandline including "grep" and then erased the command line because "grep" didn't look like a word. Strange what can happen to your mind in 2 months.
posted by wtanaka at
1/01/2003 08:13:00 AM
Jim and I ended up staying in the Cameron Highlands over New Years. The place where we were staying, Daniel's Inn, had a 6-year anniversary celebration with copious amounts of free food. Most people were pretty silly drunk.
During the party, I had a conversation with this guy Nick about law school, teaching, technology, and a whole bunch of things. He commented about how animated and excited I got when I started talking about what technology can do for people.
I really am a technologist. When I think of what technology can do for the world, it really makes me excited. Yet for some reason I was turned off to the idea of working with technology when I parted with iSpheres.
It would be easy to blame the loss of the dream on iSpheres, the politics and less than perfect times that I had there on some days. But that answer seemed to be incomplete to me. Today on the bus to Pinang, I considered the overall goal of living my life in such a way that I could look at any day and have something that I did that day that I would have admired, had someone else done it. And I think that's what is causing me to doubt the technologist path through life. Growing up, I spent time with people that respected or admired the idea of going into the computer industry. Now, I've met a lot of people, for whom computers are still not a huge part of their lives, and a few people who have even turned "anti" to certain degrees.
So it's harder for me to think of sitting in front of a computer as being a respectable activity, because many people that I've met wouldn't consider it to be such (or couldn't even imagine someone/themselves doing it)
I realized also on the bus that my dream when I was younger was always "creating a great computer game." Now that I think about it, that has a lot of aspects that I would be still interested in if the effort succeeded -- technology, management, starting a company, fame . . .
Question is, do I have the guts to make that into my goal... And would it be a good idea, even if I did...
