November 2005

If life is truly an avenue and there are numerous off-ramps we can choose to take, pass-up, ignore completely; then the last few weeks have been truly remarkable. I was out of work mere months ago and things got a bit serious. No calls from recruiters, no positive feelings about what I was doing or where I was going. It kind of leaves those in the search for work in a depressed and anxious state because no one wants to feel that the job search that they put in hours on each day delivers absolutely nothing. I get this weekly newsletter on careers, resume ideas, and other stuff and one of the continuous pieces of advice is to consider the job search as a job in and of itself. It can get difficult when you feel that there is nothing there, that the search is not taking you to a new place. The twists and turns of job searching can always get better in a single day with nothing more than a phone call. And that happened to me and is still happening. I have an approach to looking which takes me to certain places and I have kinda figured out what works for me.

The twist and turn that I kinda saw and that I blogged about before is that the things I am moving toward are moving me farther away from working around Linux. Perhaps that is just the necessity out there and its okay. I think I had my final fling working around Linux at the Free Standards Group and now its time to go out there and find things which are different; that take me to new places, and that I can feel challenged about.

All that being said, there are twists and turns on the job search path that perhaps bear repeating and they are things I have learned:

• don’t give up. One of the things I think that happens especially out here is that the job market flows in all different patterns and within months one can find different realities to looking.
• try to find a positive in each day. If you can keep your head… and you know that what you know another person is looking for, then you will not only survive but excel
• know when to say when. Sometimes, as I found doing archeology, one has to know when to say when. Sometimes you just have to bid adieu to things to make other things happen.
• be brave and resourceful and never give up learning. Learning takes many shapes when you are out looking for work and sometimes a simple thing like a small job fair can yield appreciable results. Never let the size of thing make you believe that it is not worthy.

All of the things mean you can tackle the diversity, the feelings, and the successes just as easily. I know people that have had chances but through some flaws in their character they never see the value in the thing put on the table and they choose to believe that everything must simply be delivered to them at their door. Geez. Opportunity may not wait for that dood!

The main thing I have learned is the “know when to say when” thing and thats a hard one to learn. With our fragile male egos its hard to admit that suddenly you are not the top dog and that the world is spinning off into different places and its simply not gonna wait for you to carefully study the outcomes. Women are just so much smarter than we men at this stuff. They simply know.

All in all, the best resource to have in the job search is a family that understands and supports. Our egos are small and malformed and we need it. Men are such dwarfs in so many things that women are so good at. I’m glad for the possibilities I have and I can see that knowing to say when has allowed me a few advances.

Everyone deserves a personal perspective; especially on a personal website that just happens to double as a weblog. I was cleaning the garage out few weeks ago and I found this old cardboard container folded over, taped, and touched by age. I’m sure you all have done the same and found things that amazed or saddened or amused. This one seemed unopened for a few family moves. I just stared at it for awhile and decided to take a chance on it not being something emberassing since my wife was helping with clean up. The box almost fell apart and inside was this virtual wealth of stuff. First was a daypack I used to use when I did archeology. It had maps, a compass, notes, names, phone numbers. The maps were USGS topographic quads of an area in Nevada around Fallon NAS. As I read the notes, I was reminded of that particular work. I did a survey for over 16 or so remote radar installations all across the Great Basin Desert in Nevada for this company I worked for. There were lines drawn that all were intersection points from different known points and the lines crossed in various places. If you have done map work, you know what intersection and resection are. Given a map and a compass, I would never be truly lost and I could also find a place and how to get there. But the amazing thing were the names and numbers. I found a small notepad with these names and numbers of people long lost. I actually called a few numbers but unfortunately they had changed.

It also allowed me this wonderful bathing in my own history and what things were like then and before. I wandered deserts, mountains, valleys, and plains. I was a modern nomad touching the history and prehistory of lost races and places. I also had this league of friends that seemed to be isolated much like me and the wonderful times were the times spent in comeraderie. I don’t know of existing people in today’s life that touched upon the mystical feelings of coalescing around a fire in the middle of nowhere with a small group of archeologists. It was light and dark and often outside of the fire were these other worldly forces that all gathered to watch us. But the fire was the essence and stories were told of past archeology. We drank lots of beer and often the discussion wavered around fact and fiction; but the main thing was a joy in just being together. Archeology is a very isolated science for the most part.

Flash forward to a group of email I happened to find and the box I had carefully kept after leaving Linuxcare. I found a few things of interest including a gzip’ed archive with old mail. Amazing! This mail was mostly from what was called the “spam” list. Stuff that I still laugh at and people I still know of or hear of.

Its truly amazing in a life how time passes and what we all do to either honor or forget the passage. Finding that old box in the garage geared memories and finding the desk contents from the wild and wooly days really tickled me. I have one picture of our days at Linuxcare in this big room where we all sat together. Its all I have left besides a small award that I got for some minor accomplishments in a quarter of time.

