I snuck in on KnowProSE.com the fact that as of 2009, I am semi-retired from professional information technology. No one seems to have noticed yet, which is fine with me - but I have intended to write a little bit about the why of that. This is a part of an explanation, written more for myself than anyone else. It's a cleansing of sorts.

When I was 11 I started professionally in Information Technology. That seems unrealistic, but I did write professional code back then that was used in someone else's printery. My late Uncle Amar guided me on it, but I was the one who really coded it - and he was the one who really designed it. Back then, programming and system analysis were approached separately. He was the system analyst, and I was the nephew code monkey who was also tasked with making tea. Over the last 26 years, much has changed - and nothing has changed. As an individual, I broke through the ranks and wrote code in many places. I wrote documentation, I killed bugs dead and created new bugs. But after 26 years of doing all of this, I've seen a lot of unfulfilled promises within information technology. There is an emptiness within the field of computing technologies that can only be filled with understanding how the technologies apply to human settings. They can only be filled by improving the human condition. { Read more }

While I just wrote about the search I made for a computing device that fulfills my needs, I'm still a bit irked. The truth of the matter is that I still rely on a paper notebook stuck in the back pocket of my jeans for most things. Why? Because I grew up using pen and pencils. I flow better when using a pen (but not with a pencil, for some reason). Granted, I can type up a storm and can sometimes blaze past 120 wpm, but to get into the groove is a little more difficult with a QWERTY keyboard and mouse. A pen doesn't require a physical ambidextrous rhythm. Or maybe it's just that I learned the keyboard after I learned to scribble hieroglyphics using a pen.

The point is that there's no device right now that I think really improves upon present writing instruments. Sure, they're making better ways to read things - the Kindle gets a lot of buzz for being easy to read, but I've not seen one and I probably would find it useless because of it's geocentric features and DRM-wrapped-tighter-than-a-wet-dream. It's even more useless to me because I can't very well write with it better than what's out there.

And don't get me started on the mobile phone. With SMS text messages as prevalent as they are, you'd think some rocket scientist would come up with a decent input device instead of offering software that guesses the word based on a dictionary. { Read more }

Lunch with a friend last week reinforced some of my own behavior. She's pursuing her Master's Degree, and because of that she's slowly pulling herself out of other activities - something that I've done more than once over the years to the seeming dismay of varied social networks. One day I'm really interested in something and immerse myself in it. Weeks later, it no longer interests me and I seem to disappear from that region, perhaps still existing on the fringes - sort of like what I have done with Second Life recently. Why? Much the same reason.

Time is finite. Time management is imperative for one's sanity. And thus, triage of interests happens at times. A long trail of interests and people I know because of them follows my lifetime, but no one branch defines my life. Instead, my life defines the branches - and long ago I learned that Life is something that takes you along it's own path despite your interests elsewhere.

I remember a time when I was not connected to a collective consciousness known as the Internet. Even when I got connected, reading Levy's Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books) had me stretching for more. For over a decade, I have drank of the collective consciousness and have added to it a bit, here and there.

So why was it an advertisement for a writing tablet, the Neo, caught my fancy? Was it that it's an electronic device that is portable and would allow me to write anywhere? No, that wasn't it. I'll quote what caught my eye: { Read more }

In having a hard drive crash, I've been reloading the main system... all... day. Its something I have never really enjoyed - the time spent waiting for something to be ready, and the long periods of time it takes to download updates and code through the cocktail straw of a pipe I have in Trinidad. It is like watching refrigerated molasses ooze.

And yet, it is clean. It is the wiping of a system that had grown cluttered in ways that I had not appreciated in some time. A system that, in 2005, was new is once again new in 2008 - through the failure of a hard drive. And I find myself not wanting to install too much on it. It is light. It is fast. It is clean. It doesn't have the gigabytes of documents I had on it - thankfully, I had already backed those up. It doesn't have the years and years of emails stored away, it doesn't have all that junk I was slowly sifting through - some of the junk older than the computer itself.

Clean. { Read more }