So I’ve been thinking about Daniel Pink’s article, “Revenge of the Right Brain“, over the past couple of days, and it’s amazing how much my own feelings toward a future career mirror his piece.
One would have to consult my parents as to when I may have first exhibited artistic sensibilities, but as I grew up, I was very fond of writing, drawing, and music. I was always doodling, tracing, sketching. Making up stories, or just bits of stories. In seventh grade, I started playing the clarinet in band, was quickly moved to the bass clarinet by Mr. Dawson, our fantastic teacher-director, and continued all the way through high school. I did not attempt to gain a music scholarship to LSU; I had a partial academic scholarship, and the Air Force wanted to pay the rest of my way, so long as I was willing to be an electrical engineer.
By the end of my freshman year, my Air Force scholarship was gone. My grades tanked, and they yanked it. I was not a party animal, I did not go hog-wild upon becoming a college student. I simply goofed off.
Looking back, maybe there was a subconscious effort on my part to sabotage my academic and future professional careers. I was a right-brain person, suddenly thrust in to a left-brain world. No longer burdened with studies related to engineering, I remained in Air Force ROTC, and switched majors: criminal justice. When LSU’s Criminal Justice department was terminated as a separate division the following year, swallowed by the larger Sociology department, I was forced to change majors again. Not particularly interested in a sociology degree, I opted instead for political science, a decidedly more right-brained course of study. I minored in history. I excelled in English classes, testing out of Freshman English 101, or whatever it’s technically called.
The large part of my professional career since college, however, once again led me in to left-brain land. I have been involved with computer technology, troubleshooting, and support, for over a dozen years. When I was laid off in October of 2003, I was both devastated and optimistic. My son was only two months old, and I was looking forward to spending a lot of time with him, which has been great. Perhaps this was the opportunity to move in to a new field as well.
I have not kept completely out of the right-brain sphere these past twelve years, however. I began volunteering as a copy editor with ATPM in the summer of 1998, and began writing the occasional review or opinion piece shorly thereafter. Today, I’m the Managing Editor, and quite happy to work with the fine staff of our little publication, all of whom do what they do because we enjoy the Macintosh platform. I also believe a goodly number of the staffers are like myself, and enjoy having this right-brain outlet, compared with the left-brain professions they may be involved with.
This blog, like its predecessor, is nothing more than an outlet for those right-brain skills yearning for exercise.
Which brings us back to Pink’s article, in which he hypothesizes that the coming “age” will be devoted to more right-brain activities, as opposed to where we currently are now, and have been, where more left-brain occupations have reigned supreme. I’m all for it. I feel as though I have a couple of books in me, and I love the editing thing. Just ask some of my online friends and acquaintances how many times I’ve annoyed them over misspellings and other grammatical gaffes on their blogs. Likewise, they are quick to point out my own brain burps, in large part because they know I care about such things. (Though with Lawson, I suspect it’s just out of spite.)
There is a part of me which has enjoyed my past dozen years in the tech field, and I would heartily welcome another job in that arena. Yet another part of me yearns for something different, something more right-brained, and this is reflected in some of my Monster search agents. In the mean time, I’ll concentrate on editing, writing, digital photography, and most of all, being a dad.
Tag: rant
I can appreciate the little sticky security tape on the tops of CDs sold to consumers. I realize it is a preventive measure against the CDs being stolen from out of the cases in a store.
However, I am quite sure that over the past year or so, the tape has gotten increasingly more difficult to get off. It used to be, if you were careful, you could pull up the tape on one side of the CD, and slowly pull the entire thing off. Not any more.
Now, the tape splits at the slightest hint of intolerance to being pulled. It took a good five minutes to get all of the security tape off Amy Grant’s latest. Normally, this should be a 30- to 45-second process.
I realize someone out there will say something to the effect of, You wouldn’t have this problem if you just ordered the entire album from the iTunes Music Store. I like having the physical CD, with liner notes, thank you very much. The process of opening said CD did not used to be this annoying. Now it is. That is the complaint.
Lee points to another Silicon.com article which reveals Steve Ballmer is even more of a childish imbecile than was previously thought.
Mr. Ballmer:
Despite your reckless and libelous statements regarding Apple and the iPod, please note that your 12-year-old is likely hiding stolen music in all kinds of places, given that your 12-year-old is likely much smarter than you are, having grown up with the technology your company had to steal copy “innovate”. (He’s also probably hiding a lot of other stuff he has found on the Internet.)
