Tag: knowledge

Knowing and Seeking

Random Thoughts

I love knowing things. It is one of my favorite things. Knowing stuff is totally awesome, especially when people ask questions and you have the answers. Knowing is, as they say, half the battle. The other half is seeking, or curiosity.

Too many people stop after knowing.

A while ago, I spouted this on Facebook and Twitter:

I love telling other people how to do their job. I hate that I have to tell other people how to do their job.

And it is a truth I have long lived with. Because I love knowing things, quite often when I interact with someone on a professional level I know a lot of things about their job, and since I also love sharing my knowledge, when the knowledge I have can fill in a gap or point out a flaw, I feel awesome. I also don’t mind when people point out something I didn’t know or missed, because I know I would have done it to them given the chance.

When I don’t know a thing, I like to learn that thing – assuming there is some advantage to doing so. I mean, I don’t know how to ballet dance, but I’m also not in a hurry to learn to ballet dance as I don’t see an immediate benefit to it. This attitude tends to lead me to acting like a detective. If something is broken, I immediately start trying to devise a way to figure out how it is broken and how I might discover a solution.

When this is my job, when it is an item under my purview, this is what I do. And when I say that I hate that I have to tell other people how to do their job, what I really mean is I hate when I have to do the detective work for an item that isn’t in my purview.

Example. I have a customer. That customer uses my service in conjunction with the service provided by another company. The customer has a problem and it appears that both services are not working. I examine my side and determine that my service is working, and only appears to be failing because the other service is not working as expected. The person working at the other company says their service is working and my service is failing. I give the customer a list of simple tests to perform to illustrate the problem. These tests are not being done on my service but on the other service, and the results illustrate that the other service is broken, returning improper results that is leading to the failure of my service. These tests are very simple, take less than a minute to perform, and prove conclusively where the problem is and even point to the solution. So why didn’t the guy at the other company suggest it?

Because it’s easier to point the finger at someone else than it is to solve the problem.

Meanwhile, now that I’ve caused the problem to be fixed, the customer likes me, doesn’t like them, and is open to listening when I suggest that they should switch to another provider for that other service.

If you don’t take care of your customers, someone else will.

As Stupid As It Ever Was

Reviews

American Gladiators is back.

Part of me feels that the title and that first sentence alone are enough to really say all there is to say… and yet, I’m still writing. I’ve always been fond of game shows. Tests of knowledge and physical skill just fascinate me. Backstabbing retarded nonsense and people eating gross things doesn’t. That’s why I’ll watch shows like Jeopardy and American Gladiators, but won’t watch Survivor or Fear Factor.

The new Gladiators is just like the old Gladiators. Normal people compete in events against “trained professionals”. It is silly, and stupid… but also fun background noise that occasionally pulls my attention from what I’m doing to see people hanging from rings and climbing rock walls and poking at each other with big Q-tips.

It certainly won’t save the world… and I probably won’t even be watching it all that long… but hey, if nothing else is on and there is nothing else to do…

Books!

Reviews

Normally my Reviews articles are for movies or TV, but I decided today to hit a different frontier… Books.

I read alot of books, not as many as I would like, but alot none the less. And as you may notice from this site (and my subdomains), I also like to write. When I started playing City of Heroes, I got a jonesing for some spandex fiction. Sadly though, there only appears to be two kinds you can pick up at the local books store: Wild Cards by George R. R. Martin and books based on existing comic book characters.

Now, don’t get me wrong… the Martin edited shared world of Wild Cards is probably one of my favorite series of books, but I had read them before… twice… and was looking for something new. I wanted to avoid the books based on existing comic characters because a few of the ones I thumbed through relied too much on prior character knowledge, basically you needed to be a fan of the comic in order to enjoy the book. I asked around for books in a superhero setting that were neither Wild Cards nor existing comics… but all the recommendations I got we more Sci-Fi or Fantasy… lacking that element of the superhero, the comic book, that makes it unique. So finally, after coming to the conclusion that either none had been written or that none had been published, I caved in and bought some books from existing comic book heroes.

