Are you a specialist or a generalist?

Are you one of those that knows the intimate working of a particular piece of software or hardware? Do you know do things that even the designers didn't anticipate? Odds are you're a specialist.

Do you have a broad knowledge base? Know how to do "lots" of different things with different software, hardware, and operating systems? Chances are your a generalist, or a "Jack of All Trades, Master of None."

What are you thoughts on being one or the other?

I started out as a generalist, then moved into being a specialist with Microsoft System management Server (SMS). Since I've become more of a generalist. I've dabbled in various different things (web development, graphics and video editing with various different pieces of software) yet have not found the time to become really proficient or a master of any of it.

They say...

An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less,
until they know absolutely everything about nothing.

The sad fact is, most of the time I'm feeling I know absolutely nothing about everything.

So, how have your transitions from one side to the other?

One can go from enjoying them to completely despising them.

It's funny how life is.

You grow up as a kid, and discover something you just truly love. That was me back in 1977. Seven years old, playing around with an Apple ][+ computer. I loved it.

During school, computers were still that passion for me. It was enjoyable, it was fun, it was exciting.

Even during the majority of my IT career, it was fast, fun, exciting, constantly changing, constantly learning, install this, integrate that, troubleshoot this problem, develop this solution, deploy this package, implement this change, Booom-bada-bing! Fun, excitment, and enjoyment.

Years later, getting into the last few years of my life, I'm finding that computers are becoming less and less enjoyable. And honestly, even after searching for that enjoyment, that love of computers that I once had is nowhere to be found. Nowhere at all.

And it's been continuing to the opposite extreme. I'm finding it becoming more and more difficult, to even be in the same room as computers. So much to the point of even being nauseous when ever I'm near one.

It's pretty sad really when the idea of bathing in a vat of iodine and shaving myself with cheese grater would be more enjoyable.

Why have I come to detest what I used to love so much. Why is there no enjoyment from just being around them. Why is there no excitment anymore when trying to figure out a problem, or how to automate somthing. Why is there no fun in checking email, or even playing a game. Why does it feel physically painfull to just be around a fragging computer?

Why would someone subject oneself to feeling sick, just to type somthing out here in "cyberspace."

If that's not ironic, I don't know what is.

Hurricane Katrina/What's on your harddrive?

Before I go any further on comments, I first want to send my condolences and sympathy all that have been impacted by Hurricane Katrina. It was a horrible natural disaster only made worse by the lack of slow response of rescue operations by the government. I will leave my opinions at that, and save the rest (or should I say RANTS) for another entry.

But first, a moment of silence............









Ok, perhaps not silence, but the closest thing one can do in cyberspace.


So tell me:

What's on your hard drive?

No, that's not supposed to be a sick innuendo (ok, well perhaps it was, but it did get your attention.)

It begs the question, do you know what you have on your hard drive? Not sure? Think about it for a moment.

Now ask yourself, when is the last time you made a backup? An hour ago, a week ago, a month ago, more than a month ago or are you asking 'What's a backup?'

What would happen if your computer crashed tommorow? Can't imagine that?

Perhaps this would be easier, imagine after you finished up tonight with your computer, you took it and placed it in a timed-locked vault and set the vault to open in 1 day. But wait, imagine when you typed in the time to open, you missed and made it one decade (yeah, I know it's unlikely, but work with me here eh? I'm trying to make a point.) There is no way you could access your computer (or the data on it for that full decade)

Ask yourself what would you miss?

• Access to your email (or access to your email archives that you had stored localy)
• What about your Quickbooks data or your last tax return
• What about those pictures you downloaded from your camera of the last wedding, or vacation you went on. What about the vacation from last year, or even before that, or since you got your digital camera.
• What about that word document you were working on? That 5 million dollar proposal that you spend all night (and the last 6 months working on.) Or the database that you have with all your email contact in it, or the spreadsheet with your budget.
• What about your calendar of all your events for the next decade?
  
• What about all those other small things you wouldn't normally think about, like your book marks, or password lists, and the likes.
  
• And most of all, you would miss reading this great blog (ok, ok, I admit it, this one was a case of shamless self promotion)

Now just think about this for a moment. That's a lot of stuff just in this list I've come up with off the top of my head. It is by no means all inclusive, I am positive there are thousands more. It would create quite the headache if it was all suddenly gone.

