I’ve tried evolving things over the years, and what I have found is that it’s not where I write that matters. It’s how I feel that matters.
Sometimes it means sitting at the big white dining table in the living room, as I am now, even ignoring the mess off to the right since I’m mid-reorganization.
Sometimes It do it outside on my balcony, with the raw cedar – freshly polished today.
The only place I don’t write is in the bedroom, really. Well, the bathrooms too.
I used to have romantic ideas of writing on the beach. That’s a bad idea. Sand, corrosive stuff all over – I will write in notebooks, but then the sun is never quite right, the wind never quite right, the sand all over… and on every beach I’ve been to in every country, invariably there’s some idiot with a big speaker system in their car who really wants to play me the song of his people.
The things I need for writing are an idea that has congealed. Once I have that, writing is a simple task.
Today I did not have one, so I finally used one of the writing prompts.
DeepAI’s generation from the prompt, “The Median Human”, using the 3D character API, created on the 1st of October 2023.
I’ve been keeping an eye on artificial intelligence related stuff and most of it isn’t as important to write about as people who write about seem to think, so I haven’t really written much about it lately.
Yet the concept of the ‘median human’ is. I asked DeepAI to generate an image of ‘The Median Human’. It’s not what I pictured, and I doubt it’s what you pictured.
Well, it’s a silly phrase. It’s so silly, in fact, that DeepAI gave this response:
That’s exactly the problem with the phrase. I wrote, “Deviants” with that in mind, because grouping a standard deviation would make more sense. We live in a society where normal and medians do not necessarily exist except as concepts. ‘Normal’, though, has a range and is a bit more workable but it’s too difficult to conceptualize.
So let’s take a step back. Take a breath. The people who are being criticized for using the phrase ‘median human’ are the people who have access to loads of data about everyone who is connected to a device. To them, to even be considered ‘a median human’ would require internet connectivity and probably the collection of data from social media, gaming and shopping websites, as well as what sort of articles one reads on the Internet. Probably even the pornography viewed, to give you a disturbing idea of how much information exists within our digital shadows1.
With all that data, it is that data alone that might be what people spouting about median humans might be basing the median on, and that’s a lot of data but the data is incomplete. Humanity exists beyond the Internet, despite what some might say, and humanity isn’t necessarily what we are but what we aspire to.
Can the average human trek around Mars? Nope. But an artificial intelligence could, trained properly. Can an artificial intelligence create a human life through sexual intercourse with another artificial intelligence? Well, there’s an interesting variation of the Turing test.
What the use of the phrase really does is simplify thinking about humans, and myself and others would argue that it over-simplifies humans. It treats humans as commodities, things that fit neatly in boxes so that tech people can try to talk about humans… when really, they probably shouldn’t.
The real issue is discussing ‘replacing humans’. I’m all for an artificial intelligence doing stuff that I don’t want to do, but since people are tied to economies through jobs, giving artificial intelligences jobs through reducing human jobs leaves us with the same problem we started with:
People making a living in a world where our civilizations have been substituted for the natural environment we evolved within, where we’re still fighting like chimpanzees over the trees with the most fruit but the fruit to us is money.
Maybe we should spend less time worrying about ‘median humans’ and more time thinking about being human and what that means now, how it has changed, and what the future of that will be. Instead, everyone’s busy selling snake oil.
1 Recommended read: “The Digital Person“, by Daniel Solove, a good starter for non-tech and tech people alike.
Sometimes it’s worth wondering about whether something is worth the hassle. An example this week was over a parking incident. I am, at present, stuck parking between 2 larger vehicles who are hemmed in by posts on either side.
For a while, one of the owners of the spot wasn’t using theirs, so I gave the other guy much more space so that he and his wife could get in and out of the vehicle. The owner of the other spot had a stroke and wasn’t able to drive, and recently someone started using his spot – I believe his son – and with their large vehicle, with poorly painted lines, it can be a challenge to park. I completely get that.
