www.nickhodge.com

Thursday 11^th and Sat­urday 13^th Octo­ber in Mel­bourne for the About Seni­ors week.

 

Sat­urday 27^th and Sunday 28^th Octo­ber in Perth for Pod­Camp Perth.

Who Is Nick Hodge?

An inter­est­ing ques­tion, who am I? This is the ques­tion that we all must answer whilst we are on this small planet. It is right up there with “What is the mean­ing of life?” Maybe they are connected.

My LinkedIn Pro­file, and more formal resume: www.linkedin.com Pro­file: Nick Hodge

From a dur­a­tion on this planet per­spect­ive, I am 39-plus-ish. Loc­a­tion, usu­ally Sydney. The fam­ily travels, and I travel for work — so there are pic­tures and stor­ies from all around the world on http://www.nickhodge.com/.

From a per­sonal accom­plish­ment per­spect­ive, I am mar­ried to Avril and have one son, Liam.

I am presently employed as a Pro­fes­sional Geek at Microsoft in Sydney, Aus­tralia. I work mainly online, pub­lished here and also http://thegeekstories.com/

This web site, mun­genet, has been online since 1996. It pred­ates the cur­rent hype/craze of “weblogs/blogs/blogosphere”. His­tor­ical views of mun­genet on www.nickhodge.com and mun­genet on webstuff.apple.com. Apart from the design com­ing a long way; tech­no­lo­gies have too.

My per­sonal likes are books (his­tory, spe­cific­ally mil­it­ary his­tory), pro­gram­ming lan­guages, music; spe­cially music of the 1980’s; and any­thing that is sorta geeky.

Our fam­ily has two Kor­ats (Lucy and Mee Noi (Our Kor­ats)). They are pure bred Thai cats, known as Si Sawat in Thai­l­and. One is named Lucy and the other Mee Noi.

We also two MINI Cooper S’s; one named Megan and the other SCRLTT (Scar­lett) Yes, the cars have names. It assists when we talk about them.

As stated, travel has been a part of my work, and thank­fully some­thing the whole fam­ily enjoy (70 Days, 7 Coun­tries and Jour­neys in 2005) so I get to New Zea­l­and and major cit­ies in Aus­tralia reg­u­lar­ily. Being a part of the wider Asia-Pacific, other loc­a­tions such as Singa­pore, Hong Kong and Tokyo also pop up from time to time.

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This is Avril Hodge, my beau­ti­ful wife. If you are a fan of Chris­tian Slater, you must, must, must visit her web site.

This is Liam, our son. Accord­ing to our friends, he is a split­ting image of me. This photo was taken on our trip to Lon­don in 2004

He’s even got my name! Although I am con­cerned about his Monarchic-tendencies. At least he is a Microsoft MVP in my favour­ite Microsoft applic­a­tion of the last 3 years: Excel. No ser­i­ously, I would not have sur­vived in my last Adobe job without pivot tables, data­bases, named ranges.

Thanks for the link, Bruce.

Andrew Smith of Stu­dio Solu­tions is a reg­u­lar com­menter here on nickhodge.com

Even when I was between jobs, he vis­ited my site and kept an eye on me. He was “the guy” that ensured I was OK, and made me feel good. People like this are rare.

In a thankyou, I’ve decided to make Andrew famous:

http://www.on10.net/Blogs/nhodge/the-geek-stories-andrew-smith-pc-based-designer/

http://on10.net/Blogs/nhodge/

Spent yes­ter­day at the Education.au con­fer­ence “So What’s New”, I asked myself — so exactly what is new? I must admit to slight symp­toms of intel­lec­tual stock­holm syn­drome. Agree­ing with all points of view and res­ult­ing in a mush of thoughts, and no opinion.

Is Web2.0 new? Rel­at­ively. Is the Web new? Is TCP/IP new? Are com­puters new? Is technology-augmented learn­ing new? On the short bus ride home, all I could answer is “no”. The demands on the next gen­er­a­tion is new. The gen­er­a­tion that is going to replace the Baby-boomers and Generation-X are enter­ing into an envir­on­ment and com­munity where pure “know­ledge” or rote learn­ing can eas­ily be out­classed by any­one with a mobile phone to “google” an answer. Child­hood Obesity is a furphy. It’s about Child­hood Apathy.

