Posts filed under 'Personal'
First, to all those who have inquired, yes, I am still alive, in the same way a hibernating bear is. That’s due to sheer exhaustion, to being stretched far too thin over the past six months or so. The new job, the new home, Conor (nearly three years old), Danny (nearly a year old), and a few lingering after-effects from previous contracts and jobs have been draining all my energy, and it’s only lately that I feel like I’m finally able to yawn and stretch, poke my nose out the door, and sniff the promise of Spring.
The new job up in the Northwest Territories is going very well, and I’m very happy to be part of a great team. Starting in any new workplace is often cause for trepidation, if not outright caution, but I’m pleased to find myself among some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. The weather here in Yellowknife may be cold at times (-40C, in fact), but the people up North are some of the warmest individuals I’ve ever met.
I’m not quite sure why I’m posting here today after such a long absence. (Yes, I have been around, in spirit if not in body, at DIYPlanner.com.) I think it’s because I’ve finally reached a turning point of sorts. My life, much like the land around me, is starting to thaw. And where there’s thawing, there’s life waiting to happen.
April 16th, 2007
I’m just packing up the final bits of my computer gear as I speak, but I just had to write this one last post.
Where I (currently) live, in Newfoundland, Canada, people have a lot to be thankful for. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, with seemingly endless tracts of breathtaking rugged seascapes, adorned with icebergs and spinning seabirds and pods of whales, striking a connection with elemental nature that’s almost unparalled. There’s a longstanding cultural heritage ripe with music, art and storytelling, and a down-to-earth mentality that cherishes family, neighbours and even visitors. Here in Carbonear, the weather is warm (but not too warm) and the area is lush and verdant with giant beautiful maple trees nearly a century old. And while there’s a high unemployment rate, the people throughout the province are among the friendliest in the world, often inviting complete strangers into their homes to share a story and a cup of tea.
But there are also idiots. Yes, we have those too.
Last night, towards midnight, I was finishing up packing for the night when I heard a loud bang. I didn’t think too much of it, since the Canada Day fireworks had been sounding sporatically for the past couple of hours. But soon I heard the sirens and suspected there was a problem nearby. A half-hour later, I let the dog out and noticed police lights spinning on a house across the street. I shuffled into my sandals and went out to see what was happening.
There were three police cars, an ambulance driving away, and a crowd milling around a vehicle. A closer look revealed an older mid-sized car whose front end was completely demolished, a large nearby maple whose trunk bark was completely ripped off, and a young girl crying in the back seat of a police car.
It turns out that this girl, whose blood alcohol was several times the limit, and who had been driving without insurance or even a license, had hit our neighbour and crashed into a tree. She then tried to make a getaway, but the car didn’t make it more than a few feet. The neighbour was flung onto a nearby lawn and was suffering from two mangled legs, a badly damaged eye, and no doubt a series of other injuries. He was rushed to the Health Sciences Centre in the capitol of St. John’s. I knew him briefly from a school where I taught — he had just retired from teaching at the age of 52, and had bought a canoe for his holidays. She wound up with a nose bleed.
As I walked back to the house, I noticed the tire tracks. She had driven through a puddle on the opposite (left) side of the road, and swerved to the right, where she hit the neighbour and then the tree. There didn’t seem to be any skid marks.
I certainly feel for the neighbour, and I’m trying to feel for the girl. She’s young, and at that age we’re all a little stupid and obnoxious. (She’s the same one we often hear roaming drunkenly with a pair of teenage boys in the middle of the night, whooping and screaming and swearing as she passes by the house.) But I can’t help thinking she needed this to happen. It’s a lesson to be learned, and it’s rather ironic that a dedicated school teacher was nearly killed in the process.
Please, folks, if you’re going to drink for the holidays, remember to do the right thing and set a designated driver. It’s one thing to play games with your own life; it’s quite another to jeopoardise someone else’s.
July 2nd, 2006
Well, it’s time I shared the other big news of my life. After a year of hunting for a permanent, full-time position, I’ve been offered a position for a job I’m sure to love in Yellowknife.
For the geographically challenged folks out there, Yellowknife is the largest city (pop. 20K) in the North West Territories atop Canada –find Alberta on your map and let your eye drift northwards– and is rather close to the Arctic Circle. 