As it happens, the newer person parked closer to my spot, and so to make space for him to get in and out of his vehicle, I ate the line a bit on the other side. We’ve all dealt with this at some point, parking isn’t something that is necessarily as exact as we would like it to be and sometimes things happen.
I didn’t think much of it.
I got a message the next day from the other guy’s wife about her having to get out of the vehicle before her husband parked, which for one incident seemed… petty. So I explained to her on WhatsApp why these things happen, which I should not have to do for anyone who has been alive for more than 2 decades these days. Her husband has been alive 6, her, maybe 4 or 5. This should not have been a thing given I’ve been parking next to them without incident for about 4 years.
Knowing the sort of people they were I stopped by the property manager’s office and started off with, “You know, in case this guy comes and talks to you…”
My instincts were right. He had been there already. No surprise, I explained it to the property manager and I explained that I will always make sure that other drivers will be able to get in and out of their vehicle – but passengers, with the size of the vehicles we’re dealing with as well as the size of the spots, may not be able to.
I got a new message from the wife, saying that they were working out ways for me to get in and out of my vehicle – which was never an issue. If I have a problem, I work it out. I haven’t run into the person using the other spot yet, but I do believe he’s trying to get used to parking in that spot and he and I have only had once issue which the married couple just won’t let go. Because she had to get out of the car before her husband parked.
Once.
At this point, I had spent an hour on the issue with messages. It seemed ridiculous to me, but the world seems ridiculous to me so when I saw my psychologist I brought it up. So we used 10 minutes of her time, and mine, talking about it, and she assured me I wasn’t being crazy about it. Now we’re looking at my time, which is now at 1 hour and 10 minutes, and her time, 10 minutes, the property manager and the administrator who I spent 5 minutes with and who the husband probably spent 10-15 minutes with… and we’re looking at an hour and 40 minutes of ‘people time’.
Over one incident. Over a mild inconvenience.
And at the end of it – I hope this is the end of it – the husband sends a message that he’ll try to park closer to the post in the future, ‘alcohol permitting’.
I wonder sometimes whether people really consider how much time they waste on stupid stuff… and how much time they make others waste on stupid stuff.
10 years ago, I would have just told them what I thought about the whole thing from the start and let it go, leaving them to sort things out on their own.
I think it’s time to go back to doing that.
This is how productive time is lost. And productive time, either for business or for personal reasons, should trump stupid every time – and we need to make it so that it is.
In today’s news, a fruit company continues marketing stuff to people who don’t need what they’re selling for the price it is being sold for – but who buy it because of the brand.
Wait, that isn’t a fruit company. Doesn’t matter. It’s a slow news day.
So I’ll build up some of what I wrote in Traffic here, since it connects two things that are often disconnected and siloed in these chaotic times. Yet there’s some technical stuff that most people don’t know about that may make you think of things a little differently.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
You might be surprised just how much companies depend on trains, planes and automobiles to move data around. XKCD was asked about when the bandwidth of the Internet will surpass that of FedEx. The answer will likely boggle your minds: 2040.
Moving data storage devices is still the best way to move data quickly. It’s not cheap, but it doesn’t matter that much – we’re paying for it, after all, not them.
‘Sneakernet’ existed long before the Internet for much the same reason. The joke originates from around 1975-1976.
“…one day a plumbing contractor’s backhoe dug up and broke the underground cable that carried ALL of the JPL-to-Goldstone data and voice lines through Fort Irwin, and it would take at least a day, maybe longer, to repair. So someone was designated to drive two boxes of 12 reels each of magnetic tape down to JPL, and quickly. The first available vehicle was a white NASA station wagon. Hence the punch line: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”.
