www.nickhodge.com

The Head­mas­ter for my last years at Immanuel Col­lege recently passed on from a short ill­ness. (pre­vi­ous ref­er­ences here and here)

Con­trary to pop­u­lar memes, I have noth­ing but fond memor­ies of Mr Volk, or Noel as he pre­ferred I called him in 2005.

Mr Volk was one of those highly influ­en­tial people in my life. He was one of a small hand­ful of people made an impact on my per­sona, from an intel­lec­tual per­spect­ive. A learned man, he daily demon­strated that geeky people mattered in the world. A great man.

Ave, Mr Volk. Noel.

Thoughts are with the Volk family.

Update: Novem­ber 2008: I have a scanned copy of the obit from The Advertiser

(thanks Mum for the sad info)

Why I quit my 6-Figure Job

Man-Machine Mer­ger Arriv­ing Sooner Than You Think on the Sin­gu­lar­ity. Mind expand­ing stuff. Ver­nor Vinge and Cory Doc­torow. Ori­gin­ally pos­ted on Boing­Bo­ing Ver­nor Vinge and Cory on the Sin­gu­lar­ity on NPR

This stuff gets my mind going in dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions. Aug­men­ted humans, instant access to inform­a­tion. Our children’s lives will be shaped by how to access, not hav­ing to bur­den them­selves with hav­ing to imme­di­ately know.

When in soci­ety has this been dif­fer­ent any­way? The young ones always know more than the oldies. My adage is simple: There is always someone younger and smarter than you. How­ever, youth is no match for experience

As the bus trav­elled over the Sydney Har­bour Bridge, we trundled through a rain­bow to the pot-of-gold called Sydney Fin­an­cial Dis­trict: The CBD. Still look­ing for the lep­re­chauns.

Microsoft WPF (Win­dows Present­a­tion Found­a­tion), a key part of Microsoft .Net 3.0 presents a mech­an­ism for build­ing inter­faces in XAML, and code against this in a CLR lan­guage. In Joseph’s and Deepak’s course, we had a choice of lan­guage. Hav­ing never used C# before, I decided to deep end myself with C#. So much like Java; takes me back to 1998.

Thanks to Joseph and Deepak for their time. Pos­i­tion­ing WPF, or in normal-speak: what prob­lem does WPF solve need to be clearly artic­u­lated. Espe­cially when you com­pare Win32 Forms vs. Man­aged vs. WPF vs. XHTML via ASP.NET — WPF has yet to hit its sweet spot. The sep­ar­a­tion of Design to Devel­op­ment is inter­est­ing; writ­ing the specs/contracts to get the wir­ing cor­rect is going to be crit­ical.
There was some home­work, and I have a pro­ject in mind for Uncle Mike built with WPF. How­ever, Mike is a reneg­ade Mac user. Oops, no Fire­fox or Mac until WPF/E comes around. Might have to go Flex.

The rich user exper­i­ences, con­nec­ted to the inter­net are start­ing to appear in all sorts of places.

How do you build them? How com­plex is the developer exper­i­ence: setup, debug­ging, main­ten­ance and deployment?

Time to start that “Do Some­thing”. Maybe that’s what the rain­bow was telling me.

Talk­ing to the great Michael Stod­dart (Stod) around the pro­ver­bial water cooler, he stated that under-25’s don’t learn the same way as us Generation-X and cusp-Baby Boomers.

Rather than learn by rote the ins-and-outs of a “new thing”, the Generation-Y’s remem­ber the tags and “where to access” the inform­a­tion — know­ing that if they ever need the inform­a­tion in the future, they’ll use the “tags” to grab the info.

Also, Generation-Y are exper­i­enced with the media-savvy breadth of info, and know how to “fil­ter” out the noise.

Last week, Uncle Mike asked about my “take” on tags.

Now I get it — “tags” are a memory access method, a digital mne­monic.

Rote learn­ing just doesn’t work in a stream-of-media world.

I’d love to get into the under­stand­ing of Learn­ing; time doesn’t per­mit so I’ll tag it, and move on.

On Janu­ary 6^th this year, I had a small per­sonal cel­eb­ra­tion: my twen­ti­eth (20^th) year of full-time work. Whilst I am at my third employer, I’ve never had more than a day between jobs. (www.linkedin.com Pro­file: Nick Hodge) The longest hol­i­day I’ve had in last 20 years has been the month the Hodge fam­ily went to Europe (70 Days, 7 Coun­tries). Apart from that refresh, its been a week or two here and there.

Here I am, in my late thirties. A poten­tially jeop­ard­ous time for men. They do silly things like buy fast red sports cars (Scar­lett Comes out in Style). The body doesn’t look, feel and work the same old way. And they start to look ahead a little, and drive a little slower.

We are all bound by the decisions we make: what cars we drive, what houses to buy; what job to do; and fur­ther bound by expect­a­tions: what do people expect from me? Why do I have to get up every morn­ing and go to work? It leads a dif­fi­cult decision: “Can I get off this merry-go-round?”.

After weigh­ing up these conun­drums, I’ve decided to spend the next 5–6 months “reboot­ing”, “reset­ing” and “reload­ing”, pre­papring for the next 20 years. Slow down, smell the roses. Look back and look ahead. Read some books, learn some new things. Return to Adobe in a dif­fer­ent role. Calm down and get stuff done that mat­ters. And as Carl Sagan said to his stu­dents: “Do Some­thing” (Carl Sagan)

After a busy, full and fun 20 years — that “some­thing” remains equally as eth­er­eal, but I’ll be ready to tackle it head on.

RIP Paul Hester, former Crowded House (and last Split Enz) drummer.