Ask Paul: July 17 ⭐

Happy Friday! We're in Mexico, we have no Internet, and the U.S. is either covered in smoke or underwater. But it's all good, or will be, and getting the weekend started a bit early sounds like a fantastic idea.
"Please Let This Hot Pink Pixel 11 Leak Be Real"

Well, the leak is real
🤯 Reimagined
michaelmdiv asks:

You seem to have reinvented yourself a couple of times (i.e. moving from software guy to journalist). What are some of the lessons or tips you could share from those transitions?

Excuse the stream of consciousness here. And elsewhere, actually.

I need to be super-clear here: I never went into anything in life with any kind of a plan. I mostly just ping-ponged between events that were thrust upon me or just occurred to me, and I decided accordingly when possible. Most of whatever has been good in my life is luck or happenstance. I guess that's true of some/most of the bad things too.

I feel like people grow up with whatever assumptions and opinions based on their upbringing and that hopefully you evolve and change when you learn more. When I grew up, I was good at drawing for some reason, and so it seemed like that was going to be some way forward. Certainly, my mother thought so, and she pushed me into various art classes, some private and some with groups. After the fourth grade, she enrolled me in a summer art program at a nearby private school that I did enjoy, but then my parents decided I should go there the next school year. And that did not work out well. So I had one year outside the Dedham public school system, even though at some point that private offered to let me go there for free for some reason.

Anyway, by the time I graduated from high school, I had won every art award you could win and I was going to the Art Institute of Boston while everyone else I knew was going off to what I'll call normal colleges and probably then to normal careers.

That did no go well either. Just a few months into this, I realized that this was a path to never making any money, and I wasn't happy with the classes, most of the teachers, the lack of any computer anything, and I just coasted and dropped out after the first year. I ended up taking a year off, worked at Toys R Us, where I met the woman I'm still married to--more luck--and then went back to school in New Mexico of all places. For one year, because that, too, did not work out. The issue was that I had no real direction. I had enjoyed art until the art school beat it out of me, but I had gone back to school for ... nothing? I don't even remember what my major was. English maybe. It didn't make sense.

Somewhere in here it occurred to me that I could maybe turn my love of computers and technologies from a hobby into a career. And so after coming back from New Mexico, getting married, and continuing schooling part-time at night, I decided to actually go to school to learn software development. Long story short, we moved to the Phoenix area and I tried again...