My brother Ron and his two daughters, Rebeca and Sophia, visited a couple of days ago. We had a barbecue and some good conversation: I really enjoyed the visit.
My niece Rebeca is about to enter high school, which is amazing in itself. More amazing is that she asked me for some advice on whether pursuing computer science / IT was a good choice. I tried to share some ‘wisdom’, but I found it surprisingly difficult to give good advice. This is a crazy old world, and who knows what the future holds? So I thought I’d post some of my thoughts here in a bit more detail.
Christmas is a distant speck in my rear-view mirror, and we are already most of a month into 2012. I wouldn’t really say I have any “resolutions” for the New Year, but I do have some goals. It is odd how the completely arbitrary change over of a calendar causes me to re-examine my life, but I will take advantage of it. It is time to give some thought to what I want to focus on in the next year.
Today was my last day at work for a couple of weeks. I still have work to do, but I am no longer on any kind of clock other than one meeting I’m supposed to call in to tomorrow morning.
I don’t take traditional vacations very often. You know…the kind where you get on a plane/train/boat and go somewhere a long distance from home. There are lots of reasons why this is the case. Firstly, we have a house full of cats that are more our children or our demanding house guests than something so crass as a “pet”. We can’t very well take them with us: most hotels frown on guests with six cats. And it takes a lot of arranging to find someone trustworthy enough to care for them who has time to do so that just happens to correspond to when we want to take our vacation.
I generally am very happy with my work. My job includes a mix of techno-geeky tasks, all related to the delivery of “rich media” (streaming, podcasting) content. The group I’m in has less than 20 people, and within that group my immediate team consists of four or five folks who design and build applications. But the group I belong to is part of a very, very large company…the best of both worlds, I guess. Some days I am writing server or application monitoring programs to keep track of the state of our streaming infrastructure, other days I’m working on a data model for the next generation of our webcast delivery interface. I never feel like I’m stuck in a rut, the work challenges me mentally, and I am surrounded by people who give a damn- that’s saying a lot.
