04-22-2014, 02:03 PM
When I was a child I remember hanging around and getting in the carpenters way at the job site trying to help. I wanted to be able to climb those two-by-four walls and balance on the ridge board that look mighty far up there to a skinny little kid.
On an entirely different side of my fantasies I idolized Bill Gates and Peter Norton for knowing assembler like the back of their hand and being the nerdiest gods I'd ever adored.
I was looking for something that I could lay my hands on and master-- be the master of. All of my heroes were already larger-than-larger-than-life and even when I had not had time to do anything of consequence I longed to do so.
I was not destined to be a carpenter. Arguably, I am still a carpenter. At least I still know how to be a carpenter and from time-to-time I am a hobbyist carpenter (which is really no carpenter at all). There was something that scared me about building and being given a set of blueprints, and not in execution either. It was the very depth of the trade itself that frightened me.
I could never be the master of carpentry, not even in a personal way. So I went back to my first love in the field of mass nerdery (ie. computer programming) where everything resolves to the simplest equation and logic prevails.
As I climbed back into that world of flat planes and smooth surfaces I found that I could now see more texture than ever before. In black and white I can see how to make it work but in larger gray letters I can see many muddled opinions of how it should work. With only one possible way that it will work, the sane and logical begins to look like Charlie Manson when they take away his guitar.
There is no constant value to hold onto; no finite fields of study exist.
There are only Mandelbrot avenues of slightly dissimilar paths for us to travel.
On an entirely different side of my fantasies I idolized Bill Gates and Peter Norton for knowing assembler like the back of their hand and being the nerdiest gods I'd ever adored.
I was looking for something that I could lay my hands on and master-- be the master of. All of my heroes were already larger-than-larger-than-life and even when I had not had time to do anything of consequence I longed to do so.
I was not destined to be a carpenter. Arguably, I am still a carpenter. At least I still know how to be a carpenter and from time-to-time I am a hobbyist carpenter (which is really no carpenter at all). There was something that scared me about building and being given a set of blueprints, and not in execution either. It was the very depth of the trade itself that frightened me.
I could never be the master of carpentry, not even in a personal way. So I went back to my first love in the field of mass nerdery (ie. computer programming) where everything resolves to the simplest equation and logic prevails.
As I climbed back into that world of flat planes and smooth surfaces I found that I could now see more texture than ever before. In black and white I can see how to make it work but in larger gray letters I can see many muddled opinions of how it should work. With only one possible way that it will work, the sane and logical begins to look like Charlie Manson when they take away his guitar.
There is no constant value to hold onto; no finite fields of study exist.
There are only Mandelbrot avenues of slightly dissimilar paths for us to travel.
