Friday, March 6, 2015

Starting Over

It's the day after my 54th birthday, the beginning of the fourth month since I left AT&T.  I promised folks I'd write, keep in touch, let them know what life is like out here in the wild, but I haven't.  I'm only now beginning to settle down and explore the world outside the slow rolling sap capture of Cube Hell.

I've taken to calling this time a "badbatical."  Obviously a play on the word "sabbatical", which sounds too closely proximate to "sad-batical" for my liking.  There is nothing sad about this time even though I do believe my body parts were held together by stress and once that stress was removed I seemed to have physically fallen apart what with the sciatica, then the colds, a flu and whatnot.  Too fuckin' bad.  I still am enjoying my time, albeit at a more leisurely pace than I'd planned.  So I'm studying, taking classes, reading,  I've started going to Meetups and I started one of my own.  I'm taking in as much of the world as I can through sight, sound, and keyboard clacking as possible.  Yes, I've even taken to hanging out at C&P Coffee just to watch people tides.  There is so much industry taking place in Seattle.

The world is huge and it's the Tower of Babel in programming & query languages out here in the wild.  This is one true reason I had to leave AT&T.  Now is the time of the Big Bang for what I do / did.  The data explosion is happening.  Right.  Now.  The acquisition, storage, analysis, summarization, and visualization is moving faster than corporations can keep up with.  Human ants are making anthills; networks are being created like neural connections in infant brains; complexity is compounding and I have to go stand out in the middle of this storm.  I want a second lightning strike in my life.  My odds are more like 1 in 6 (learned this in class on Statistical Inference) , not 1 in 7 million because of conditioning.  Those are pretty good odds and Seattle is a small city.

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