Living

My first 8 months at this job have been a roller coaster of seemingly intractable technical problems, breakthroughs, and finally being appreciated for what I am truly capable of. It’s been enjoyable and infuriating, and I’ve come to a number of conclusions. I’ve likened it to Ender’s Game, where ender is constantly tested and pushed past the breaking points, but continues to succeed because he is incapable of failure. Sometimes my perfectionist side does get the best of me, and in turn completely destroys any semblance of balance in my life… But I’m constantly learning new things that (surprisingly) I’m pretty good at, and getting to know myself and what I want better than ever before.

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News has been rattling around the web about the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer being “linked to a prostitution ring.” And that’s putting it lightly - the executive summary version of his offense reads like the note your principal sent home with you when you got caught smoking in the boys bathroom.

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I’d like to ask you all to take a few moments of your day and take time to watch this. It’s worth it.

Good, now that you’ve watched Chris Anderson’s talk on the long tail of technology, reflect with me a moment.

The DVD player killed the VCR. MP3 is slowly killing (and it’s almost dead) traditional music distribution. We’re running out of oil and we’ve already succeeded in frying our own planet. These are, if you’ve not had your head buried in the sand, facts. If you don’t believe me, there’s plenty of scientific data out there you can research (but if you don’t believe me already, you probably never will.) Yes, I’m preaching to the choir.

Now stop for a moment to think about the patterns of change outlined in Chris’s talk. Cycles, up and down, waves. So let us venture for a moment that societies, their quality of living, their numbers, and pretty much everything else about them moves in cycles as well. We’ve got war in Iraq, Darfour, Columbia and Palestine as well as many other places around the globe. War. Not get up and go to work, come home, watch TV and go to bed, but War. And yes, it’s terrible and in many cases we should do something about it (what motivates that is an entirely different thing, “world cop”?) But stop a moment and think, back to history and gradeschool. We’ve all been here, Civil war in the US. Napoleon and various other empires blazing a trail and killing millions in the name of some chosen ideal. Was it wrong? I’d flinch and say yes until you realize that our very way of living was built on these actions. So was it wrong? No… was it right? No.

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