Rounding off the numbers, twenty-four reels of tape at 170 megabytes each is 4080 megabytes. Three and a half hours is 210 minutes. 4080 megabytes divided by 210 works out to about 19.4 megabytes per minute, or 32.3 kilobytes per second (258.4kilobits per second) – over 100 times faster than a 2400 bps data circuit of the time. Note that the incident above involved only 24 reels – which didn’t come anywhere near filling the station wagon, in fact the two boxes of tapes didn’t even fill the front passenger seat. (as an aside, a station wagon is known as an estate car or estate in other parts of the world). Incidentally, that conversation was the first time your contributor ever heard the term backhoe fade used to describe accidental massive damage to an underground cable (compare it to the term rain fade used to describe a fade-out of a point-to-point microwave radio path due to the absorptive effect of water in the air)…”
It’s a very tangible way of viewing how data is transferred too, and perhaps reinforcing the anxiety of seeing a backhoe in your area. Much of what is done on the internet these days is streaming, and I think maybe the present generations coming up may not immediately understand life without streaming. When we kept things on our hard drives and floppy disks, back when they were hard and floppy respectively.
So with that settled in everyone’s mind, let’s talk a bit about what’s being marketed as artificial intelligence, which is not really that much artificial intelligence as it is a bunch of clever algorithms using probability to determine what in it’s thesaurus/image library you would like to see when queried. Where do they get that thesaurus/image library?
The video outlines some of what has been happening that isn’t good.
Algorithms, though, are important and can be used for good. We don’t see that as much as we should, largely because the wide swath of algorithms seem to be at the least questionable in whether they are good or not. That questionability comes from what we all want to see from the world and what cost we wish to pay for it – or, in the case of Internet trolls, the cost which we wish to have others pay for the world they want to see. I have more to write about trolls, but not yet.
What do we want? Before we figure out who we are, we seem to be told who we need to be. We mimic behaviors as children, and we grow within the framework supplied by our environments – rewards and punishments are set. We begin playing the game. In an environment, or, subjectively, an anti-environment.
In any game, there are things that are possible and things that are less possible. One of the more common real world games, a lottery will sell us on the fact that there is a possibility to win despite there being a extremely low probability. The lottery has the distinction of being forced to be honest about the odds, but I have yet to see that honesty in the advertising for a lottery. What do you spend, what do you get? Most people see spending a few dollars every week over the course of their lifetime a worthwhile risk – otherwise there would be no lottery.
The game environment is simply defined. Enter the world of multiplayer games, which connect people through the internet and allow them to interact within certain guidelines. People, of course, find the loopholes and some enjoy the anonymous trolling aspect since they are faceless names and avatars. Others try to play the game by plodding through, others pay to get ahead, all depending on the game and how it is set up. If that doesn’t sound like a metaphor for modern social media, I don’t know what is.
All around the world, people are playing the social media game. How one ‘wins’ is dependent on how one views success, just like everyone else, but since social media is attached to real life more closely than other games there is the financial aspect that is quite real for the majority of the planet. How one loses, implicitly, is by not winning.
If money is how we measure success, there are billions of people losing. We could change how we could measure success, or we could change the odds. Right now, the odds seem to be going the wrong way. There has to be some middle ground between tossing out participation trophies and a few winners taking all.
…Unfortunately, all too many of us are having “squirrel” days, according to Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media impacts our lives. In her new book, “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” Mark explained how decades of research has tracked the decline of the ability to focus.
“In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2½ minutes,” Mark said. “Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.”…
I’m not that surprised. There was this idea somewhere in the past that being constantly connected to other people was a great idea, but that idea also came with constant interruption.
As a Gen X sort of person, I’ve observed it anecdotally and have rebelled against it in workplaces, where younger generations in technology chose various chat technologies instead of email. We’d finally gotten the deluge of emails under control when that happened, where sending and receiving emails caused a drag on personal productivity. We controlled it with checking our emails only a few times a day.
Then some idiots decided that immediate conversations all the time with chat was a good thing. Some people seemed to thrive on it, some people didn’t, but one thing I noted as one of the rebels was that my work always got done while the people constantly chatting with each other never met deadlines. It’s anecdotal, but… now it’s been shown that our attention spans are indeed shortening, and if you have to take 25 minutes or more to refocus on what you’re doing after each interruption, your productivity is unlikely to be as good as it could be.
In our personal lives, social media has also gone from blog posts which have pandered to the shorter attention spans to people watching short videos on Facebook or TikTok or… whatever social media. Some think it’s great, many were born into it and don’t know the joy of not being interrupted. My grounding in the pre-Internet era, when we time-shared computers like real-estate, gave me that.