And I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

There is a series of books, four of them so far, for the Justice League of America. One book is about the JLA as a whole fighting the good fight, and the other three (of which I’ve only read one so far) take a single member off on his own, with the occasional backup of the JLA. The first book I read was the JLA book, The Exterminators. And when I got into it, I was very happy to see the author not rely on prior knowledge. He explained as he went the relative parts of each character’s background as it was touched on. His book read like a comic without pictures… well, in my head there were plenty of pictures. The book was very well done, all-in-all a two thumbs up review. The second I read was for the Flash, called Stop Motion. Like the other, this author too didn’t trust you to just know the character, but he also didn’t bog you down with 50 years of history in the lives of speedsters of the DC Universe. He told what he needed, that’s it. The story was tight, and exciting… but it did leave me wanting in the end. The finale was just a bit sub par… it was a mystery, and as sometimes happens, the resolution of the mystery, figuring out who done it and why, was much more satisfying than the final conflict between hero and villain. It was like pushing a boulder up hill, excited the whole way up to the top, not knowing what was on the other side, getting to the top, seeing the other side, heart pounding, pushing the rock over the edge… only to see it roll about ten feet and stop because the hill on that side levelled off. It was like a rollercoaster that took you up a huge climb only to have a pitiful drop off the other side. I enjoyed the book, but just was a little less than fulfilled with the resolution once the mystery was unfolded.

There are two more books in the series so far, Batman and Wonder Woman, with a fifth, the Green Lantern, coming soon. I look forward to them.

When I picked up the JLA books, I also decided to grab the two Hellboy books by Christopher Golden, the Lost Army and the Bones of Giants. The Lost Army was a good solid read, and felt like Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy) had done much of the writing himself. The sense of humor, the oddity of the situations, Christopher captured the essense of the Hellboy comics perfectly in his prose. And like the JLA books, he didn’t rely on the reader knowing Hellboy, not that Hellboy readers really know everything anyway. He would just hint at the past, and give you tastes of the world Hellboy belonged in that existed outside the scope of the story. Right now I’m about halfway through The Bones of Giants… and wow. It’s better than the first book. Christopher’s writing style and familiarity with the mythos now shines with a much deeper and provacative tale. I can’t wait to see how it end.

Anyway, that’s it for now… I’m glad I was wrong about at least some of these comic book novels. I hope more are on the way.

The Two Most Frustrating Things…

Random Thoughts

… while working your job…

The second most frustrating thing to run into is someone else doing a job that you think you can do better.

Seeing someone fumble and stumble when you believe you could do it faster, easier, and more effieciently is one of those heartbreaking, knuckle-whitening things that can drive you up the wall and over the edge.

The MOST frustrating thing to run into is someone else doing a job that you KNOW you can do better.

Seeing someone fumble and stumble when you are secure in the knowledge that you can do it faster, easier, and more efficiently, and more to the point HAVE done it in the past faster, easier and more efficiently, is one of those things that drive people to killing sprees.

I want to do my job well, but sitting here day after day, unable to do my job because someone less qualified than me can’t seem to get it together takes me from 0 to 60 on the frustration-o-meter in under 3 seconds of walking in the door.

And then.

Random Thoughts

The IT market sucks in Atlanta.

I can’t afford to leave, and at the same time I can’t afford to stay.

3 years ago, I was gold. I was better than gold. I was a fast learner with a little experience in everything. I was a general practitioner of the Science and Medicine of Technology. The offers on the table were fifty-thousand a year. Minimum.

Today’s IT market is looking for the person I’ve never been, and without money cannot afford to become: The Specialist. Check the job pages. They want people with 3 or more years working on a single, likely non-widespread software package. They want someone with 10 years working in a particular single function who have mastered all skills required.

The General Practitioner is dead.

So… I am left with this. What am I supposed to do?

I can’t get a good job because I can’t even get interviews due to my lack of specific knowledge. I can’t afford to take classes, or buy books to attempt to learn those things on my own. I can’t afford the certification tests, without which no amount of knowledge I teach myself is valid in the eyes of recruiters.

Its the Catch-22 of the IT industry: To get the job, you need training, and to afford the training, you need the job.

I’m overqualified for the job I have, and underqualified to get another.

And we won’t even get into the whole “But the experience on your resume isn’t current” crap.

I’m angry.

I’m pissed.

I’m mad as hell.

And there’s damn little I see that I can do about it.