Get my balls back.

I took apart every electronic toy I ever got, I wired 9-volts into Stomper 4x4s, I soldered the door-bell circuits from my Sister’s Barbie mansion onto Tobor (“It’s ROBOT spelled backwards!”), I nearly burned the house down dozens of times, and made model rockets with gun-powder nose-cones.  I had a whole lab under my bed on a cookie-sheet (since I was so safety conscious) which my mom secretly checked and as it turns out, confiscated some stuff that seemed “iffy”.   My dad bought us a Commodore 64 in about 1983 and all my attention turned to this amazing piece of technology until I went to college in 1989 and my dad got me an IBM 8088 with a 10MB HD and MS DOS.  It was the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end.

Path of least resistance
I started writing software professionally while still in college in about 1994 or so.  It was easy.  It was all Access databases with some VB in there.  I was taking classes for C++ and Algorithms and Computer Org so on and EVERYTHING was in unix and vi and I loved unix (I had experimented with some of the first linux distros for the same reason Linus made them – to have that power at home) but it was harder – Access as my first relational database experience was exciting and easy, so I put much more time into learning these tools and my studies suffered (a repeating theme of taking the path of least resistance).  Plus the stuff I was doing in Access and VB was making me real money – a lot for a 25 year old college student.  I made $50k my first year just doing part time stuff and then almost $70k the next.

I wasn’t using much of my college education to make money and the money was only going to get better if I put more time into it, right? – so I took another path of least resistance and dropped out to work in IT full-time.  I started improving the stuff I had been writing and made a couple really great and interesting apps – one of which, I found out recently, is still in use today – more than 10 years later.  If only I had tied some royalty to that one  I bought my first new car with my own money, I got married, bought a house and settled down.

Thus began my decent into Microsoft-land.  What a wonderful world (back then).  I was a naive Capitalist and thought all that proprietary code and the American Dream and so on were real, and I really didn’t put too much thought into it.  Stallman was someone I followed and admired, but I thought he was paranoid and that if he would just join The Bill all would be right with the world.  So I moved my Access stuff to SQL servers, did more in VB, even made little specialized functions in C and did a lot of shooting from the hip.

My life for the next 15 years was Microsoft.  I had some career changes in there, from being a stay-at-home dad and playing Golf and so on for about 4 years with some special projects that I took on if they looked interesting and, of course, were built entirely on Microsoft.

From college on, I had tried various flavors, versions, and distros of linux, with varying degrees of success and as much as I wanted to use it, and as much as it seemed superior (even then) as a server, I never felt it was quite ready as my desktop – videos and music were challenge at first and getting X running was hard with all the disparate video hardware at the time it got just silly sometimes, the trouble-shooting conversations.  In any case, I was a MS whore and Windows Power User so to get Linux running with my preferences was always frustrating.  Paths of least resistance, but I got the farthest with the suse stuff from back in the day.

Then I went to work for a big, International, public corporation where Microsoft was the word of The Bill and we were all seated at his right hand.

In February of 2009, at the height of our software’s glorious crappiness, I got laid off.

Revolution OS
The last decade and especially the last 5 years have been amazing for Linux.  I did some travelling in 2001 and 2002 and always looked for documentaries to take with me.  I only needed one!  After watching Revolution OS about 100 times, those old long-bearded gurus were starting to make sense and I saw what I had been missing as I looked out just the Redmond side of The Train.

Enter Web 2.0; I know we’re all sick of these eras and loose combinations of technology needing a catch-phrase or name for salespeople, but we all kind of know what I’m talking about – ajax, nosql, agile, the engagement of the mobile platform, work-flow, SOCIAL(!), and especially the interconnected nature of applications on the network now.

We also have had such a giant economic calamity that all the shrouds and make-up and kabuki and veneer came off the world and it’s become obvious where the real evils lay, and why they lay there.

So I found out that I was being duped all these years (DUH!), but I was too blind and busy and so intent on that least-resistant path, that I just heard the PR and moved on.

So after reading about and putting off learning anything about this new world, I decided to give Python a try.  I’m immediately hooked.  More-over I’m hooked on the Bazaar and what it means to me as a person who is trying to be creative and have interesting projects.

Now this is the new path of least resistance but the paradigms are so different and the tutorials, how-tos, IRC chat channels and so on provide no real context – the statements are complete and simple, but when your context is from the Planet of Microsoft, where everything is blue, if you tell me that I can put colors on a window, I’m going to get a little hung-up and wonder why you are saying colors when you really must mean ‘blue’ right?

Bill – I’m coming for them
So Bill has my Balls and I want them back.  He’s not going to give them back, I’m going to have to take them and that’s going to be painful, because there is still a connection.  Every time I boot Linux or begin to have certain breakthroughs with a Linux program, he’s going to squeeze them a little to cause me pain – I have to play through the pain and keep striving, darting, zigging and zagging and eventually – on that last day when I stop running Ubuntu 9.10 in a VM and start running Windows on one, I’ll take my balls back and return them to my wife, where they belong