Maybe that’s why I stare at all the red dots running around and wonder why people of even my generation don’t pause and start focusing more on what’s important. The trouble is, we all think different things are important. That’s why when I wrote a brief note to Gen Z and Millenials I pointed out that we, indeed, didn’t start the fire. Yes, we failed to put things out, and yes, we did have a hand in screwing things up. There are lessons on why we screwed these things up.
But that would take more than 47 seconds to explain.
When I first started programming, I did a lot of walking. A few months ago I checked the distance I walked every day just back and forth to school and it was about 3.5 km, not counting being sent to the store, or running errands. At the same time, we had this IBM System 36 and a PC Network at school where space was limited, time was limited, and you didn’t have much time to be productive on the computer so you better have it locked down.
At that point, the language was BASIC. The popularity of object oriented programming had not blessed (and cursed) us yet, so we had line numbers on each line, handy for debugging because the most basic errors would tell you where you had a typo. There was an hour every few days to type assignments in so that you could get a grade, or maybe even do something of worth and understand what you were doing.
During that period, can you guess where I did most of my programming? When I was walking around seemingly aimlessly in parking lots, or staring at trees, or anything but staring at a computer monitor. Computers were not plentiful, the time on them was limited, you didn’t have time to screw around on a keyboard.
I have survived decades of programming since then. I still fiddle now and then, but after being beaten to market by Google on getting stuff out (“Set your sights high!”, they tell you…) I’m a bit tired of chasing those particular red dots. My absence from my desk was almost never found tolerable by at least someone who thought what they thought mattered more than results, but I got results. If you saw me typing frantically away at a keyboard, it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing. There was thought that went into crafting that code, there was planning and bullet proofing, to the point where as I became more senior I spent less time at the keyboard than many people in departments I worked in.
I mention all of this because software engineering has changed over the years. In my days, when we were learning we were not given answers from websites like Stack Overflow, we didn’t even have websites. If we were lucky we had the manual for the language, we had plausible typing skills and we had limited time on the machines.
This isn’t ‘walk uphill both ways’, this is, “We did this without all these cool toys you have now”. It’s not an issue of we had it harder, it’s a matter of we did it differently. We didn’t have editors that were forgiving, much less helpful. Within such a short window technology for programming has come a very long way, and it’s kind of cool – except all the silly Python editors and tools apparently written by the children of people who thought that “The Lord of the Rings” book trilogy was evil.
From the 1980s to now, it’s been a real whirlwind with way too much hype on way too many things that nobody recalls immediately. Then the captcha came along, to make sure ‘bots’ weren’t trying to do things, to check if a real human being was involved.
So humanity doubled down on that with large language models like ChatGPT. I guess kids stopped walking to school, they got more computers, and now they don’t even have to do their own homework.
I’m not sure where this is heading, but I’ll be making popcorn.
I’ve been looking for angles on how to write about this latest lockdown in Trinidad and Tobago. I considered writing something for TechNewsTT.com about the technology aspects, but the article always fell short in my mind and seemed to dance just a bit beyond a technology aspect. Then, too, writing anything critical in Trinidad and Tobago is like threading needles – plural – while riding a rollercoaster because of politics, because of what I perceive as a culture that demands progress but does it’s best to work against it with cultural inertia… And so there has been a bit of paralysis in my mind as this all plods along.
And plod along it does. Social media has been drowning in disaster porn. The government of Trinidad and Tobago adds it’s deluge onto that with daily statistics that are confusing to those that don’t understand how they are created, and frustrating those that do. Imagine that the testing laboratory is closed on weekends, and always lags on Mondays, and how that skews statistics – but then, too, imagine so many being tested that to require staff to work weekends would be a bridge too far. It is fair to say that the Ministry of Health has been overwhelmed and performed well given the circumstances, but it is also fair to say that the fact that the Ministry of Health has been overwhelmed speaks to decades of stagnation in many regards. Health records immediately come to mind in a country that has de facto free medical care, to a point, and at some points pointless.