It isn’t about teach­ers, cur­riculum, ped­agogy, cent­ral­ised test­ing, digital divides, politi­cians or depart­ments. Formal learn­ing about indi­vidual teach­ers and how they engage with their stu­dents. Enga­ging teach­ers leave a long emo­tional memory that has long term impact. Learn­ing Mentor Apathy Breeds Child­hood Apathy.

As the token lay­man at the con­fer­ence, I kept quiet and listened and learnt. The chal­lenges for par­ents and teach­ers is very sim­ilar for man­agers of small teams: enga­ging the minds of people is no easy task.

Phil­lip Adams was the key­note, fam­ous speaker. His feel­ings in rela­tion to the dot­age of mass-media and the rising of unme­di­ated media is inter­est­ing; and the impact the web and imme­di­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion have on the oncom­ing gen­er­a­tion seems in tune with the cur­rent mood of the internet.

James Farmer: post-punk decon­struc­tion­ist (icon­o­clastic edu­ca­tion, incor­por­ated sub­ver­sion) using web2; or more import­antly, using more advanced web tech­no­lo­gies in and out of the classroom. In a multi-dimensional, non-mediated media this seems the cur­rent norm.

Annika Small: the future learner, future learn­ing of the envir­on­ment. Future­Lab in UK. Not quite sure where this present­a­tion was on about; show­ing off Xerox Parc or MIT Labs-like videos of learn­ing scen­arios in the UK. Any of these could have been cre­ated with pure paper tech­no­logy and an enthu­si­astic teacher.

Whilst in these highly abstrac­ted circles, one should be extremely care­ful not to pro­ject your per­sonal life into a debate as import­ant as edu­ca­tion. As a par­ent of a teen age stu­dent, and not here to sell “stuff” to any­one. Just to listen, absorb — and sur­pris­ingly learn. Immersed into a world of instant-ness. Liam has cre­ated a digital learn­ing envir­on­ment based on strung-together tools. Cre­at­ing con­tent, and col­lab­or­at­ing with his class­mates to get work done.

The wis­dom of enthu­si­astic teach­ers is long remembered, les­sons from rote teach­ers is soon for­got­ten. Digital tech­no­logy will rarely aug­ment a bor­ing, non-engaging teacher. This concept is touched on by Judy O’Connell, a blog­ger at today’s con­fer­ence and rep­res­en­ted by Al Upton and Immanuel College’s Kevin Richardson.

A brave and far-sighted Edu­ca­tion Min­is­ter is going to have a dif­fi­cult time mov­ing the col­lect­ive wis­dom of rote learn­ing, exams, com­pet­it­ive effort and incre­mental res­ults into per­son­al­ised learn­ing and flex­ible meas­ure­ment. I wish them well. All chil­dren have a lat­ent thirst for learn­ing; and unlock­ing this should not be con­strained by short sighted populism

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The idea was to spend the day with the illus­tri­ous Uncle Mike. In a strange coin­cid­ence on the day, we both wore blue shirts. I was merely a calm­ing and super­flu­ous “num­ber 2″ gopher. Even more stra­tegic behind the scenes, earn­ing his stripes, was Munge Brother and Life Kludger No. 3, David Wal­lace. Wel­come to the Blue Shirt Bri­gade, and the Munge Broth­ers.

A good day out, and an excel­lent way to end the first week of doing something.

About 21 years ago, before sit­ting my “final” exams I knew I had a full-time job. Thanks to Tim Kleemann now owner of Next Byte, the IT industry had sucked me in. Janu­ary 6^th, 1986. I was work­ing for the man.

20 years on…and for the first time in my employ­able life, I am tech­nic­ally self-employed. Whilst my self-employment is by choice, but it’s still weird.

Do I call myself if I am going to be late to the office?