In fact, the picture at left was taken from my hotel room at about 1:00 or 1:30 am, and the midnight almost-sun shows the necessity of having thick curtains in the summertime. In the Winter months, there’s an equal amount of darkness. Summer temperatures range from 15-30C and the mercury in Winter can often drop to -30C. (People’s tires freeze to square shapes, I’m told.)
No doubt a few people are scratching their heads. Why, they ask, are you heading to a small, frigid place enshrouded by darkness half the year? Well, that’s a misperception, but I’ll deal with that in a minute.
The days of short-term contracts can be frustrating, especially when it comes to ensuring any sense of stability, and –with several mouths to feed– knowing where the next meal is coming from is always a worry. I used to love freelance work, but owing to a number of factors (mainly geography, overseas outsourcing, and those user-friendly technologies accessible to more amateurs), the contracts are becoming less frequent and less interesting. I want a job where I can grow, where I can learn, where I can exercise my media-related skills, and where I can become part of a team that really cares about what it’s doing. Jenny and I want a community that’s small enough to be close-knit, yet large enough to provide for our wants (including fresh produce like cilantro and mangos) — we want a place where we can feel comfortable settling down. And I’m a pretty rustic guy, so I like to commune frequently with the natural world, a faithful hound by my side.
I flew up to Yellowknife for a weekend (it took 23 hours to arrive from St. John’s, Newfoundland — a heck of a commute), and I got to know more about the organisation and the city. I can say that I was pleased at every turn. The company and its projects seem quite exciting, the opportunities for professional growth and learning are certainly there, and –hey– it’s mostly a Mac shop. Meanwhile, the people in the city (population about 20,000) are exceedingly friendly and culturally diverse, the shops seem to cater to every one of our necessities, and a wild and wonderful natural world of trees and lakes and animals is only minutes away. It’s also very warm, and the air is fresh and alive with all the greenery and flowers. Between the job and the location, it’s certainly the most exciting offer I’ve received, and there’s no hesitation in seizing it.
I’m in the throes of packing right now (Jenny just returned from hospital, so she won’t be in any condition to do much), and I’ll be heading north in the next few weeks to find a place and get things set up. Jenny, two-year-old Conor, and newborn Daniel will be joining me within a month or so. I must say, every indication points to a great future for the Johnston clan….
June 19th, 2006
Introducing my new son Daniel Karl Johnston, born late last night at 9 lbs 3 oz. Here he is, some five minutes old, with his proud mama and papa.
For those interested, I’ll post a photostream later with more pictures and details.
I also have some more big news to share, which I’ll post as soon as I get a breather. (I assure you, there are good reasons for my absences of late….)
June 15th, 2006
A personal invite goes out to you all for a special sneak preview of my new blog, A Study in Sherlock, set to launch tomorrow. This site is devoted to the life, times and influence of the Great Detective himself, perhaps the most famous fictional character in history.
There’s a tonne of material already in the queue, and so it’s my intention that there will be something new every weekday, and occasionally on weekends. That includes original pieces (many of which are written for newcomers to the Canon), photographs, teasers for the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, illustrations, news stories, book reviews, audio snippets, “workshop” projects (such as do-it-yourself reference cards or CDs), radio plays, and featured sites. Most of these entries are selected to offer something for neophytes, but –hopefully– also provide ample occasion for discourse amongst the more experienced.
I appreciate any and all feedback from you fine folks — a contact form can be accessed from the top menu, and the comment forms are ready to go, so please don’t be shy. I hope you enjoy!
March 12th, 2006
I’ve just finished an online gallery for my wife –the real artist in the family– and you can now see it over at her blog, The Space Above the Couch (click on the “gallery” link in the header to launch it).
March 2nd, 2006
One of the reasons why I decided to keep a blog in the first place was to force my mind into gear and keep learning. After all, nothing obliges you to delve into a topic quite like having to share one’s thoughts and opinions about it. (The old teaching dictum: “The best way to learn is to teach.”) Of course, to stick with something long-term, you actually need to have either a personal stake in it, or a burning interest for it, if not an actual obsession. While I do have a personal stake in this blog and DIYPlanner.com, sometimes the endless marching forwards of productivity methods can get a little wearisome. The subject matter is inherently practical and work-related, never something I’d pursue to unwind or relax. (At least, not any more.)
