As I write this, our neighbor is having his healthy redbud cut down. Something about it making a mess on his roof. Suffice it to say we have very different ideas about trees.

During that spring bloomtime, I can walk up my stairs and see the redbud framed in our bedroom window. It’s astonishing, every time.

One day I had been changing clothes in our bedroom with the door shut. As I turned to leave, I was caught up by the light playing on the door. Later, I wrote the following:

I reach to open–
pause–the redbud behind me
glorifies the door.

My "computer origin story" is varied and long-ranging. My parents, a junior-high math and science teacher and a medical technologist, started a small business in the 1980s for data processing and desktop publishing. My dad had PCs (mostly Compaqs) which were used for the data processing side of things, and my mom used Apple and Macintosh computers for the desktop publishing side.

First computers

My family acquired its first computer in 1984, I believe it was an Apple //e or the like. It has been a long time, so forgive me for not remembering exactly. From that time to today, there has consistently been an Apple or Macintosh computer in my parent's house. Doing desktop publishing, my mom also had one of the first Apple Laserwriter printers and paid around $7000 for it. I always use this price as a baseline for judging how truly expensive Apple devices are today. If you go by inflation and the relative purchasing power of today's US dollar, they are not that expensive anymore.

The first computers in our house had me, the youngest, learning how to use them and teaching everyone else. I was eight or nine years old but I was the one that figured it out. I have memories of floppy disks and external LaCie SCSI drives and traveling to Portland and Tigard with my parents to shop at third-party Apple stores that no longer exist—this was all pre-Apple Store. Places like The Mac Store, MacForce, and other names I honestly cannot recall anymore, which I find sort of sad.

Computers in school

I became familiar with typefaces, clip art , PostScript, and Aldus PageMaker, at a pretty young age. This was when PostScript was the language on printers and the printers had more memory than the personal computer you were working on. I went through grade school, junior high, and high school, producing some of the best looking essays and research papers because of what I had access to at home.

In second grade, I was put into a "gifted" placement track with several other students. Over time this idea of a "gifted" student nomenclature has been dropped due to how different people learn in different ways and it doesn't necessarily mean one person is more gifted than another. The part I will mention is that the actual placement track's name "DEEP" was more "woke" for the time period, standing for "Differentiated Educational Experiences Program" and anyone placed in that program ended up in "advanced" placement once we reached high school.

I mention this program because it had me taking classes at the high school very early in my education. During grade school, one day a week (I think) took place in two classrooms at the high school, very math, science, and computer-oriented. We had access to many types of early computers and science experiments. I took courses in German and Physics all before I was even in junior high. We also took field trips to cool, interesting, and educational places in the region.

In summer 1986 I attended a "computer camp" at the high school with other kids of the nerd persuasion. I recall this being interesting because at the very same time, the first and only mall to ever exist in my hometown was having its opening ceremony and ribbon-cutting, while we were inside a classroom on a sunny day playing with computers. At some point in the late 80s or early 90s we had Prodigy internet at home, but I honesty don't remember exactly when. I just recall using my dad's amber CRT Compaq computer to use it.

In junior high school I took a proper typing class, I think it was just par for the course, a required elective. Back then we first learned on a typewriter, though I'm pretty sure we transitioned to computers at some point. All I know is that I learned how to actually type and we were trained to look at what we were typing from, not the screen or paper with the output, and not the keyboard. It might sound weird, but I think this was a huge part of learning to write efficiently today. It's something that perhaps is taken for granted in the modern coursework of a student. I don't even know, do you still get taught how to type?

My high school finally had computers in some classrooms around 1992, I believe. They were Macintosh Classics, if I recall correctly. To be honest, this was during the time period that I became chronically ill and many things during that time are fuzzy at best, or completely lost at worst. Shortly after this time, I went dark with computers. I went dark on a lot of things.

Computers in transition

I became more creative and less technical. I joined art classes and drama club and was part of a choir at my church that travelled. I went to college for a few years doing accounting and economics work, but dropped out before finishing any degree, and can safely say I didn't do much more with computers until the late 90s/early 2000s, when I bought my first personal computer: a Compaq running WindowsME 😥

I'm pretty sure WindowsME only stayed on that machine for a few months, quickly replaced with WindowsXP. WindowsME was a mistake of an operating system, and even I knew that. I also fairly soon realized I was just not a Windows person, though I spent several years making skins for all the things I could on my computer. I think that is when I first realized I wanted to do something technically creative, though I had no idea what that was.

In the 1990s we went to Incredible Universe in Wilsonville, OR, this went on to become the area Fry's Electronics. Into the early 2000s I also started going to many other electronics stores in the Portland area, including Circuit City, Fry's, and, my favorite, CompUSA. I think CompUSA was my favorite because it was an authorized Apple retailer and had a really good in-store selection of products, which I used to pore over on my visits.

