Death and My Blog

Hi folks...

Perusing my blog here, while there are few posts relative to the timeframe I've had this thing, I'm proud of myself for having a blog in the first place.

I'm a seeker... a seeker of knowledge, of new and different and more productive ways of doing things, of new music, and alot of other things. I was initially skeptical of blogging in the first place, as I didn't just want to go start a blog just to have one. After some time I finally found a good reason. I began this blog to document my research and experimentation with some new technologies that have rekindled my interest in what is possible with computers and technology, a field I've been in for a long time.

I look back on the relatively few number of posts and think, "well, maybe I don't have the motivation for a blog that I thought I had"... However, I am thinking tonite and realizing it's not about the blog. It's about my motivation to work on the projects that interest me. Without getting too personal, let me just say that I've had lots of motivation in the past in my day job. While I don't have a dream job, I've had a pretty nice ride in the industry, having been unemployed only a week and a half out of almost 19 years. I've seen alot of cool things, some came and went, others stuck around for the duration. I think, as alot of others do, that we've only begun, relatively, to delve beneath the tip of the iceberg to what technology is going to do in transforming humanity. Had I known it would get to this point so soon in my career, perhaps I would have been motivated even more before to dig deeper myself. Honestly though, alot of computer stuff comes easy to me. That's not to brag, it's just that I've a talent for it is all. But unless one really strives to push the limits of whatever talent they have, it seems to turn to boredom at some point. I'm guilty of that, and the reasons are my own, and I won't make any excuses. That's not the point of this writing.

The point of this writing is for me to take an honest self-assessment of where I'm at, in order to try to push the envelope on my talent into new territory. You see, in 2007 and 2008 I turned on to virtual worlds. I was all excited, even buying a sim in Second Life so that I could meet people, have a place to build, script, and develop a new set of skills in an area of technology that was, and still is, new and exciting. Throughout 2008 I became a pretty good scripter in Second Life and OpenSim. I worked on the side for a project at work that provided great experience and contacts but ended up not getting off the ground as the technology hadn't matured enough yet for what we were trying to do. And since I was a Java programmer by trade, I became very interested in Project Wonderland and the possibilities there, since I could readily apply my skills.

At the end of 2008, my younger brother, who was a little over a year younger than me and whom I spent a lot of time with, passed away. Shortly thereafter, I sold my Second Life sim as I couldn't afford it anymore. I also lost a lot of the motivation I had. I felt lost and empty, to say the least. Insert all relevant things about death of a family member whom one is close to here, et.al. as I've run the gamut and continue to deal with it. I think the strange thing is that I am just starting to realize how much my brother's death has had an effect on me and not only my work, but my motivation in general. In fact, one of the most surreal things to me is how calm things seem nowadays, as though I could do anything I wanted in life if only I apply myself, and yet, what is it that really matters in the end? In say 5, or 10 years, what do I want to look back on and say, yeah, I'm glad I did that? Insert all relevant sayings about how the journey is the reward, et.al. here. ;-) I suppose some of the surreality is due to the nature of the time my brother and I spent together and our relationship in general. Those are personal things that again I'm not going to get into here. Thing is, I thought at some point last year I picked back up to normal speed with my life. The reality is that the love I had developed for the technologies I am interested in had waned, and I was looking everywhere else for reasons why, except looking at where my motivation had went.

I may wake up tomorrow thinking the half hour I spent writing this blog post was a waste of time. I probably won't though. I know that even though I can't explain why my brother no longer exists in corporeal form, I can continue to seek knowledge and truth about the experience. In the same way, I think I must get back on the path to greater knowledge in the technologies and research areas that I love. Technology is always changing and while I can't predict the outcomes, I can spend some time each day seeking knowledge and learning. As I like to tell my friends when I want to go to the store, I just want to see what they got. ;-)