InkBlot's Inkernet

…right now, is an Alaskan artist named Marian Call.  Pop open her site in a new browser window, tab, origami chicken or whatever, then keep reading this.

So, “geek chic”…frankly, worries me.  Perhaps it’s because for so long now, geeks have been the subculture to defy direct scrutiny.  At first, no one understood us and tended to leave us alone.  These days, there’s more of us than you’d think…yet we still try to avoid notice, because, well…it might scare some of you to realize you’ve already joined us.

Which is why whenever I see anything marketed to geeks, I tend to get suspicious.  We don’t tend to do that very much.  Not on purpose.  Thankfully, Marian hasn’t…in fact, as you poke around her website, look for a track called, “I’ll Still be a Geek After Nobody Thinks it’s Chic.”  Long title, but sums up what I’m trying to get at here pretty darn well:  it can be tricky to separate “geeks advising geeks on cool, geeky stuff” versus “marketers trying to subvert geeks”.  This is the former, not the latter.

So where did I learn about the lovely Ms. Call?  Well, it’s getting a bit fuzzy…because for awhile, I hadn’t, and then it seemed like everyone was talking about here.  Somehow, it all revolves around something called W00tstock.  After an appearance on their tour, lots of the geeks I follow on Twitter keep talking about her.

What else do you need to know?

• Vanilla, her debut album, contains lots of goodness.
• Got to Fly was commissioned by Quantum Mechanix, and is largely dedicated to the Firefly universe of Joss Whedon.  Do you need to know and love Firefly to like this album?  No!  Really, only one song I can think of might seem strange if you don’t know Firefly.  Although, if you know me and don’t like Firefly, I’ll probably pity you.
• She’s on tour right now, though sadly not near Texas.

So give her a listen, and sometime soon I’ll try and remember to tell you about more W00tstock alum, like Paul & Storm, Molly Lewis, and Jonathon Coulton¹.

1. Who may not have appeared at a W00tstock yet, but it’s only a matter of time… ↩

This past year, some big things have happened for me.  First, I changed jobs…sort of.   I still work in the same company, but I’ve moved from being a Technical Trainer with the Tech Support department, to being a ‘System Engineer’ in the Release Management¹ team.  This means I help shepherd software from the developers out to all the servers and workstations in our little world.

It’s a marked change for me…for about 20 years now², I’ve worked in some form of tech support.  Even up to the last 8 years as a trainer.  I wasn’t always on the front lines, but I was always there, fighting to make Windows PCs work for users who’d rather be doing something other than fighting with their PCs.  Now, I’m doing a variety of things: installing services and daemons on UNIX servers, packaging and deploying windows software, and on and on.

I’ve been working so hard to reach a point where I felt like I was accomplishing something on more than just a person-by-person basis.  In Training, I felt I was going to reach that point…but I didn’t.  Lots of reasons, and I might do a post-mortem some time, but not now.  Suffice it to say, I need to grow.  I needed a change.  My new job is fantastic.  I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water some days, but on others I do feel occasional bursts of brilliance.

Sometimes, when you’re in a comfortable little groove, you forget how exciting and thrilling leaving that groove and striking out in a new direction can be.

1. Yes, this is an ITIL term. ↩
2. ouch…now I feel old ↩