To that end, I’m thinking of beginning a new multimedia blog. The catch? This one will be about Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since I first learned to read, I’ve always been fascinated by this character. I’ve read the Canon (the 56 short stories and four novels) dozens of times, the rest of Sir ACD’s works at least two or three times, and I have shelves and shelves of scholarly books, pastiches (books in the “original style”), biographies, films, graphics, television programs, radio recordings and more. While I possess nowhere near the knowledge of most Holmes scholars (alas, I have yet to subscribe to the Baker Street Journal), I figure this is a perfect opportunity to immerse myself in a lifelong interest, become more proficient in the subject as I go along, learn to relax a little, and offer some daily illustrations, links, photographs, texts, reviews and old-time radio shows for those who follow the life and times of the Master Detective.
Everyone needs a hobby to unwind. I figure a thirty-year obsession is about as close to a persistent hobby as I get….
February 21st, 2006
One of the few traits I seem to have inherited from my late and much-lamented father is a decided lack of patience when it comes to shopping. Now, send me into a store to rummage through books, office supplies, electronics or tools, and I could be content, if not outright gleeful, for hours on end; indeed, I could easily get lost for days in large bookstores, sifting through the titles while I forget to eat or drink. But send me forth into the teeming hordes of a department store or mall, especially on a quest for some ill-labelled and confusing feminine product, and I’ll soon be quivering in paroxysms of frustration, anger, loathing for fellow humans, and even the fear of God.
And so it was with no lack of trepidation that I sallied forth recently into the seething swarms of bargain-hungry shoppers all brought to the brink of outright violence in their efforts to exchange well-meaning Christmas presents for the last dregs upon the shelves, and I in search of a seemingly rare skin lotion for my pregnant wife.
The dementia had been spreading since Boxing Day. Housewives were now bickering violently over cheese graters, burly men were play tug-of-war with cans of paint, and children were whirling around yanking each others’ hair while the super-soaker gun in their hands crashed into nearby shelves. Shoppers left their carts in strategic positions in the aisles to prevent passers-by, and passers-by were crashing into them, sending them flying. Newfoundlanders, normally one of the kindest races on Earth, were suddenly transformed into primitive and tempermental participants in actions that paled The Lord of the Flies. The staff, normally standing with smiles at each doorway and junction, had long since disappeared into their secret little crawl-spaces in fright, and there were forty impatient people for every distraught clerk at the check-outs.
I went from aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, looking for the lotion. Being a typical male, I figured that skin lotions would somehow be adjacent to hair products, tampons and sundry other feminine products that would make a grown man blush. That, however, was not the case, and I scoured that entire section of the store looking for the bottle that my wife had shown me that morning.
To make a long and horrible story short, it was over a half-hour later when I finally had the lotion (which, of course, now had a different name and packaging) grasped tightly in my hand lest I be ambushed and assaulted. My blood was boiling, my body was covered in sweat, and my head was throbbing. Quickly, I wended my way through the crowds to the baby section to locate some tiny nail clippers. I was rummaging through all the disorganised racks when I became aware of a young lady standing next to me.
She was staring hard at the baby bottles on the shelves next to me. A young mother, probably, and evidentally as distraught as I was. She fidgeted with the sets, uttering frustrations, picking packages up, reading them, slamming them down. Each one set my nerves a little tighter, and I tried to ignore her, sifting hurredly through the mess in my vain search for the clippers.
I then heard her weak voice: “Excuse me…?”
I turned to face her, and I felt the tension inside me, a brittle twig bent just to the breaking point. Her eyes were welling with tears, her bottom lip trembling as she bit it. “Can you tell me…?” she started to ask, then stopped suddenly, looking at me expectantly. Keep in mind that I’m rather a large man, and somewhat intimidating.
“Yes…?” I said, probably growling a little. I wasn’t in the mood for stupid questions. I just wanted to escape.
“Can you tell me…,” she started again, “which nipple do you think is the most real?”
I stared blankly at her for a moment. She stared back, a small animal caught in headlights, then glanced meekly at the shelves of baby bottles again.
