five questions
Time for my five questions, pitched my way by Sir:
People in the IT world usually end up hating either the ‘I’, the ‘T’, or both, or life in general at some point during their career. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘meh’ and 10 being ‘I’m going to set everyone on fire’, where do you stand on working in IT at this point in your life?
Although I may have given you the impression that I work in IT, due to my near-constant lamenting about having to provide hand-holding for the assorted stupids and halfwits that somehow managed to get decent paying corporate jobs (despite their seeming inability to read or perform addition or follow very simple and explicit directions to accomplish trivially easy tasks)… I actually don’t. That being said I do have a technology background, and am currently working on a sizable project involving IT and security and a number of other things. The technology aspect of it is fairly interesting, and I love learning new things — a great deal of my frustration (and that of other IT professionals I work with) is that certain higher-ups seem to want miracles delivered on a fairly regular basis, both on the cheap and on very short timescales. Trying to explain to them why what they want is either impractical or just flat out unnecessary is often like trying to convey to a five year old that the television is not actually full of tiny little people prancing about.
Still. It beats being unemployed.
My love for the Pacific Northwest is as pure as the breath of a newborn unicorn, but I’ve always wondered: Is there a reason one would rather live on the Oregon coast over Washington’s? In other words, why do you live where you live and what makes it so great?
Which part? Are you talking about the actual coast?
Further inland?
Or the strange and wonderful city of Portland itself?
Honestly, Portland is just sort of where I wound up after four years of living in the hinterlands and realizing if I wanted to get back to the big city life that I craved it was easier to move up here and go to school than it was to try and go pick up the pieces of my life that I had left scattered all over San Diego. I don’t think I’ve seen quite as much of Washington as I probably should, although I expect to remedy that this summer when I go camping in the Olympic National Forest. I hear good things about Wenatchee and suspect I should probably go visit it at some point, especially because there is a super pretty redhead who lives there who I think would give me plenty of scotch to drink.
What made you start blogging and, having met so many bloggers in person over the years, why in God’s name do you continue?
I started blogging because I was bored with what they were teaching me at school, fairly certain that none of it was going to get me a job. I installed WordPress on my student web account and started fooling around with it, hoping to teach myself a few things about new web technologies so I could earn some money. That didn’t really end up happening, but I ended up meeting some pretty cool people right from the start via blogging (largely by accident and a last minute invitation, but that’s a whole story on its own). I showed up at Portland’s TequilaCon knowing very little about blogging or bloggers or even what an RSS feed was all about. I keep at it because I like the interaction with the bloggers I read and who read my drivel in return. Also a fair percentage of people I’ve met through the blog seem open to the idea of letting me feel them up. I don’t think you can get the same kind of experience just playing Counterstrike online.
When you were 10, what did you want to do when you grew up?
At that age I’m pretty sure I wanted to be an X-Man. I think I empathized with their plight of being disliked by regular people because they were perceived as being “different”. Also being able to shoot force beams out of my eyes or being able to teleport just seemed really fucking cool. Although I failed to develop any mutant powers during puberty, that is when my hair started becoming curly, so I guess that’s something.
Where jobs and the making of the money that allows us to eat and drink are concerned, what would you rather be doing and where would you rather be doing it?
It’s funny, not too long ago a friend of mine asked me this. His answer was that he’d like to jump out of helicopters and shoot bad guys. Me, I’d like to figure out a way to make a living by traveling around this great big country of ours in trains and planes, carrying my laptop and my camera, shooting off pictures and stories and articles to my hypothetical editor whenever I dropped into a wi-fi enabled coffeeshop. I’d have a totally sweet drawing pad and illustrate a webcomic in between. I’ve never been to Europe, so I think I’d like to spend some of that travelling time in Spain and Switzerland and Italy. Since you paint such a nice picture of England I’d like to travel around there as well. I would spend Decembers in Australia, avoiding the bothersome holiday season entirely by surfing, and come back to Oregon in January just to let people envy my kickass tan.
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And that’s my five. I’m supposed to post the rules and offer to interview other people, but let’s face it, I’m both lazy and incompetent at memes. If you’ve really got a burning urge to be interviewed I can oblige you, but it’s going to cut into my wine drinking time.
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