Now your thinking, "Geez, I better go make a backup!" which is good. Now your at least thinking about it.

But ask yourself a very important question: Do you know "what" to backup?

In the good old days, it was easy. You backed up everything. It was easy. After all, you could fit everything on 30 floppy disks or so. That was back in the days when harddrive size was measured in megabytes. My first harddrive I had was 5mb (yes, only 5 megabytes) You could fit the entire contents on about four HD (high density) floppys. Man that was easy.

Nowadays you typically don't have harddrive smaller than 40 gigabytes and now there are ones that are as large at 250gb and growning bigger every day. An you know what? It's just like money, the more you have, the more you spend. The bigger your harddrive is, the more space you tend to use.

Now, even with CD writers and even DVD writers, the amount of data to back up is just staggering. By the time you get done with your operating system (call it 100 megabytes) and your office suite (call it another 250mb) and any other software you may have, let's call it easily 1gb of data. And that's not including your data, that just your basic system configuration.

Already there, your talking 2 CDs (700mb each) worth of data.

Now think of it, how many pictures do you have from that digital camera? I know my picture count is getting up to 2000 or so after owning it only a year. Granted all of them aren't keepers, but let's use that for sake of argument. With a five megapixel camera, typically each picture is 3 or 4 megabytes. So 2000 * 3.5mb = 7000mb, or 7 gigabytes. Now your getting close to the size of 2 DVD (about 4.7gb) or a single DVD-DL (approx 7.2gb or so) and that's just your pictures.

Add in your email, contact lists, etc, etc, etc. Not only is it getting to be a lot of data, but it's also getting to be a lot of time.....

So what to do? That will be in the next post. Things to consider when you creating your backup strategy.

Well it's been a while since my last post...

so I figure I should write something, even if it isn't on the topic of the blog.

Life has been fairly busy for the last while with lots of travel. I got to visit my children that I haven't seen for about two years or so. My parents (aka the childrens grandparents) also were there at the same time.

Needless to say, there was quite a bit of lawyering and etc. that we went through to get the visit arranged due to the monther's (aka my EX-fiance) unreasonablness. We did get there, and did manage to see the children, though, initally not under the agreed conditions.

Regardless, even though the conditions that were agreed on didn't happen (this was for the first day), it went as well as it possibly could have. It's more the principle of the thing. When your spending money on lawyers to get conditions agreed up, one should stick to those terms agreed upon. One *SHOULDN'T* be trying to force a confrontation. Especially infront of the kids. That's just bad form.

The next two days were full. We all had a wonderfull time together. Visiting the science center, playing in the park, seeing movies, swimming and playing on the hotel's water slide, and just getting to hang out was fantastic.

I've always done my best to keep intouch with the children, although it's not been an easy thing. When your given an assigned time to call, and there is no answer, time after time again can be very dishearting. All one can do is keep trying. What is even worse is when the babysitter answers, and one can hear the kids in the background, and being told to call back at some other time when their mother is around. Heartbreaking it is. Bad Form, especially when it's when she stated the time and day. I mean honestly, what is the absolute worst that could happen talking over the phone that she feels the need to "be around" when we talk? I'm arcoss an international border (I'm in Chicago, kids are in Canada) and a good 1500 miles away. If your bitter with me, fine, be bitter with me, but don't let your bitterness flow to my parents (which have done nothing other than try to be grandparents). And most of all, don't let your bitterness use the kids as pawns. As I said before, and will say again, BAD FORM.

Since the visit, things have improved. I've called more often, and have managed to get through which is really nice.

My little princess (my daughter) just had her birthday, and to quote her, "Every thing you sent was *EXACTLY* what I wanted." That made me feel so good (and yes, I did have some help picking out some of the stuff, thank you, you know who you are, and also thanks to the coulple grade twos we consulted with at the store).

My big guy's (my son) birthday is coming up shortly also. I know I've got stuff for him that he's going to love.

I can wait to talk to them again. I miss them lots, and wish I could visit more often which is why I so treasure the time when I do get to talk to them. Know that I love you both. That is somthing that will never change.