Then I laughed. Loudly. She laughed, nervously at first. The people down the aisle began to laugh.
And shopping didn’t seem like such a horrible thing any more. At least that day.
January 27th, 2006
About six years ago during the height of the dot-com madness, I was flown across the continent on very little notice for an e-learning consultation, and promptly placed in a high-end hotel (the type that feels no need to include “quality” in its title). Each morning the hotel would sponsor a special e-networking breakfast room for select guests, and it was here one morning that I stood, overlooking San Diego while indulging in aromatic coffees, decadent pastries and exotic fruits. There I made the acquaintance of the CEO of a newly-public company (e-something- or-other, of course), a man in his mid-twenties, just a few years younger than I, but far better-groomed and clad in clothes costing more than a luxury sedan.
The first ten minutes of the conversation was decidedly one-sided, and he went on at length about how he outsmarted his stock advisors and “stuck it to the vulture capitalists” to attain the nearly $40 million he needed to pursue his super-secret business idea (which, true be told, once he explained it to me, sounded like a flaky advertising project to create and sell ads to run within a company’s own intranet). R&D money, for him, meant wining and dining celebrities and high-powered executives in epicurean and orgiastic parties held in rented designer mansions. To determine what people actually wanted, of course.
He asked what I did, and I told him why I was there, and a little bit about my jack-of-all-trades background. He didn’t seem interesting in anything besides himself, so I kept it short. The conversation then went something like this….
“Listen, guy,” he said, mouth half-full with baklava no doubt flown in from Greece –he called everyone guy, even the women in the room– “there are two types of people in the world: the generalists and the specialists.”
I nodded, trying to hold up an tiny expresso cup in my large hands without jutting out a pinkie, because my father told me it wasn’t a manly thing to do.
“The specialists back themselves into a corner, you see. They only have one set of skills, and when those aren’t needed any more, where are they?” He awaited my response, a Socrates probing his Plato, while he picked his teeth with his forefinder and flicked the flakes ramdomly.
“Where?” I asked, cleaning off my tie in as subtle a fashion as possible.
“I’ll tell you where, guy… no where!” he exclaimed, slamming down his empty cup upon the table by way of punctuation. “But people like you and me, we’re too smart for that.”
“Are we?”
“You betcha, guy. You see, we’re the people who evolved, while others got left behind. You don’t see us running around with apes, do you?”
My mind returned to university, when a female friend of mine started dating a large and uncouth individual with an excess of body hair, but I simply shook my head.
“We’re the ones who adapt, who know enough about how everything works that we can be leaders. And leaders are leaders.”
A brilliant observation, I observed.
This went on for another ten minutes, wherein he expounded upon the virtues of those people who knew little about anything in particular, but about many things in general.
It almost made me feel good, however briefly. I had always been a generalist –I prefer the term “well-rounded”– with a hand in everything from project management to art and design, from high-tech multimedia production to marketing, from programming to teaching high school literature. I’d always adapted, often quickly, to whatever role was necessary at the moment, learning whatever skills were needed. It wasn’t a waste of time after all, I reflected.
In 2003, after the dot-com collapse had bankrupted the technology-based private college I was working for, I started going through all the business cards I had collected a few years previous, partly out of curiosity but mostly in the vain efforts to catch a few leads. The CEO’s company, like all the others, was redirected to a squatter’s perch with the pitch “This domain name is available and can be yours!”
Meanwhile, I’m still in pursuit of permanent employment with a good future, while all my specialist friends have been gainfully employed for years with decent, stable incomes. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a generalist, I’ve decided.
January 14th, 2006
You knew people like me in high school. We sat at the sides of the classroom, snug against the wall, rarely daring to be heard. Our marks were above-average, our fashion sense decidedly dated or dictated by what we received as birthday presents. We tended to be poor as jocks, soft of voice, timid in manners. We liked showing up on the last day before Christmas or Easter vacation, because we got to chat one-on-one with the teacher and other folks like us (of course, if you weren’t like us, you probably didn’t know this, but pipped off and headed to the mall or went driving around town). We saw all our crushes fall for the popular kids, and we cursed our looks and inability to fit in, and then we felt sorry for ourselves. And strangely enough, for all our supposed brains, we trembled, sweated and stuttered as we were forced to read speeches in front of the class. We were the watchers of the world, ill-fitting and uninvolved.
