Last public blog entry for Cerkit

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Update: This blog post is no longer relevant. After 7 years, I started blogging again. You can find my current blog at http://cerkit.com/blog/

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That’s it, goodbye public weblog.  Personal blogs have become a way for everyone to gossip with one another and talk about their pet dog’s new food bowl.  The “blogosphere” has become a giant, festering, incestual cross-linking pile of steaming potatoes.

I’ve gotten to the point in my career that I must cease discussing my opinions and reactions to world events, political issues, or any other thing that might somehow offend one of my customers.  Besides, I’m not the same as I was four months ago.  I’ve changed, for the better.

I started my blog as a way to keep my family and friends updated on our life.  My family already knows me, so when I would write about something controversial (or leave important facts out of my entries for the sake of brevity), they knew that I was only exploring the possibilities.  They also knew that I’d eventually learn and helped me stay on the right path.  They forgave me for my mistakes and they forgave me for offending them.

Many blog readers aren’t so giving.  Anonymity has created a culture where otherwise polite people can become something entirely different online.  Over the three or four years that I’ve kept my journal online for the public, I have received numerous negative (and some threatening) emails from people who took issue with a blog entry.  At no time did I ever promise to follow some journalistic creed to write for my audience.  No offense, but I don’t write this for you, I write it for me and my friends and family.

However, I will not stop blogging in a personal fashion.

As strange as this sounds, I am locking my personal blog.  In order to access my blog (including the archives), you will need to register.  I will no longer discuss technology or programming on this blog.  This is my personal journal that I use to chronical my life and the attitudes, beliefs, and pains that I feel each day.  Very few people outside of my circle of friends will care anything about that, so I’ve decided to lock the blog up so that no search engine crawlers will index what I write.  There will also likely be another level of access for my deepest and most private parts.  I’m tired of writing my diary online only to have people who have no idea who I really am misunderstand because they have no context in which to anchor their interpretation of my writing.  Not so with friends and family.

So, I’m choosing capitalism over the bill of rights.  Sure, I have the legal right to say anything I want (well, aside from the illegal things like hate speech and pipe bomb schematics), but my employer also has the legal right to dismiss me for any reason at all.

If you are subscribing to this feed with your RSS reader, you shouldn’t have to make any changes to your feed address.  I’ll make sure the process goes smoothly.  Instead of getting this blog feed, you’ll get the ISV Developer Evangelist team blog.  It’s so much better when the team works together to come up with a plan to help our customers and partners succeed.

Visit the US ISV Developer Evangelist Team blog

I’d say it’s been fun, but I’d be lying.  I am embarrassed at much of my behavior and content over those three years.  As part of my recovery, I am locking everything down.  Too many people judge me based on my blog alone.  That frightens me because my blog is an immensely insignificant representation of who I am and my true nature.  Not just that, but when my blog suddenly switched to opinion instead of useful technical tidbits, everything in my life began to unravel.  Unfortunately, I publically blogged about it.  Now, most of the information there is irrelevant based on the lessons I’ve learned.

I appreciate all of the support I’ve gotten from all of you over the years.  I look forward to many more years serving the industry, but babbling on about ideas and thoughts that were unfiltered, and immature (even outright idiotic at times) has left me with a giant stain on my Internet reputation.  My local “meatspace” reputation is a little better.  However, one day they will find each other and I don’t want to offend anyone.

This is the last public entry I will make.  After a few days (or sooner) RSS subscribers will be redirected to the US ISV Developer Team blog and web visitors will be redirected to the new Cerkit.com site.

Legalize it…

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Just trying to get your attention.  ;)

I was pondering subcultures who wish to have legal reform, but have had no luck for a long time (if ever).

In addition, I was trying to think of the consumerist catch phrases that are used to identify these movements.

How many of the following catchphrases can you link to their movements/organizations?

  • “Make love not war” (easy)
  • “It’s a child, not a choice”
  • “Legalize it”
  • “Fight the power”
  • “Hate is not a family value”
  • “Straight but not narrow”
  • “Wonder twins…ACTIVATE!”

I’m sure there are more, and I’d love to know what they are.  Add to the comments if you have one that isn’t listed here.

What is the upper limit of the term “likely”?

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I was thinking, with all the ways we have of dicing up the word “likely”, what is the upper bounds?  On the “likely” scale, which is likely going to be the most likely likely.


Ok, from negative to positive, we have:



  • zero
  • not likely at all
  • highly unlikely
  • unlikely
  • not likely
  • rather likely
  • likely
  • more than likely
  • most likely
  • [this is where "highly likely" should go, but it doesn't]
  • X=?[...]

“[...]” is meant to represent an array of answers, since there might be more than one.


What’s X?


 

Prophetic dreams – do you believe?