So then we get into threading one of the needles where we don’t criticize the people in the system but the system themselves, much like National Security in how it has had to deal with the State of Emergency which has not been invasive, to the chagrin of some who think that everyone who breaks the rules should be tossed in a cell somewhere – as if tossing them in cells doesn’t create new problems in a pandemic. Where do you house them? How do you feed them and handle basic necessities for them? It’s not so easy.
Meanwhile, the hunt for vaccines became a political stew and an international one at that, while all the time the local politicians hold press conferences on each other rather than the actual issues because, really, what do you do when decades of lack of progress in so many regards comes to a head in such a situation? While the pandemic is a new experience and has wreaked it’s own sort of havoc across the world, that havoc was largely made possible by failures in systems that were perceived as robust to the voting publics. In this regard, Trinidad and Tobago is not that different, but anyone familiar with modern history of Trinidad and Tobago will look back to the 1960s and 1970s and think of all the money just wasted and stolen rather than invested, with every government since working with less and less while the challenges become greater and greater.
So how does one even begin to write about this properly? Facts and figures aren’t enough because there is context, and there are so many contexts. Economic, education, medical, national security… How does one write about all of this without blessing or condemning anyone in government? While it’s popular to apply faces to blame, it’s almost never right – the odds of complete incompetence of any individual in any bureaucracy is limited by the bureaucracy, but it is also magnified by the bureaucracy.
I have spent months observing and reflecting on it and I have yet to find the right threads to begin tugging on when it comes to this tattered rug that has not been dealt with since the time of my grandparents, when it should have been, when it could have been.
But I have this parting note. Recently, I noted to some former classmates that when we graduated Secondary School, regardless of where our paths would take us, we lead with this thought that we could somehow make a difference… and some of us have, probably more than think they have, but when I look at the world and consider someone now that age looking at this tattered rug… somehow, it just doesn’t seem to measure up.
After the vacation, I’ve been thinking over a few things that apply here and, if you’re patient, you’ll get to my point. This is normally fodder for my other blog, but I think it fits here on this site to this readership.
I’ve been a workaholic as far back as I remember. The reasons for this I understand, the effects understandable.
There are people floating around who know aspects of me – the Software Engineer who finds pragmatic solutions where others don’t, the writer whose work is liked by a small audience who reads it in secret and doesn’t share much, the person with a camera who gets labeled a photographer to get discounts – no, I will not do your wedding – the peculiar brother, the hard to understand cousin, the loyal friend, the uncompromising person who has learned to pick his battles, the sound of reason in the conversation and at the same time the frustrating person who isn’t convinced by passion.
In writing about a character writing itself, as well as experiences over the days since my return to Tobago, I began to think of how we write ourselves. And, over the course of the last few days while encountering people who saw some of my printed photographs, I heard people talking about, ‘my art’, and even say the word, ‘artist’.
‘Art’ and ‘artist’ do not resonate with me. They conjure images of self-congratulating groups of people swilling cheap wine and cheese, of the cliche poet dressed all in black screaming into a microphone with the angst a good parent would have slapped them for – or is it more politically correct to put them in a timeout? Either way, you get the point. I don’t people who call themselves artists in that much regard – I don’t dislike them, I just don’t identify with them and their clique.
I play with things. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. It scares some people if you say that, so you learn not to say it, but I play with things. Objects, ideas, code, technology, words, light, whatever. I like to learn, and I like to be off the beaten path – spending a lot of my own time over the years doing just that, to the benefit of employers that never truly appreciated it.
I’m a recovering workaholic. The vacation, the writing, the playing – that shifted my perspective to it’s natural center, and what I found was the way I should have looked at the years of my almost completely unvacationed professional life:
What people call my work is just the collateral damage of me becoming better at things through experimentation. My life is my art, my work – what I leave behind is simply collateral damage of all of that. That stuff is not that important.
And my point here is that we have cultures and pressures from society that do not let us look at things that way, that make us believe that we are what we do. We’re not what we do, we’re what we become by doing.
