“Worry is a waste of energy”

The year was 1984 and Iwas a year out of high school.  Having decided that I was grown up enough to live in my own apartment, (even though I couldn’t really afford it), with a rusty old ugly green sedan for transportation, I muddled through.  Working a part time job and going to school part time, I spent most nights at home eating baked potatoes because they were cheap and filled me up.

During the day, my thoughts were constantly on worrying about what my future would hold.  Read more

Stuck is not a fun place to be.

Yet for so many, stuck seems to be a state that is stubbornly present, even defeating in the lives of so many.

You know, the web site tweak that just has to be done before you promote, the sales script that needs to have every word perfect before you make the call, the distraction of finding something new to create instead of focusing on the thing that’s in front of you.   Read more

Just finished watching the movie Peaceful Warrior.  (If you haven’t seen it, go grab a copy at the DVD store.  It’s one you’ll want to see more than once).

In the movie, Dan, the main character, has a very busy life. He’s a young college student and athlete, bound for the Olympics, he trains hard, plays hard and gets good grades.  A certain feeling of uneasiness comes over him about his life, something he’s never had before.  He seeks the counsel of a wise elder who begins to show him the way. Read more

It was a room filled with about 300 networking engineers.  True geeks, that’s for sure.  I was there in the room to deliver a training to these high-level engineers about a subject they all loved – TCP/IP.

As the training went on, I discussed protocol, troubleshooting, hacking (oh excuse me, I meant to say “breaking down patterns to achieve entry into a network”) ARP, RARP, PING and a hundred other protocols.  We talked hexadecimal and binary numbering systems, packet loss and router tables.   Exciting stuff when you’re a geeky engineer. Read more