Notice the caps of “Progress”? We are supposed to progress and evolve in life. Things are supposed to change, move along, become different. A friend once asked me whether I would ever move out of doing technology and into something else. I remember a friend of mine Bill that did just that. Bill is this interesting guy you want to spend time talking to, getting to know, and then admiring, respecting, and wanting more time with. I’ve worked with Bill since the Linuxcare days and then I hired him over at Technorati. He was there for quite some spell doing the “engine room” work. The engine room was Bill’s name for the data center. Data centers have unique needs and unique denizens work within them. System Administrators, DBAs, ops doods all conversing, fixing, and doing. My favorite one of late is GSI Hosting over in Kansas City, MO. I worked with perhaps the most dedicated operations admin team I have ever found while doing the work at Visa. But it seems that these guys that do this work are “touched”. They pull “iron man” shifts, understand operating systems like you and I deal with small kitchen appliances, and also are able to fix. They fix things and they understand things.
Well, back to Bill. Bill knew that world and then he left and therein is the story. I’ve wondered a few times what it would feel like to simply leave it all behind. Perhaps do a Alexander SuperTramp Into the Wild thing. I could drive my laptop into a ditch and burn it up. Leave behind the monikers of dead linux ISO images and disks. Stop all the things that frustrate me with the world of IT and services…
But then reality bitch slaps me across my skinny (er) face. And I hear it singing its swan song:
Dood. You ain’t leaving nothing behind because there is nowhere to move to. You cannot leave a thing behind if you have nothing to move toward.
I tell it,
Forward and toward and behind are relative concepts so stop with the slapping already.
It tells me,
Sure. Now go figure out why the appliance you are playing with won’t boot.
So off I go. I ain’t gonna leave this behind because behind is a term that does not apply any longer. I made my changes and now I’m at a place, doing a thing that seems enjoyable. So moving and grooving and being take on different core meanings. Thanks for the slap; but I did not need it.
Writing the Next Blog Post…
There is no next blog post. Because by the time the pressure builds up like eating too much Navy bean soup; the next blog post has become this one and when I scan back across what I’ve done; I say: “Holy Cow. I hope people don’t actually read this meaningless drivel”. If you do, I’m sorry that I can’t write momentous dialogue the top 100 and talk about trains of clues and social dialoging and things to do with RSS.