With that as a focus decades ago, I can’t help wondering what I would be like now. I don’t expect that I would be much different, but knowing that would probably have made life a little more contented when things were not going the way I would have wanted.
You are not what you do, you’re not even what you’ve done. You are what you’re becoming, only partly because of what you do and have done.
This will be a long post, so come back with coffee, tea, something else, or not at all. It’s meant to be linked from the ‘About‘ page.
I’ve been going back and engaging some of Renard Moreau’s ongoing conversations – it’s a nice blog Renard has – and it’s healthy to pause for a bit and think about what, how and why I write what I write.
But I’m more than that now, as people who follow can see. There’s a story there that, as much as I hate writing about myself, is a good story and one worth telling as I begin to connect different writing I have been doing in different ways.
Early Writing.
I had some poetry published while I was in my teenage years – nothing particularly great, I think. Writing was something I did every day – we all do, some more than others – but I was focused on the way out of my own prison, which at the time was computing. So I wrote logical code for systems that did exactly what I wanted.
As training goes, that’s pretty horrible training for a writer.
It did, however, get me out of Trinidad and Tobago and out of a house I wanted no part of. It got me to Irving, Texas, where… well, let’s say I enjoyed parts of the childhood I did not have while growing up. While paying my bills. While going to college. And then, while not going to college.
Then, as a sailor, I wrote logs where creativity was not considered… appropriate. No one found it funny when I logged in a Soviet Submarine into a lake at NTC Orlando, and they did not let that pass. They did, however, allow me to log rats in and off the compound without complaint.
Then, there were the SOAP notes in hospitals as a Corpsman – good training on observation, but again, creative writing was frowned upon.
It wasn’t until I got back into software that creative expression was allowed – not so much in the code (oh, the comments I left!), but in that new thing that they had come out with. Email. Not everyone enjoyed my emails, but those that didn’t were usually on the receiving end of some acerbicly made point.
Around this time, I restarted creative writing, largely as an attempt to reconnect with my late mother. We read our poetry at various places in St. Petersburg, Florida – I may even make it up there in 2019 for a CAMs reunion party. And there a conflict began within me – to pay the bills or keep writing. Pragmatically, I continued doing things to pay the bills.
Poetry was fun for a while. Then short essays. And so on.
Later in the 90s, I was able to do some creative and technical writing for a site called Brainbuzz.com, which later became Cramsession.com, and now I think it’s in the ether with study guides still floating around. And in those very late 90s, I began on a new platform.
I began blogging back in 1999. Almost 2 decades ago.
The Blogging Years – Present.
Writing at first in the medium, I was focusing on a lot of self promotion – as many bloggers do. However, I had a heavy distaste for self-promotion – I believed then, and still do now, that content should stand on it’s own. That it doesn’t is an entirely different topic.
Later, I would tire of that. At the request of my father, I returned to Trinidad and Tobago – and it was a time ripe with opportunity. Trinidad and Tobago was to be an Internet hub for South America and the Caribbean. Internet businesses had proven themselves, and my memories of Trinidad and Tobago were optimistic. Too optimistic. The infrastructure wasn’t there, the cost and quality of bandwidth at the time was below reproach, and people I thought I could count on were instead people who wouldn’t spit on me if I was dying of thirst.
So I did what I always did, what I still do with a more mature outlook: I tried to solve the problem. Call it an exercise of futility if you will, I call it an exercise of youth – much the same thing. And so I learned about why all the problems I did not think I should have were there, and tried to bypass them – to no avail. This took years. It introduced me to very quality people inside of Trinidad and Tobago and outside – as well as some people who only recently I found out were the people ripping off my ideas and selling them as their own. Mea culpa. The difference is that they were selling the golden eggs; I am the duck.
I wasn’t making enough money to feed my reading habit. I read a lot of Gutenberg.org back then, and it broadened me some more. The humanities I had kept from myself came flowing in. The world as I saw it shifted into something broader, with more meaning than silicon.
