The lack of coffee filters in this house is distressing. Fortunately it appears all city opened at 6am, so I’m off in that direction shortly.

Seems like it was a drinking weekend. I worked late on some java + couchdb projects Friday night. Java is frustrating. So very much time is spent writing setup code and dealing with classes hidden deep in jars rather than just writing code. But it’s coming together and I got some results.

Sweet, Ken’s going to All City. So I’ll wait for that.

Mom and I met for dinner at Cafe Flora, and made it to the Shark for Dollhouse and BSG. The latter is coming to an end in three episodes and, well, as they say, is heating up. Saturday and Sunday morning were described already. I did get a second outlet into the garage later in the day yesterday, and pulled down the EMT I had picked up to make the bike rack with. I got thinking about my lack of a mitre box for making the 45 degree cuts when Scott and Meg showed up at Jules Maes, so Ken and I joined them. Ken and Scott floated the idea of using a chop saw, which seems mostly like a semi-good reason to blow more money on tools. Meg thinks Colin may have a tube bending machine in his shop that will go that big though.

It took me a couple years, but I got up to Seattle Central and took the compass placement exam for math/english. English scored were near perfect and placed me in ENG101. I assume from that it’s mostly to determine you don’t need any remedial “what is a comma” type work. Having had a math class history that’s suffered from being in and out of school when I was younger, I didn’t know where that would end up. I got placed into Pre-calc II. That class is full, as is the Computer Science class I was looking it, so I think I’m going to take Pre-calc I at night, which has space and will at least get me going. I’m still considering if I should take ENG101 as a correspondence course. I’ve got to deal with getting in-state tuition setup, so perhaps I’ll worry about that later. Oh the maths. And school. I’m not really sure what’s gotten into my head.

The latter part of the story goes as so. After dropping out of high school I spent six months coming to terms with existentialist angst, although I didn’t call it that at the time. Once that was settled, on with life. I spent some time working at the University of Maine in the Chemical Engineering department doing computer work. I wanted to go there, but I’d need a diploma. Since I was under 18, I couldn’t get a GED without a college having accepted me, and I couldn’t apply to UMO without a high school diploma. I got a letter from the college that looked all fancy asking them to let me take the GED, and one from a high school guidance counsellor explaining I was much better off this way, but it didn’t work. There’s some irony in the laws meant to keep kids in school, keeping kids out of school instead.

So I went back and took some night classes, tests and whatever through the adult education department to finish off the diploma, graduating a month early from high school to the surprise of many family members who were still convinced I was a no good drug addict, mostly because I must be immature and a failure because my parents raised me mostly without strong moral guidance tied with strict punishments. And a gold star to my parents for supposing I could learn all that on my own if allowed to. Eastern Maine Technical College (now a community college) was starting a new networking programming which I was interested in. I took a physics class at night there to meet the entry requirements. The class was incredibly frustrating due to the other students and towards the end of the class my attendance fell off a cliff. My instructor looked at me puzzle when I showed up on the last day, but let me take all the tests I had missed as well as the final and not let the time have gone to waste. By the time I was finished with that I looked at the syllabus, and saw the final quarter of the second year would be spent studying the material I had been reading for the last couple of months myself. With that, I that idea went out.

Some time later I had another college foray, taking some Interactive Television (ITV) courses through the University of Maine at Augusta (as opposed to the engineering college at Orono) for business classes. Having given up on getting any interesting Information Technology classes anywhere, I decided some business classes wouldn’t hurt. They did. All of my classes amounted to working out of text books. Having long ago learned to read a book and understand it on my own, I ran out of reasons to be there quickly.

So what exactly do I expect to garner this time around? Certainly not a diploma, at least this decade. Some theory I suppose. My practical skills and my thoughts about them in my industry are already leading edge. Some time ago I realized this when I went to the computer aisle in a book store and realized you couldn’t buy books about the software and technology I’m working with because we haven’t written them yet. We’ll start with some maths, ideally get some computer science classes in there to cover some prerequisites so if I do see something that really engages me down the road I won’t be screwed on account of that. I’ll try to stick to classes that are transferable to UW or directly applicable to something else I do. I’ve considered the meteorology courses for my flying, for instance. It’s sort of like the boy scout motto applied to school. I’m certainly crossing my fingers very hard in hope that I’m not going to be paying hundreds of dollars to be read to.