A recent post by Henry Sharam over at DIYPlanner concerning introversion and extroversion has me thinking about how things might have been.
If you’re an introvert with a bit of life experience under your belt, you know that thought that hits you when you drive pass a high school: “If I could deal with people then like I deal with people now, how much better could it have it been?” You’d be able to deal with the loud people. You wouldn’t be afraid to share your mind. You wouldn’t have frozen in your tracks when face-to-face with the secret object of your affections. You would have seized the brass rings.
That life experience generally comes bundled with confidence as you grow older, as you achieve a string of successes that reinforce your identity, self-discipline, and knowledge that you have something important to say. Yes, that’s all very nice, but still you wonder, what if you could have escaped the little mental and social traps of being one of the quiet ones — when you were young enough to really enjoy it?
January 6th, 2006
My wife Jennifer Pohl, a well-known artist, has launched her own blog, entitled the space above the couch (very tongue in cheek, no doubt). She’ll be exploring artistic, creative and inspirational matters, and will be posting another of her paintings each week. An online gallery of her work is also on its way. There are many truly beautiful pieces in her body of work, and I hope that others might find them as inspiring as I do.
I love you, darling, and wish you the best of luck with it.
June 29th, 2005
One of the reasons for my productivity kick of recent months is the need to balance an extremely hectic lifestyle. My day job is ending at the end of the month, necessitating a lot of long hours, traveling, and delivering back-to-back training sessions. (And, it seems, I will be unemployed come March 1st, with a family to feed: a genuine cause of concern.) My other job is developing a new online high school English course for the Department of Education, which I slot into almost every spare minute in the attempt to finish the contract for next month. Plus, I have a seven-month-old baby that I should really be spending more time with. Add all that up, and you can probably see why I am often overwhelmed by my schedule. Keeping track of it all, and attempting to make the most of every minute, is an ongoing and highly stressful battle.
Yesterday, I had about an hour between training sessions, and I was “around the bay” near Glovertown, on the cusp of Terra Nova National Park. There isn’t much to do in Glovertown, especially in the winter, so I was at a loss at what I might do to fill an hour. I drove into one of the many nearby bays and parked the Jeep to get out and take in a breath of fresh air. The wind had died down to a gentle breeze, and the mild weather was allowing fog to creep in from the Atlantic, smothering the nearby hills and covering the ice flows that reached into every harbour and inlet. From the side of the road, I could see the ice beginning to retreat, leaving large areas of dark, deep, open water.
An odd thing happened. As I stared at the scene, belly-breathing in the misty salt air, getting lost in the blackness of the harbour, I became aware of the tension –knotted tightly into the muscles of my back and forehead– gradually slipping away. My perennial headache released its grasp upon my brain, and an odd feeling of peace swept through me. The ice, shrinking and melting away into the depths of the sea, took on another meaning, one that I cannot fully describe.
I took the above photograph, and will put it into my planner as a reminder that life is not all schedules, deadlines, action lists and endless responsibilities. I think we all need such a reminder, although its nature will no doubt be different for each and every one of us.
February 18th, 2005
I took these pictures today near Twillingate, Newfoundland, en route to a training session. The only thing more beautiful than the place is the people.
December 1st, 2004
I was taught an important lesson over ten years ago. While teaching in France, I gave English lessons to a Master Chef (whose humility did not permit him to speak of his hundreds of awards and distinctions) in return for getting cooking lessons. Aside from raking me over the coals many times for not having adequately memorised hundreds of herbs by smell and taste, or knowing exactly which of the hundred hanging pots would be most suitable for a certain sauce, he once became very upset with me when I suggested he give up his day job —which had nothing to do with cooking— and go to Paris to work full-time as a chef. I knew his job in the public service was mundane and quite boring, but I also knew he had received offers from some very high-class and trendy restaurants in the capital, so this didn’t seem like much of a stretch. Why was he upset? Partly because he didn’t want to sully his art, but mainly because —by turning a passion to commercial use— his love of cooking would become only a job. The flame that burned within him would be extinguished, and he could not live with himself.