In 2003 I built a PC. I purchased most of the parts online from retailers like TigerDirect. It was a beast of a machine, the case was a tank with a finish like a metallic silver car. It had all the bells and whistles I could afford at the time, including a TV card that used to record television shows to watch later. This overlapped slightly with my adoption and use of TiVo DVRs. In fact, at one point TiVo provided PC software that could be used with a TV card, and then I could share shows between my PC and TiVo.

Later that year, I had saved up enough money to buy my first Apple computer, a PowerBook G4. The CompUSA in Jantzen Beach (Portland, OR) did not have one in stock, the closest store was at the Tacoma Mall in Tacoma, WA. I remember the trip up there to pick it up well, it was some of the worst weather I've ever driven in. My mom went with me, but I was driving and it was sideways torrential rain on Interstate 5 the entire trip. Totally worth it, though, as that purchase was probably part of the impetus for me deciding to go back to college about a year and a half later.

Computers in college and beyond

After I had dropped out of college the first time, I took a ten year hiatus from higher education. I worked several jobs, mostly as a waitress at a large national casual dining seafood restaurant (I'll let you figure that one out), but I also worked as an associate manager at a retail clothing chain, and as a small business multi-purpose nerd that did a lot of custom fidding with off-the-shelf software for handling inventory for a gift shop.

I made an unlikely friendship with a gal at the restaurant who was ten years my junior. We lived in the same apartment complex and I had a small work crush on her brother (who also worked at the restaurant). In early 2005 she moved to Portland to attend The Art Institute of Portland and convinced me to come down and visit. I'm pretty sure my visit in the middle of a week was completely spur-of-the-moment on a day off.

I recall driving around Portland's Pearl District and visiting several apartment complexes, imagining moving to Portland and where I'd want to live. The school was between NW 11th and 12th, and NW Couch and Davis. I ended up parking on Couch, next to P.F. Chang's where we had lunch, a block from Powell's Books. The school was around the corner, and as I mentioned in a recent post about my student loans, I left that day having signed up to attend in the fall.

From the time I started school there to today, I've been an Apple MacBook Pro user, with one Mac Pro and one iMac mixed in. I still have the Mac Pro tower, mostly for the hot-swappable drives that still have data on them I may someday want, and the iMac which I still occasionally use. The Mac Pro was from the time period when Boot Camp allowed for installing Windows natively on a Mac, and I did so, installing Windows Vista, the last version of Windows I used on one of my own computers.

I also went through a period, via a boyfriend, when I had several different versions of Linux installed on an old Compaq, the same Compaq that had come with WindowsME. We eventually wiped each version out to try something new. Some years later, the last PC I purchased was a tiny Asus running as a server for me to access remotely from school. They all now sit in my basement.

I started school during the fall 2005 term, took one term off half-way through, and graduated in the winter 2010/2011 term. Most jobs I've had since then I've acquired a new machine, and kept at least two of them after leaving the job. I've had a job where I had two simultaneous work laptops, one from the company and one from the client, and a personal laptop, and explaining that to TSA when traveling for conferences was never fun.

My time in college the second time was all computers. The main computer labs for my department were PCs but we crossed over with graphic design a lot and used Macs in their computer labs as well. Many people worked directly on the computer lab computers, I preferred to do most of my work on my own machine. The early 2000s were a transitional period in computing and we'd just started to see other digital and mobile devices enter the scene. I won't talk about them in this post, but may do a follow-up someday.

My degree is a Bachelor's of Science in Interactive Media Design (or Web Design and Interactive Media), it changed names partway through and I transferred from one to the other. I have a proper design history background with this degree, a healthy dose of typography and graphic design, as well as basic programming fundamentals via Python, and every web language and technology on the scene at the time, including HTML + CSS, Javascript, Flash and Actionscript, other web programming languages like PHP and platforms like Drupal. In fact, I went on to work for one of my teachers who was a PHP and Drupal instructor. I stayed with Drupal nearly my entire career.

That brings me to today, typing this on my very own MacBook Pro laptop purchased after I left my last employer, my first "personal" MBP after a long line of employer-acquired MBPs. I've used this one the longest and am looking at replacing it within the next year as funds allow.

 

No matter the circumstance, human suffering matters. Our attending to it matters. Acts of tenderness are not morally trivial. […]

For as Naomi Klein has reminded us, our demise isn’t all or nothing, at least not for the next few centuries. “There are degrees to how bad this thing can get,” Klein says. “Literally, there are degrees.” As we struggle to figure out how to notch back the degrees, so as to mitigate the suffering that a warming planet is going to bring, we also need to figure out forms of relationality—both to ourselves and to each other—that won’t make things worse.