I’ve been at home mostly the last few days soaking in the revelry of college and NFL daze. While I really enjoy this time of the year for football, its also a changing of the guard time and you can gauge what teams are gonna move and groove and which ones are falling away. I poured myself a good healthy and hearty mix of honesty, truthfulness, and disclosure today and decided that the path I am pursuing for work is the best one I could given the real facts of work out there. The real facts are that there are jobs and one can find a good job by simply bending like a reed and not being iron. Bending a bit will allow you to support family, house, kids, and become yet another person. I think that is very important given the reality of life in today’s “Silly Icon” valley. The life here is truly framed in subterfuge. Thousands out of work, the chemistry of the high technology companies may be swinging back yet again to a certain ’start up”. Who can tell. Its definitely not like back in 1998 when I was casting about for a job after the GAPinc, and found that I got about 30 calls in one day. Now I have about 4 different possibilities but each one is uber kewl and offers that needed change.

One of the things I think I will be bidding adieu to is working around open source and linux overall. I don’t see any of the positiions really delivering work around this and perhaps its just time to move on past that. I have really loved working around Linux and the folks engaged in Linux and I have this desire to see Linux standards and certifications become truly open and with the willful cooperation of the different major and minor players. Without that, I don’t see the current effort with the Linux Standards Base and Free Standards Group really going anywhere. Some will undoubtedly say its because I left there and I have grapes which are sour. On the side of work at the FSG, I can truly say I loved that job and I would have continued with it; but now I see I was really not meant to. I want to be in a position to create and build and my new opportunities are all aligned that way. So, while I will continue to publish on the ways and means of the new Linux open standards approaches, I also am moving toward jobs and careers which take me further away from those things. No one could ever call me a person locked down to one operating system and I have blogged before that I feel like a “habilis” of technology. That is, a user of it. I use what I need to get things done and I don’t want to be locked down because its cool, or because others feel there is some necessity of doing things a certain way.

So, the subterfuge runs deep and swirls; just like the diswasher going now. But the dishwasher cleans and bubbles and sends jets of water out to change the dirt. My new possibilities do the same in some ways. They allow me to re-invent myself yet again, find things which I value, and move on to new drumbeats. I have realized that this weblog cannot go away now and it has to be run on wordpress. So, in the interests of long-term weblogging, I have taken steps that will mean a more resiliient and redundant server that this stuff runs on.

Take care you all… I’ll be seeing you down the same and perhaps different paths; but I will always be blogging here and I don’t plan on ever setting the iron down on what I see being the failure of contemporary standards and certification efforts.

Well, this weblog is back in shape pretty much so its time for me to begin writing about some of the things that have been occupying my time of late. The original system that the webserver was on managed to have a massive disk failure but thanks to the power of rsync, the effect was somewhat limited. I also spent the time in darkness cementing down some career change type stuff and also building a more available and redundant set of debian servers to handle some stuff here. At the risk of mass advertising, let me state that the best way to manage critical files (documents, music, backups) is to build a RAID1 array with a 3ware controller and then get a Debian Sarge net installer. Why debian? Well, because Debian really does 3ware well and you can be done with building a minimal system in less than 30 minutes. Consider installing cron-apt to let you know by email when new packages are downloaded from a repository near you.

The other thing that occupied a lot of my time of late was T-day. Its my favorite holiday of the year so I like to do the things on that day which make it special. Namely football!! There are a few “too bads”. Too bad that the Broncoes won in OT against the Cowboys. Too bad the Lions did not mount more of a challenge to Vic’s boys.

Finally, I also lost my wiki stuff in total I’m afraid but I had managed to keep secondary backups of the pages so all is not lost. Based on my thoughts today and yesterday, I think its about time that we considered a few facts. Linux and where its gonna go are bound up how well we align the three sides of the so-called pyramid to each other. The three sides are corporate users, distribution vendors, and the “community-at-large”. Think in the widest terms for each of these. No limits besides the ones you set. Also ask yourself honestly whether the current efforts truly will cause a evolution and revolution in the use of Linux. I think without a cosmic alignment that Linux will never truly become what it has the potential to be. Its a simple reality that by ignoring one of the three supporting frameworks the other two will wander through what enterprise adoption means and what ISV alignment means, etc. The big non-player now is the community-at-large. Without them, we shall never see the true evolution of Linux to where it should and could be. Its all about potentialities, folks.

Its the day after a day of thanks. Lets move on and envision where we can be and what that terrain looks like. I have personal agendas to fulfill and a few miles to go before I sleep. The weblog is back and the I plan on writing more on these topics soon since I feel that we all need communication and dialogue to ensure we see what should be the path. Good dialogue and communication and consensus.