g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Entropicana
Cold Fury
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Cartago Delenda Est




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Friday, August 11, 2006
17:44 - One life to live

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I run a number of different websites and have been in a position of power, or at least of making decisions and building an established name, in a number of disparate communities over the years. I have probably at least three or four completely separate things that could be called "careers" all at the same time. Plus hobbies.

It's not that I bring to the table anything particularly special; I was no great shakes in my college class, and indeed found that I couldn't hold my own against a pretty sizable majority of them. In fact, I dropped out after two years. I did fight my way back in, and I did graduate, but it wasn't with any particular distinction. (Well, except that it was Caltech, which is something of a distinction in and of itself. Good thing, too, because that name is about the most valuable thing I got for my parents' $150K.)

So I'm not exactly what you'd call a big-time smart guy. When I don't think about something for a while, it gets swapped out and shoved to the back of my brain to a degree that's probably more severe than in most people. I used to do contour integrals and Fourier transforms on a daily basis; but the other day, in an interview, the guy abruptly gave me a rudimentary two-statement/two-variable word problem, one that would probably look fairly at home in one of the first chapters of a Saxon pre-algebra book. And you know, it's true what the seniors told me, that first day when they took me and a few other wide-eyed high-school kids through the steam tunnels during Prefrosh Weekend, skulking beneath the Chem. E. labs and losing track of which darkened tunnel to duck into: you learn higher math and you forget how to count. It must have been a hoot to watch me crash my brain hilariously into the wrong gear and stall out a few times. I'd pushed everything I knew about TCP/IP and routing and security into the forefront of my brain in preparation for the interview, and look how far it got me in trying to figure out how many birds would fit on how many lily pads in a pond. I'm convinced the guy did it just to see what I looked like squirming.

But I like to think that just because I haven't done algebra since 1999 doesn't necessarily mean I haven't been spending my time wisely. What's been occupying my cycles since then has been Perl, MySQL, Apache, FreeBSD, networking, and all that Mac and iPod-related stuff. Tying all of it together has resulted in professional websites internal and external, frivolous personal projects, big thick book contracts, and a woeful lack of free time. (Also a bunch of other ongoing projects, just as important to me, but less relevant to this topic.)

I know it's not that I'm particularly smart; I can't do things like some of my classmates could, like alphabetize all the letters in every word in a sentence while speaking the reshuffled words as naturally as in their original form, or recite pi to 30,000 places. (One time, while we were gathered in the Blacker Hovse lounge watching a laserdisc, the bulb burned out in the projector. Someone pulled out the disc and spun it on his finger, while someone else bounced a laser pointer off it. A third guy pretended to decode the movie in real-time; and what made it especially funny was that none of us were sure that he couldn't.)

But I guess what I do have going for me is an obsessive streak, or what could more charitably be called focus or drive. I don't give up on things, and I don't accept mediocrity, let alone failure.

But even these things aren't enough to accomplish the sort of stuff that I've managed; there are millions of people who pound away their whole lives without getting their names into the front pages of Google on any search, let alone three or four unrelated ones. It also takes luck. Of the "right place at the right time" sort of variety.

So when I got a message yesterday, sent through the feedback form of this site, from someone named Sergey located here, it really rocked me back on my heels a bit.

My first visit on your site was in May, 2000, when I phricked up goverment phone station in an order to get access in the internet. At that time, in the suburb of Samara, where I lived, there were are no telephones for ordinary people, only for the corrupted officials. Your site was the first site which I saw in the internet. I was very happy to see a lot of information about a film which I saw in 1994 on VHS and which I came to love. Although it became now better with the internet, at least I have a telephone, but your site was the first. I and want to say you thank you. You one of not many people which would conduct so large and known project such long time. And I was pleasantly surprised recently, when saw in a bookstore the book of "FreeBSD Unleashed" in Russian edition. What all the same are the formed and talented people, as you. Alas, the internet is accessible in Russia only in Moscou, here only dialup on enormous prices from monopolists, here in the suburb of Samara of the internet it is not practically, connection is developed very badly. But I often read your blog and look updates on this site. Thank you for your excellent work, you are an outstanding man. All the best. Sorry for my bad English, I was never engaged in a serious study him.

This isn't the kind of thing you get every day, or indeed every decade. Naturally it makes you sort of look around you and think about all the things that have brought you to where you find yourself. Some of it is self-motivation and stubbornness, true; but it's also the luck of being born somewhere where those kinds of traits can bear fruit, surrounded by the technology and the freedom to use it that people in other parts of the world won't ever enjoy.

Yeah, it makes me take stock of what I've managed to do thus far. But it also makes me all the more determined not to let a second of life slip past without being used to create something. I mean, if I can do it, then I'd damned well better do it.

There's only so much creative opportunity in this world... and while it's slowly but surely expanding, it does nobody any good if it goes to waste.

Apologies for the unaccustomed self-indulgent ramble. I don't like talking about myself, but there seemed no other way in this case. And this isn't the kind of thing that I can in good conscience allow to pass by without appropriate reflection.


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© Brian Tiemann