Before I knew it, I was being invited to conferences on culture and ICT – which I honestly thought I had no business going to, but even when I said as much, they still paid for me to go. With their confidence in me, I dedicated myself to what we discussed, and ended up broadening myself further and further – enough so that even years later, I still get messages asking me what I think about things.
WorldChanging/Alert Retrieval Cache.
I was writing for WorldChanging.com for a while.
Then the South East tsunami hit, and I had an idea, the Alert Retrieval Cache (ARC) – one guy, Dan Lane, fleshed it out in amazing ways. That idea later became more of a problem than a solution because of humans and distrust and reasons why humans should distrust.
It also made me leave WorldChanging.com – don’t let anyone fool you, that was a very odd place to communicate with people. There were disputes with the third party involved who also wrote for WorldChanging.com – I simply wanted it to work, he wanted to capitalize his ego with it. The powers that be were Canadian about it, wanting peace instead of progress. I left. Screw that Utne.
One thing became clear: I wasn’t just a technologist anymore. I had been given the opportunity to see the world in more ways. It was very exciting, and I ended up traveling in Latin America and the Caribbean afterwards – not the tourist stops, but in the homes of people who lived there who showed me not what their tourism boards wanted me to see, but what people there wanted me to see. I had traveled a lot before, but every place I stayed gave me new insights into a world that so many of us take for granted.
Another thing had become clear: I had unrealistic expectations of people. They weren’t motivated by the same things as I was, and my world unraveled before my eyes. I put it back together again, every international disaster another stitch in that fabric as people asked me – pleaded with me – on setting up that ARC. There was anger. There was distrust in humans.
And I wrote. Mostly unpublished, in journals on a shelf not far from where I sit. My distrust in humans became more of an acceptance, and I became better at dealing with people and their quirks – their motivations. I grew. The alternative was simply not worthwhile.
The Land Period.
When my father died, I returned to Trinidad and Tobago to settle his estate. That took years. And then I tried to do things with some land I had inherited which required me to deal with people on it. This was another growth experience; even more writing on a shelf – and it was enough to get by, what I did, but it was not enough to get ahead.
I tried my hand at agriculture, which I wasn’t terribly bad at, but it just wasn’t enough.
The Return to the U.S.
I returned to the United States with the idea that I could make enough money to get back to that land and do something of worth with it. In the downturned economy, with the shifts in technology, I made ends meet. I saw very clean parallels between, as an example, Beloit, Wisconsin, and the Caribbean as far as not advancing and why.
I learned a lot more about the world, but in the end I broke even. I was getting to that age where people weren’t sure whether they wanted to hire me, I was at that age where I wasn’t sure I wanted to be hired by them.
Long gone were the days of the code monkey for me, but everyone wanted a code monkey so that they could play their silicon organ. Attempts I made to get past that failed. Honestly, I could probably be doing code for some company in the U.S. right now if I really wanted to, but I don’t – I turned down one huge company twice, and a slightly smaller company twice. They’re names you know, but they’re not names that will make a difference here. They’re not important to me, and that’s the point I’m getting at.
There was more to technology. I’d already been reading everything all this time. It was all beginning to make sense, and I read then – as I do now – to get the language to communicate things. To make simple what seems so complex at first. To see things work.
I made my way through jobs – even getting to work at a company that did Emergency Communications, learned more about telephony than a sane person should, and left.
To return to Trinidad and Tobago, to finish some things with the land, and ultimately, to write full time.
And Back To Trinidad.
Agriculture again, and dealing with land issues – pushing hard, harder than others. Adjoining landowners were useless despite being related. So I changed the paradigm.
And now I’m back to writing – connecting things beyond just technology, looking at things and seeing what needs to be fixed. I write about it. And also, I’m writing other things, unpublished…
Fair warning: my writing typically takes more than 47 seconds to read.
When I first started programming, I did a lot of walking. A few months ago I checked the distance I walked every day just back and forth to school and it was about 3.5 km, not counting being sent to the store, or running errands. At the same time, we had this IBM System 36 and a PC Network at school where space was limited, time was limited, and you didn’t have much time to be productive on the computer so you better have it locked down.