Hodge Fam­ily His­tory in Win­dows Live Local Maps. Added some notes, for com­ments from those who might know more about the His­tory of Melville Hodge.

A pro­ject over the last 2 months has been to research the his­tory of one Melville Hodge. Born in 1803 in St Andrews, Fife, Scot­land (yes, this is the home of golf), he is the fifth and last child, and second son of John Hodge and Elspeth Clarke. A the­ory I have here is that he did not take an appren­tice­ship, and moved to Cupar fol­low­ing is older brother, James.

In 1820 maps of Cupar and St Andrews, a Hodge owns a house in each town. Again, I have a the­ory that John Hodge was a Baker; and his son James once trained, moved a short dis­tance west to Cupar.

In 1854, Melville, his wife and two chil­dren moved from Fife, Scot­land to South Aus­tralia. Sadly, his wife died on the voy­age. Melville remar­ried, and had a son in Aus­tralia: David Melville Hodge. David Melville is 5 gen­er­a­tions removed from myself. Using a new rail line that ran through Fife to Edin­burgh, through to Liv­er­pool in the north of the UK.

As Aus­tralia is just about to go through another Census, some research on Scot­land People, I found that the 1851 and 1841 Census’ were online. Quick search­ing pro­duced Melville Hodge liv­ing near Cupar (pro­nounced Cooper to Aus­trali­ans!) in 1841, and Leuchars in 1851. In both, he is lis­ted as an Agri­cul­tural Labourer. It is my hypo­thesis that he moved to South Aus­tralia for the oppor­tun­ity to own land.

Melville intrigues me: he had won­der­lust at a late stage in his life (he was over 50) and left his nat­ive Fife for Aus­tralia. I need to do more research on the early 1850’s in Fife around Cupar and Leuchars to get a feel­ing to why he moved, and to Aus­tralia rather than the US or to a large city.

David Melville, born in the 1860s near Angaston (Barossa Val­ley, South Aus­tralia) inher­ited this won­der­lust: there is a diary of his travels to the far north-west of Aus­tralia in the late 19^th Century.

As a “Dawkin-ist” when it comes to the Selfish Gene, in my Y-chromosome lives a part of Melville Hodge. Could the won­der­lust many older gen­er­a­tion immig­rants to Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and — and need to see the world genetic? More research is required, and its fas­cin­at­ing how much you can do via these inter­web of tubes.

Ref­er­ences:

Adobe. 8 years. Yes, this post is going to be a little different.

On my –1’st day at Adobe, I jump on a plane and head to the US for Applic­a­tion Engin­eer train­ing. Whilst some indus­tries call this a Sys­tems Engin­eer style job, at Adobe you are demon­strat­ing and integ­rat­ing applic­a­tions. Along with a host of other greater Amer­icas and Asia Pacific Applic­a­tion Engin­eers, we immersed ourselves into two weeks of intense class work. A reor­gan­iz­a­tion was announced in my second week at Adobe. Hav­ing sur­vived 3 very tumul­tu­ous years Apple, it was situ­ation nor­mal for me. People I met: Colin Smith, Noha Edell, Terry White, Lisa For­res­ter; all still at Adobe. I felt at home.

Adobe applic­a­tions avail­able 8 years ago: Acrobat 3, Pho­toshop 5.5 and Adobe was just about to launch Illus­trator 8. In the print world, Pho­toshop, Illustrator/Freehand and QuarkX­press 3/4 ruled. We could call it the Creta­ceous Period in the cre­at­ive applic­a­tion world.

Whilst I had exper­i­ence on the web, and using dynamic lan­guages; Java with WebOb­jects, I sud­denly had to reskill in the print world. A pro­ver­bial comet was about to explode and start the Ceno­zoic Period of cre­at­ive applications.