I’ve always been the type to have a hundred hobbies. They’ve been ways of testing the waters of a new subject area, of dipping one toe into the stream and seeing how inviting it is. From there you can decide whether to jump in —wherein it becomes more than a hobby: it’s a career— or you can dangle the feet off the end of the pier, slosh around a little, have a stress-free day, and move on. My myriad hobbies have ranged from mineralogy to gourmet cooking, from medieval longbow archery to Victorian speculative technologies, from woodworking to herbalism. All of these things, I’ve simpled dabbled in, and attained the rank of advanced amateur, taking them no further, even though my interest in them bordered on the obsessive for periods of time. Somehow, there was always something even more exciting just around the corner, and the endless twists and turns of the journey kept me venturing forward, burning with the desire to try new things.
Not long after graduating university, the real world intervened. Having taught for a one-year contract in Newfoundland, I was a victim of a job market whose glut of teachers and dwindling student population had barred most young teachers without tenure or very specialised subjects (such as Special Education) from finding work. One of my chief hobbies during high school and university was programming and multimedia work, and this skill-set provided me the only opportunities I could find. Soon, I found plenty of work developing and managing kiosk, CD-ROM and website projects. The hobby had become a job, and the endless hours of keeping up with technology had drained any degree of enthusiasm I once had for it. The flame was extinguished.
But one of the other hobbies I had in high school was photography. It was a perfect amalgram of creativity and technical know-how. My piece-meal camera kit, along with my homegrown darkroom, allowed me endless hours of pleasure in taking and developing photographs. In university, my empty pockets meant giving up the somewhat-costly hobby, and it broke my heart. Eventually the camera broke, the darkroom was disassembled, and the world moved on.
Right now, I have almost no spare time, except for the 15 minutes or so in the morning while I eat breakfast and write in this blog. Not too long ago, my endless concentration on matters for my two jobs caused me to fear for my sanity… I was even unable to sleep, thinking unceasingly about my work and upcoming projects. I had no mental playground where I could tinker with non-work-related ideas, or subjects that I could read about to relax me before shuffling off to bed.
Then, by a fortuitous turn of events, I gained a new camera —a Canon Digital Rebel— which was by far the best camera I’ve ever owned, and a very capable manual one, at that. Suddenly, I have a hobby again, a mental break that allows me to focus on an activity that has absolutely nothing to do with my work.
I’ve finally rediscovered what my life was missing: the immersion of oneself into something non-imperative. No one will get upset with me if I take a lacklustre photograph. No one will hold each picture as a symbol of my livelihood. No one will pass me quotas, or force me to spend endless hours keeping up with all the latest advances. For once, I don’t even have to use a computer, if I don’t want to. The chains are slackened, the cage is opened.
What an amazing feeling, this newfound freedom….
November 17th, 2004
It just struck me that I’ve been on the Net for 20 years this month. I remember distinctly: I was fifteen years old, and a month or so into grade nine. A friend of mine that had been at some high-brow mathematics camp during the summer (I had been reading Orwell’s 1984 during the same period, I recall) and came back with a Datapac account, which was one of the only ways that an individual –at least in our neck of the woods– could access what was becoming the Internet. I had been playing around with tiny local BBSes and QuantumLink (an early large and very expensive BBS service from the States), which at least gave me menus to explore things, get little files, and drop messages into forums. My friend had almost no interest in his account, so he gave me the login and password. I fired up my Commodore 64, jumped into my Kermit terminal, and did the manual dial-up. Mere minutes later, I was face-to-face with a black screen and a blinking white cursor. I started typing commands randomly: “dir”, “help”, “list” and other logical requests gave no information, only errors. Since there were no books at our tiny mall bookstore covering this strange experience, and there were no easily-accessible online sources of information, I could only keep guessing at commands. Eventually, I started figuring things out. Like pieces of a puzzle that suddenly materialise and form part of the broader picture, each new tidbit was not only exciting but hinted at greater things to come. Sad to say, the ensuing year or two of alternating frustration, experimentation and exhilaration was one of the last times I truly had fun on the Internet. Until now.
I’ve wracked my brain many times trying to figure out the reasons why I loved my early experiences so much, compared to recent years. Perhaps it was because I was exploring a hitherto-unknown world and living by my wits. Maybe it was because everything was new and fresh and unspoiled by modern commercialism. Or, given my awkward pre-trendy-geek existance, perhaps I was holding out hope for meeting others of my preternatural kind.