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I am a believer that dreams do literally come true and many of my dreams seem to reveal my future.  Recently, I found an old blog entry that I wanted to log here…


Molecular Transportation


That entry was written in March of 2004.  The part of the dream that is most interesting to me is the second paragraph.  Without getting into too much detail, that’s exactly how I felt about 3 months ago when my entire brain shut down and all that I had to hold onto was a shower head that I was looking at when the event took place.  The little “hiccup” I experienced was the moment where my body “crossed over” from my condition to the “new” me.


My interpretation of the first paragraph is that the “group of people” are doctors and the device is the medication that I was prescribed.  Once I had been prescribed the medication, I was “transported to another place”, though I would hardly use the word “instantaneously” to describe the duration of the “transport”.


It was strange to find this entry after so long and learn that, even if not actually predicting what happened to me two years later, it is neat to me that there is at least some similarity.

Flags

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We have flags for all sorts of things.  Most notably are the flags we use to represent our counties, towns, schools, villages, states, territories, and countries.  Has anyone ever stopped and considered that we have no global flag?


We have no flag to represent us all on this planet.  Why is that?

Enough already, America isn’t evil!

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Consider that everything you see in America was built upon these words…


“We the people…”


Unfortunately, our global ambassadors carry machine guns and show up in tanks.  Sure, those are our “people”, but they don’t represent the true America.  In America, there are far more decent people than there are soldiers, politicians, and used car salesmen combined (and many soldiers and politicians are decent people, even if they have questionable intent).


While we tout the power of our constitution, there are things in it that many people want removed.  Our dilemma is that every time we change the very document that defines our personal freedoms, we risk losing it all.  We are slowly allowing ourselves to chip away at our own rights.


Remember, it’s not the government that is chipping away at our rights, it is each and every American citizen and our visitors.


It is you and it is me*.


We are the people!


[cue cheezy patriotic ballad]


 


*Unless you aren’t an American, which is the most likely conclusion since there are more people in the rest of the world than there are in America.

A new world awaits

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One of the most exciting results of my treatment is that everything seems new.  I can concentrate and truly internalize everything I see.  It’s no longer just one giant white noise generator at the center of my brain.  I can hear the world better.  Every aspect of my body has changed in response to my treated brain.  I can feel my hands, I can feel my skin, I can feel many organs, and, best of all, I can feel the wind.  All of my senses are functioning as I expect they should.  I don’t know because I’ve had this illness for twenty-five years, but I feel like myself, if that makes any sense.


There are aspects of my life that take on a whole new light these days.  I’ve realized that in my obsessive pursuit of the knowledge of computers has left me deficient in areas that I should be well-versed in.  However, the affects of my illness heightened my ability to think abstractly, an essential part of software engineering and development. 


I started my obsession in fourth grade, when computers were finally small enough and cheap enough for the home.  That’s where we first started using the term “Personal Computer” (PC).  I was still paying attention in school, I always aced the tests.  However, because I was so obsessed with computers, I spent all of my free time writing computer programs.  “Free time” to me included time that should have been devoted to homework.  As a result, I got poor grades in school.  I learned to master the art of brushing off nagging teachers who just wanted me to turn something in.  No one saw the value in computers or computer programs, so I felt extremely isolated from the rest of the world.  That’s actually a good thing, I think, because my illness also made it difficult for me to have a conversation with anyone.  The problem with this “secret” life is that the only other kids around me who didn’t do their homework were the troublemakers and losers.  So, I began to associate with them and eventually hang out with them (I think mom would call that “the wrong crowd”).


Over the past few months, I have worked to attain the correct level of medication.  It was a slow process as my dosage could not be full-strength all at once.  As each new dosage increase came, I experienced a week of relapses and general lethargy.  At first, I would black out and lose hours of time.  Laurie told me that during that time, I would wander around shaking my hand, barely responsive to the world areound me.  I was slow to understand anything let alone respond to it.  As time went on and the medication started to have an effect, the increases became easier, but they were still difficult times.


As the days progress from my final (I hope) dosage increase, I am re-learning everything and truly internalizing everything I ignored as a kid and young adult.  One of the most helpful realizations lately has been this…


Part of becoming a successful adult is knowing when to lead a conversation and knowing when to follow it. 



We all depend on one another, either directly or indirectly.  That means that every conversation you have contributes to (or takes away from) the forward motion of the human race.  Everything you say to others is processed, remembered, and many times, repeated a million times over.  With the emergance of civilian Internet access, this has become even more true.


To me, this means that every conversation I have should contribute to the world in a positive way.  Of course, I realize that there will always be conversation “fluff”, the standard things we commonly say that lose their meaning due to the frequency of their usage (“how’s it going?”, “what’s up?”, “What do you do for a living?”, etc).


Human interaction seems to be the greatest improvement in my behavior so far.  I focused on that because I am no longer hiding in a “cave” writing code with very little human interaction.


My new position with Microsoft is completely about human relationships and no longer about knowing the most efficient collection class to use when you need random access to the data stored within (versus one that sorts the data in any number of ways).


In summary, I feel completely new and free.  I know that sounds cliche, but my favorite cliche of all is that cliches are cliches for a reason.