Much travel, bring people into the Adobe fold, presen­ted Adobe tech­no­logy to over 40,000 people in the last 8 years. Untold num­ber of hours in a plane. Show­ing off “cool and use­ful” things that applied in the real-world was, and still is my pas­sion. Qantas Fre­quent Flyer Plat­inum, all the nice hotels. Nights alone, wak­ing up in a city whose name you for­get. My per­sonal favour­ite road­show was Pho­toshop 6.0 for two reas­ons: firstly, pion­eer­ing the re-emergency of music of 1980s as cool and hip (Generation-X now has money to spend?) by themeimg my ses­sion around “Music of the 80’s Trivia”; secondly as Liam and Avril saw the best show in Sydney. I also here apo­lo­gize to all those attendees who saw pic­tures of my MINI in demonstrations.

There were two events in this period that I was a part of that changed the land­scape. One was the change from film to digital deliv­ery of print advert­ising; the 3DAP and a small com­pany called Quick­cut (now a part of Tel­stra) enabled the tech­no­logy. The second was the move from QuarkX­press to InDes­ign by Australia’s major pub­lisher, Aus­tralian Con­sol­id­ated Press (ACP). Adobe, and more prob­ably more spe­cific­ally Michael Stod­dart and I, saved the Pack­ers many mil­lions of dol­lars by assist­ing Linda Har­kin in this change over. Killing the Xpress dino­saur with the intro­duc­tion of a more nimble mod­ern mam­mal, InDes­ign. Now in Aus­tralia, InDes­ign and PDF is the stand­ard. I proudly look at magazine cov­ers. There is a part of me in there. My name is in the about box on every copy of InDes­ign in the world. Humbling.

Dur­ing my Adobe life, I also met and spoke to the founders of Adobe; Drs. War­nock and Geschke. Met and spoken to senior exec­ut­ives too: Mr Chizen, Mr. Narayan, Mr. Elop, Mr. Steph­ens. The engine of Adobe is its engin­eers: and I’ve inter­ac­ted with many of these people too. Smart people: much smarter than I. You get inspired, and pass this on to cus­tom­ers. Listen­ing to a tech­nical present­a­tion on how the “heal­ing brush works” and real­ized that you know nothing.

There have also been some not so pub­lic events: such as Michael Stod­dart, Alan Rosen­feld, “Mur­ray” the Cro­codile and I act­ing as “Steve Irwins” and win­ning the Most Cre­at­ive 10 minute demon­stra­tion at an internal Sales Con­fer­ence. It was way funny. OK, you had to be there.

Dur­ing the most recent 3 years I decided to have a major career and job change within Adobe. Thanks to Craig Tegel for his ment­or­ship and man­age­ment (and more recently Steve Lamb­ley); I worked with a dif­fer­ent part of my brain. Work­ing with an excel­lent team of people: Emmah, Bianca, Daniel, Gavin and Lee, and man­aging the Aus­tralian and New Zea­l­and sales chan­nel. Man­aging and motiv­at­ing people has been the most enjoy­able part of the last 3 years; as has bring­ing people into the Adobe com­pany: Mark Szulc for instance: from cus­tomer to col­league. Brent Irwin, Aaron Tavakoli. Alan Rosen­feld, now a MINI owner and Mr Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite Evan­gel­ist, Europe. (aside: Hey Rosie, where’s your blog?)

Influ­en­cing the sales part of the busi­ness: whether it be Licens­ing sys­tem changes, pri­cing, avail­ab­il­ity, chan­nel strategy. Work­ing with people such as Den­ise Dewell, Anna McNally, the smartest guy in NZ: Lou Nunn, Luke Ogier in our part­ners. What a ride.

In the end, I had reached the end of my nat­ural abil­ity. A change of what I had defined as “a career”, and more import­antly “life”, was in the wind.

The worlds of Split Enz, I Walk Away ring through my head:

Just a slave to ambition /

Ten­sion your per­man­ent condition /

So much you’ve always wanted /

Too much givin’ you a sore head

So, its back to what I enjoy most; enga­ging with cus­tom­ers and tech­no­logy. Real­iz­ing this, I must take time to relearn “tech­nical stuff”.

Some Fre­quently Asked Questions:

1. Have you been forced to take this Leave of Absence?

No. This is a decision I’ve made com­pletely my own, and my family’s, choice.

