Well, I’ve always enjoyed writing, conveying my thoughts – there is something philosophical that comes into play with writing, even if it’s only for my own self or some imaginary audience. My father was a professor at WSU (Dr. of Speech and Hearing Sciences) so speaking and writing well was always highly stressed in my family. I don’t think I took it seriously until I was passed over for a promotion almost 9 years back. After explaining to Dad what had happened, he wrote a letter that pilloried my boss at the time. Needless to say, I never passed it on, but the people I did show it to were quite impressed with his use of language. That struck a chord with me and I started then to learn how to write better. A little more than a year ago, frustrated with management where I worked, I wrote my own letter of dissent (I DID pass it on), and showing it to my coworkers who were impressed with MY use of language and being able to make MY point.
Argument (as in collegial discourse) is something else that I learned from my father. I often, to the disgust of my ex-wife, argue and debate a topic “just-for-fun.” I enjoy the exercise of looking at a topic from all sides discussing the merits and flaws, playing devils advocate regardless of whether I am “right” or wrong.
Also, and here’s another tangent, my kids were going through a trunk that I have carried with me over the years since leaving home. In it they found my old Dungeons & Dragons books (Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual). They were intrigued and I started to roll characters and we began to play. Well, half of them (my two oldest daughters from my first marriage, and my present wife’s son) are getting to the age where they need to start writing for school and learning to write well. So, I’ve turned our D&D games into a kind of collaborative story writing – I as DM attempt to vividly describe a scene, and they must also describe what their characters think and how they interact with each other. I force them to be descriptive, not give me quick “I open the door” type responses.
After leaving SafeHarbor, I ended up mired in the fallout from the dot-com implosion, and had difficulty getting out – due in part to familial and professional constraints at the time. The position I am in now (both professionally and with family), however, has giving me the openness to explore again. The “raison d’etre” of the group I am in at my agency is to take a lead in shaping the organizations future direction with Enterprise Solutions. My primary focus is server/infrastructure and project management.
Having worked in the field at my agency, we lower echelon IT personnel cried and begged for training, more often than not being denied, either because there wasn’t money in the budget or at our level, we were not important enough to warrant training – someone higher up learned how something was to be done, then wrote a check list for us to follow. No insight how it worked, or what to do if it broke.
In my present position, seeing a need for field training, we began developing an internal training academy. I was tasked with writing the first training manual to teach the field how to install, configure, and troubleshoot Symantec’s Storage Exec. It was profoundly enjoyable – every one of the “students” commented on how professional the manual and training was. So, even though they are all intelligent IT folks who could’ve figured Storage Exec out for themselves, they still appreciated a peer teaching them (I will stress “peer” because they will run into things with this or any other app out in the field in daily use that I won’t, but can learn from their issues and roll it over and coalesce their collective experiences).
I had tried blogging before, but was befuddled, anxious that I didn’t have anything new to say that hadn’t been said before, so why would anyone want to read my blog? I didn’t want to get stuck only with “woke up and fed the cat” type posts. I didn’t feel that I was so technically savvy that my solutions would impart any new knowledge. Chris Sanders in his WindowsDevCenter blog posted 5 things to do to optimize Virtual Server – again, many in IT could have discovered those, and I often write procedures of a similar nature internally for my organization. I have recently acquired access to a Windows Longhorn beta, and the chance to “play” and explore. I might actually have something to contribute – what a concept. Why not share with everyone else? I can do this too!
So back to why. There’s more to IT than I’ve been left with for the last five years and I want to jump back in with verve and alacrity. I’m in a position now to explore and learn, and what I learn might be of use to someone else, even if I don’t have a massive following. Blogging is allowing me an outlet for my intellectual aspirations; I have musings about things and though I might be way off-mark or disagree, would welcome insight from my IT brethren that I can practice the art of writing and argument.