But I’m pretty sure the reason is this: at that age, technology was only a hobby. As the years went on, fewer people wanted to avail themselves of my other skills, demonstrating only curiosity and fascination with my technical abilities. After finishing university and teaching English for a year-long contract, the province’s teachers’ glut forced me into taking a job with a fledgeling multimedia company, where I was responsible for producing CD-ROMs and websites. It was interesting at first, but when a hobby becomes a job, one often loses any sense of enjoyment in it. It was no different for me.
Flash-forward till last year. I’d spent ten years ping-ponging among various marketing, communications, technical and academic organisations, almost always doing consulting, producing multimedia, programming or handling technical training. The fragments of the dot-com bomb were still lodged in my skin, and most people I knew from the industry had disappeared from the face of the earth. The days of jet-setting around the continent to offer advice were long gone, figments of idealistic imaginations, and now I sat in a small town in central Newfoundland betwildered at the strange twists and turns of Silicon Valley greed and pseudo-inspired nonsense. Each day, I woke up hating myself more for putting endless hours of study and practice into skills that became obsolete six months later. For all the 100-hour work-weeks, there was nothing to show except some out-of-date machines, some vague memories of enthusiastic ventures long faded into the ether, and a burned-out and unhealthy shell of a body….
But now… now is different. The web is fun again.
Part of the reason, I ascribe to not needing to produce commercial websites any more. There’s something disheartening about expending all your creative energies to be greeted with lacklustre response from businessmen and the ultimate question, “How will this contribute to the bottom line?” I have also given up almost all programming, as most of the applications I would need to produce are already available in some form, especially in the Open Source world. While I used to enjoy the challenges inherent in crunching code, the left side of my brain would frequently seize control over the right side, and any creativity would be overruled by my steel-cold analytical machine. Imagination atrophied, and the number of times I would be struck by heart-pounding satori moments became few and far between. My recent decision to walk away from all commericalism and technical doldrum, and instead concentrate on my future in academics, was one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made.
But there’s something else, something that I’ve watched for years only as an outsider: the social and personal aspects of the web. I’m not talking about the occasional idle chatter on IRC or IM, or the god-awful “social networking sites.” I’m talking about personal presence and how it ultimately connects you to others.
I started this blog as an experiment only a month or two ago. At the time, I was convinced that I would let it slide (as I’ve seen so many others do), and that it would be successful if I only had a couple of friends tune in every few days. I installed WordPress, constructed the template rather quickly, and got in the habit of writing a few entry drafts per day while I ate or waited for something. With only an odd post here and there, my blog address mentioned in a few places, I figured a few people might wind up idly clicking on my page and finding an item or two of interest. Then something happened that I didn’t expect. When I viewed my stats for the first time a week or two ago, I found I was up to nearly 1400 unique visitors per day. I get plenty of email either wanting to chat, or giving me advice, or asking for mine. I’ve even been contacted by several of my ‘Net heroes, whom I thought would never give me the time of day. I don’t say all this as an ego boost: indeed, it’s more an illustration of how setting up an inviting “homestead” on the Net can suddenly bring neighbours a-callin’.
Meanwhile, I’m having more and more fun with web technologies that are getting increasingly creative while having less of a need for “technical intervention” (which is essentially what geeks like me used to have to contend with, in order to get anything of substance done). Wikis, blogs (writing, commenting, trackbacks), Flickr, del.icio.us, online courses, Gallery, groupware, Moodle, Gmail… for the first time I can truly enjoy the web without being a techie and having to roll up my sleeves. While I know, deep down, that I’ll always be technologically-inclined, this part of my nature is beginning to manifest itself in the best ways to use and manipulate technology, not create it, or sweat out its issues and inconsistencies to make a buck. I’ve decided to leave that to others who genuinely care about it, and I couldn’t be happier. Snapping a picture of my newborn son, and sending it the web for relatives to view, is far more intrinsically rewarding to me than slogging through any amount of code that silently powers the system behind the scenes.
I’ve found joy again. And ironically, it’s because of the very technologies that brought me to the brink of self-destruction….
October 18th, 2004
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