By the time I finished 10:04, I felt like I understood some options: not being ashamed of the desire to make a living doing what we love, while also daring to imagine “art before or after capital”; paying as intense attention to our collectivity as to our individuality; demanding a politics based on more than reproductive futurism, without belittling the daily miracle of conception, nor the labor and mysterious promise of childbearing and -rearing; attempting to listen seriously to others, especially those who differ profoundly from ourselves, no matter how precontaminated the attempts; spending time reading and writing poetry; and more. Far from despair, I felt flooded with the sense that everything mattered, from meticulous descriptions of individual works of art to kissing the forehead of a passed-out intern to analyzing our political language to documenting the sensual details of our daily lives to bagging dried mangoes to the creation of the book I was holding in my hand to my deciding to spend time writing a review of it. “The earth is beautiful beyond all change,” Lerner repeats in 10:04, quoting the poet William Bronk. The inspired and inspiring accomplishment of his novel makes me want to say that sometimes, art is too. And maybe—if incredibly—so might we be, ourselves.

— Maggie Nelson, from “Beyond All Change. On Ben Lerner’s 10:04” in “Like Love: Essays and Conversations..” (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes:

• Photo: DK 5:11 am this morning at Cove Island Park. For more photos from this morning, click here for birds and here for landscape.
• Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
• Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“

Going from a company with two coworkers to a company with 200K coworkers is certainly an adjustment. It’s my first job in 18 years where I’m not working for myself but by far the biggest eye-opener throughout this process was doing tech interviews! I learned a lot about myself; like how after decades of coding in a room by myself, performing in front of someone else isn’t natural for me. Weirdly for me, a live demo in front of thousands of people… no problem. A random generated coding challenge in front of one person… palms sweaty, mom’s spaghetti levels of difficult. I also learned that too much caffeine and the panic-flavored adrenaline of interviewing is a lot of chemistry for my active brain to process.

I eventually figured out how to interview and I had a lot of great conversations with great people at great companies. That said, this experience left me with lingering qualms about the tech interview process. A lot of it comes down to the information asymmetry where the seller (the hiring company) has more information than the buyer (the job candidate) and it’s hard to get any feedback for self-improvement. Even in my limited experience, it’s not uncommon to sink 15+ hours into a take home coding test and interview loop only to receive a terse rejection. Granted there’s promise of a six figure salary at the end of the rainbow, these jobs don’t fall out of the sky so you need to put in work, but I think that situation needs to be a bit more equitable to candidates – a Newtonian dynamic of matching effort.

One question they ask you at interviews is “What are you looking for in your next role?” and while that sparks thousands of ideas, I boiled my needs and wants down to two core concepts:

• Be a part of a larger team of engineers - I’d like to work on a larger team of developers. I want to be in a situation where I can actively and passively learn from other engineers who are subject matter experts in different subjects. As a life-long learner, I’d like to take myself out of the “lone developer” paradigm and absorb as much as I can.
• Be tangential to the money machine - When you run your own business there’s a tight coupling between how much you work and how much money you make and you’re constantly aware of that fact. After 18 years of running my own business and two particularly intense years of startup burnout, I’d like to try something different and play a more supportive operational role for a bit.

I think I found that in Microsoft. There’s a multitude of people I can ping about niche technology choices. There’s even access to a library of research papers. And already I can see how operating in a product support role seems to provide more opportunity for strategy to the broader needs of the organization as opposed to reactivity to the needs du jour that happen in Productland.

I’m sure throughput will be a bit slower without direct access to the publish to production button. I’m sure there’s topics I won’t be able to talk about on this here blog (but I tend not to blog about specific work-related activities here anyways so that won’t change). And I’m sure I’ll have to put a disclaimer here and there that these ideas are my own and not reflective of my employer. Henceforth and furthermore all bad ideas are copyright of Dave Rupert LLC®.

It’s the end of an era for sure but also the beginning of a new one and potentially the beginning of lots of new ones, who knows. Thanks to Trent and Reagan. Thanks to everyone who provided emotional support on this journey. Thanks to esteemed friends who provided referrals. Given the current macroeconomic situation, I feel lucky to have landed somewhere familiar with great opportunities and many Dave Rupert-shaped problems.

Things I bring that I have used:

• A watch, to keep track of time
• Pen and paper, to draw diagrams or write down important information like crossroads I pass by and names of restaurant/stores
• My phone, to take pictures of important landmarks

Things I carry with me but haven’t used yet:

• Cash, for a taxi ride home in case I get lost
• My grandma’s phone with working cell connection, to call in case of emergency

With these tools I haven’t gotten lost in this foreign land yet, but my fear of doing so keeps me from going very far. Or at least making many turns. Most days I get out on the main road, choose one way to go, and walk in a straight line before my watch tells me it’s time to turn around. I don’t think I’ll get around to genuinely wandering and getting lost this trip, which is a shame because I don’t know if I’ll ever be anywhere this safe and urban that doesn’t have Google Maps or Uber.

Without a phone leading me around, I pay more attention my surroundings to keep from getting disoriented. The fear of getting lost heightens my senses. I highly recommend it to everyone—that is, getting lost (with appropriate safety measures, of course). You’ll pay more attention to the world around you, hone your sense of direction, and practice dealing with unfamiliar situations.