2. What hap­pens to your cur­rent role?

When you take a Leave of Absence for more than 90 days, your pos­i­tion is deemed “open”. There­fore, Adobe is hir­ing for my role. I will not return to this job.

3. Is this an indic­ator of your opin­ion and/or faith of Adobe’s products?

No. I think I’ll be an Adobe Pho­toshop and Adobe InDes­ign user for life. It’s almost hard­wired. And once you have Pho­toshop neur­ons, the other applic­a­tions just link together.

This leave is for me to reset/reboot and retrain for the next 20 years of my life. For the future of self. Has no rela­tion to the incred­ible Adobe technology.

4. What do you think your future is?

Does any­one know, exactly? It has some­thing to do with End Cus­tom­ers, Soft­ware and Tech­no­logy — from a work per­spect­ive. From a per­sonal per­spect­ive, which is way more import­ant, I’d like to keep that per­sonal. Thanks.

5. Do you plan to return to Adobe?

The answer to this ques­tion is a little out of my hands, but it is my wish to return to a Technical/Evangelism style role. The work I do will be com­pletely dif­fer­ent to what I have done over the last 3 years.

I will always have a pas­sion for Adobe products, as I have for Apple products.

6. How did you come to this decision?

Once my “dream” was to work for Apple. I did that. Then what’s next? Ori­gin­ally, I moved into the chan­nel role for a sim­ilar reason: the chal­lenge. Once you meet your chal­lenge, what’s next?

I had reached the end of my nat­ural abil­it­ies and have decided to reset and go back into a more evangelist/technical/customer role. It is a strange change to “go back”; it lim­its your so-called career pro­spects and income. This is con­trary to what “your upbring­ing” expects — ever higher, ever for­ward, be ambi­tious. This pres­sure is internal, and I think comes from the com­pet­i­tion we exper­i­ence in the school envir­on­ment. Even my alma mater high school, Immanuel College’s motto was “Plus Ultra”; ever higher in Latin.

The scars of ambi­tion do not heal eas­ily. So, my career man­tra is now “what’s next”, tech­no­lo­gic­ally. How can I help a small part of the world? Where can I assist people to take the cool tech­no­logy and apply it in the real world?

It is obvi­ous to state that the future of IT is a highly con­nec­ted, yet loosely coupled world. TCP/IP pack­ets are chan­ging how the world com­mu­nic­ates. Fast pro­cessors are chan­ging how we inter­act with col­lec­ted assort­ments of these pack­ets. Some­where in this maze is a place for an IT veteran.

7. Are you avail­able for freel­ance Tech­nical Sup­port, Train­ing, Con­sult­ing, Stra­tegic Plan­ning or Gardening?

No to the garden­ing; for the other cat­egor­ies please Email me on hodgenick@gmail.com, my rates are reasonable.

8. Hey Nick, do you want to come and work for me?

Offers to hodgenick@gmail.com. All offers are con­sidered, but please do not be dis­ap­poin­ted if yours is politely declined.

9. New! Do you have plans to travel anywhere?

In short, no. Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing too much of over the last 13 years!

A Plea

As a heart-felt plea, I am going to ask you to read this post: How to Find What You Love to Do on LifeHack.org. It provides an excel­lent per­spect­ive on the thought pro­cesses needed to come to terms.

I’ve learnt that it is import­ant for your phys­ical and men­tal health to do what you love to do. No-one wants to, nor should have to, slog it out in a soul-sucking job. No-one wants to live their work life just for a dis­tant chi­mera of “retire­ment”. It is a false goal. Live life for now.

What’s Next? Do some­thing. The ideas and oppor­tun­it­ies spin in my head.

Nick Hodge as rendered by Meego, a ser­vice I don’t quite get — but it is all the rage with the Tech.Ed AU crowd… and for some strange reason, it doesn’t like Fire­fox on my Mac. Booted up Par­al­lels, ran Win­dowsXP and used the command-shift-4 to get MacOS X TO cap­ture this off the Win­dowsXP ses­sion. Clean up in Pho­toshop CS2, save as a nice small com­pact PNG with transparency.