Which reminds me of a funny story at an unnamed private vocational school for computer certifications. I took a Microsoft SQL DBA (Database Administrator) (MCDBA) certification training course there because at the time the four tests for this certification had two that overlapped with the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MSCE) certification I was aiming for to get someone to look twice at my resume and actually give me the opportunity to talk. Anyway, the instructor was terrible and read directly from the coursework. We weren’t really held to the material strictly though, so I made due. The funny part was that he ended up leaving, and I had just started working there. I was one of the few instructors that had a solid set of the recent certifications to match the classes I was teaching, and I got picked to teach the MCDBA classes. The argument was that it’s more important you know how to teach than know all of the material. It’s certainly essential you know how to teach well and moreso to engage the students. (I’m curious to see how my experience teaching affects my interest in classes now.) All the same, I always felt a little shifty about the teachers not always having the certifications, or on the job experience, with the technology they were teaching.

Before the event that caused me occured, it was hinted at. I was specifically asked if I was on board, yet without any direct statement of what ship I was joining. This felt like straight out of some business book, or “CYA for Dummies”. In response I said simply that they should do what they felt was right, and I would do what I felt was right. This wasn’t what they wanted to hear. I found some irony in this too because of another event.

A supplier once sent us twice the product we paid for by accident. When I asked what we were going to do about it, I got this lecture about how we were an honest company and expected to make the right decisions. Really, I wanted to know exactly what we were going to do; such as who to call, should I drive over there, etcetera. When folks get up on their soap box like that, I tend to let them have it. I don’t feel the need to justify myself to people acting that way. So I found amusement when shady actions were justified as being on board, having been lectured previously about doing the Right Thing.

In the end, I left the company after said event. It was an extremely difficult choice for me, but I stuck by it because I felt strongly that leaving was the right thing to do, for a number of reasons. I’m getting back to giving The Cathedral and the Bazaar a solid read. By design, it’s one of those books that puts to words things you may already have though, provided you are a part of the open source community. This has brought back a lot of memories of working for people that tried to direct what I did on a regular basis.

I’ve worked in technology almost all of my life. Definitely all of my life since high school. The time before then I often regard as a pre-cursor to life. I’ve never worked in fast food. My after school (and sometimes during school) jobs were in computer repair, then system administration (starting an ISP). Through Matthew, I’ve had a lot of experience in trades, solving unexpected problems daily in unexpected places in the world. I’ve put in a “hard days work” in both labor and tech in ways that I’ve found very few willing to (or capable of). When I employed a few friends doing electronics salvage, I remember one asking me how I was still lugging around piles of scrap cable after twelve hours of work without complaint. How do you explain to someone that you just do? He only lasted a week or two.

I don’t know how people get to feel so entitled. I suppose I could relate by thinking about how difficult it is for me to deal with emotional problems at times. However I’m pretty sure that my difficulties are that I try to, whereas most people don’t.

Reading the aforementioned book and thinking about places I’ve worked shows a pattern of success when working for people that give me a task and let me go; trusting me to come back if I have a question but otherwise get the work done the best I can discover on my own. Those who have ever tried to outline my day have only caused me undue stress, and my eventual departure.

When I told my father I was going to take some college courses, he asked me about how my certifications were going as I hadn’t talked about them for a while. They aren’t going. They got me a couple jobs here, and enough time has passed that I know enough people here that know how capable I am that I don’t doubt my ability to find other work if necessary. Ideally future jobs will be squarely open source, and I think the internet will be able to speak for me in short order. I’d still like an RHCE or a CCIE some day, but I touch Cisco equipment only out of occasional necessity or fun now, and I haven’t touched Redhat since 6.2, despite promising Scott Dodson I’d give it another look sometime. The power of being both a solid system and network administrator fits where I’m going now in a different way than it used to. The jack of all trades skill set sells “I can take care of everything if you let me do it” well, but it’s forming into a background that makes my design choices well founded as I almost subconsciously pick apart systems in search of flaws that aren’t stable or scalable.

Coffee is devoured, I should get to the office.