A challenge then, to the CEO of Microsoft: without any warning whatsoever, conduct a full-scale examination of the hard drive of every Microsoft employee, including every PDA, every digital music player, every MP3-playing mobile phone. Cross-check the findings of digital music with each employee’s personal CD collection. Report the findings of how much stolen music is residing inside Microsoft itself. That is, if you’re not too busy dancing around on stage like a fool and flinging your feces at your competition, monkey-boy.
(Via MacMinute)
Six years after Steve Jobs and Apple declared the floppy disk dead, with the release of the iMac, Bill Gates states the same:
In some ways, I think this is the first time I can say that the floppy disk is dead. You know, we enjoyed the floppy disk, it was nice, it got smaller and smaller, but because of compatibility reasons, it sort of got stuck at the 1.44 megabyte level, and carrying them around, and having that big physical slot in machines, that became a real burden. Today, you get a low-cost USB flash drive, with 64 megabits on it very, very inexpensively. And so we can say the capacity there for something that’s smaller, better connectors, faster, just superior in every way has made that outmoded.
So I suppose now that the tech industry pundits will proclaim Mr. Gates as a tremendous visionary for getting rid of the tiresome floppy disk, when in fact, Mr. Gates’ company is one entity responsible for extending the floppy’s life.
(via RAILhead Design)
Pixar dumps Disney.
Pixar will be the better for it. Eisner is an idiot. I hope the Disney board roasts him on a spit.
(Thanks, Michael.)
In the most recent Macintosh Daily Journal, Matt Deatherage & Co. take Information Week to task over their recent PC Vendor poll and rankings. MDJ correctly points out what’s really behind the buying decisions of most corporate IT managers:
IT buyers list many important factors, but when Apple meets them, they ignore them because Apple is not the “standard.” The most important consideration for IT buyers is not cost, customer service, quality, reputation, or proven technology, even if the magazine’s survey said so. The most important factor is that the PCs be Intel-compatible so they can run Windows, but no one wants to say that because it makes them look inflexible. Windows is the elephant in the middle of the room, and rather than talk about it, InformationWeek made up reasons why Apple doesn’t meet criteria when it obviously does. It’s hard to see how that is information, even if it does come out weekly.
Have you seen the commercial being plastered across the airwaves by Dell featuring the interns and Dell’s product “designers”?
The thought that Michael Dull employs product designers in the first place is tremendously laughable. It becomes more humorous when you notice the products said “designers” are handling:
- a PDA–designed and produced by an OEM, with Dell’s logo planted on it
- a printer–Dell has never made printers, does not make printers, and won’t make printers, so there’s no need to employ a printer “designer”
- a flat-panel display–designed and produced by an OEM, with Dell’s logo planted on it
- Inspiron notebook computer–the only item featured that actually is designed by Dull’s product “designers,” and is about as inspiring as a Michael Jordan Hanes briefs commercial.
Truly pathetic. Unfortunately, I’m sure Joe Consumer has no concept of how Dull operates, and is buying this hook, line, and sinker.
You want truly innovative product design? Come on over.
I check my email this morning, and what do I find but some idiot has uploaded penis enlargement spam into the comments section of one of my posts (from October 2002, no less).
Comment deleted, IP banned. Don’t you morons have anything better to do?
So the brilliant executive minds at Verizon Information Services finally decided on a plan for its IT personnel, and made said plan known to all of us yesterday at an 8 AM meeting: layoffs, or in corporate jargon, a RIF (Reduction In Force).
On the one hand, I can respect this decision, as I believe it better for the company than the other major proposal that was looked at, which was outsourcing IT personnel under AMDOCS, our main contractor, and provider of much of the core server software the business runs on.
Only everyone pretty much hates AMDOCS; their code is sloppy, as the Toad can well attest, and they’re arrogant to boot, with a “we know better than you” attitude toward even the most techincally competent among the Verizon IT staff (most of whom are more technically competent than said AMDOCS personnel). The only reason this scenario didn’t play out was because Verizon couldn’t get AMDOCS to swallow a lot of salary and benefits issues that would have taken better care of Verizon employees who were outsourced.
So my team lost three people yesterday, and I was one of them. I’m still on the payroll until 24 October, and the severance package looks pretty good.
So potential employers, I’m a Mac geek with a decade of experience in computer support, with a little HTML knowledge I’d like to expand on. I need to stay in the Dallas area, and I’m open to contract, contract-to-hire, or, best of all, permanent positions.