Up until now, I have studiously avoided having an online presence, which is at least supposed to be unusual for a \u201ctechnology professional\u201d such as myself. I ignored Facebook until my eldest daughter signed up, at which point both my wife and I opened accounts in order to \u201cmonitor\u201d her. (And that so-called monitoring lasted about a week or two, at which point we decided to make the lazy decision to trust her. I haven\u2019t logged in in\u2026 I probably shouldn\u2019t say. Our daughter has somehow survived largely unscathed despite our lack of oversight.) I accepted a LinkedIn invitation not long after it appeared, but then proceeded to largely ignore that as well for months on end.<\/p>\n
Why? I\u2019d like to think it\u2019s because I had more important things to do, but truthfully, I can and do waste time as well as the next guy. Am I a bit of a Luddite? Yeah, perhaps. Is it because I have nothing useful or interesting to say? Well, I suppose we\u2019re about to find out\u00a0\u00a0\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I\u2019m certainly not afraid of speaking in public, and, in fact, I\u2019ve done a fair amount of that (albeit not in a professional capacity). I am, however, perhaps a bit afraid of writing in public. I am acutely aware that the written word, which may be read, re-read and otherwise steamed over, is a completely different beast than the ephemeral spoken word. Once it\u2019s on paper \u2013 or even worse, the Internet \u2013 plausible deniability goes out the window. As the well-known Mark Twain quote goes, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”<\/p>\n
So, to appropriate the immortal words of the Admiral Stockdale<\/a>, \u201cWho am I? Why am I here?\u201d<\/p>\n After completing a math degree during the Reagan administration, I was \u201cseduced by the dark side\u201d and found myself living in the Boston area and writing software. I discovered that I truly enjoyed this work; at least most of the time, I also thought I was reasonably competent. Several years later, I moved to Seattle and took a job with what I now usually refer to as \u201ca large, formerly local, aerospace manufacturer\u201d. I spent the next seven years modeling and simulating manufacturing systems, using a number of different simulation packages.<\/p>\n These were generally excellent tools; nonetheless, I couldn\u2019t help but to put my software developer\u2019s hat back on. Wouldn\u2019t it be cool if the software worked like this instead? Could I build something better? I spent the occasional weekend or evening noodling on it. But the ideas were barely formed, and they never seemed to coalesce into anything that felt like a workable concept.<\/p>\n Life intervened. I had kids. I moved on to other jobs. The ramblings disappeared into farthest, darkest regions of my home desk drawer.<\/p>\n About ten years ago, I was at a medical device startup, doing MRI image processing software. It was very cool, and a lot of fun \u2013 until we ran out of money and went splat. I took on a fairly heavy-duty volunteer position along with some contract work with a previous employer.<\/p>\n I had some more time on my hands once my volunteer responsibilities eased; I began to noodle a bit more seriously on simulation. I took up Python, figuring it to be both a useful (saleable!) skill and a tool of choice for those\u00a0that do\u00a0discrete event simulation. I ran across Stackless Python<\/a>, and soon had a working, if primitive, simulation library base on Stackless tasklets. (Later, I found the greenlets<\/a> package and moved back to a standard Python distribution.)<\/p>\n Earlier this year, I found myself at a professional crossroads. My contract work ended. It was time to answer, yet again, that age old question of what do you want to do when you grow up? I had options, thanks to a wonderfully supportive spouse. Ultimately, I decided to pursue this project. I didn\u2019t know where it would lead, but it was time to find out. And much as it sometimes frightens me, it was time to put myself out there as well.<\/p>\n So here I am. I need to do a little catch-up on the \u201cputting myself out there\u201d front, but my goal remains to chronicle this process. I still don\u2019t know where it will lead, but hopefully the ride will be interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Up until now, I have studiously avoided having an online presence, which is at least supposed to be unusual for a \u201ctechnology professional\u201d such as myself. I ignored Facebook until my eldest daughter signed up, at which point both my wife and I opened accounts in order to \u201cmonitor\u201d her. (And that so-called monitoring lasted… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howardklein.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}