Had a rather "interesting" night last night. Got a speeding ticket, found out an arrest from 12 years ago is still on my record, need to get that expunged ASAP. Thought I had paid someone to take care of that for me. None of that is really a big deal, but it did lead to me staying awake, and reflecting on my life.
What have I accomplished: (for now I will keep this to my career, I am too tired today to expand beyond that)
Built a career from scratch in IT, as a Network Administrator and a Network Engineer, with no formal training. Everything I know about computers comes from reading a book, and spending countless hours of my life tinkering. How did I get to here from going to college as a Materials Engineer? Well, that one is not so strange, and no, I am not one of the thousands of engineering drop outs who went into IS. I was sitting with a group of friends at a party, 6 of 10 sheets to the wind, and suddenly realized, that I need more social interaction in life than what my chosen career was going to offer me. I chose it, (ME), because I have always intrigued by technology. I love it, I was reading Popular Science when I was in 4th grade. I was reading Scientific America when I was in 7th. So, this thought left me searching for something that would be technology based, deal with people, and be constantly changing, to keep it from getting stale. The only thing I could come up with that fit this bill at the time was computers. (Some people would say, you went into computers to be social?) Well, yes, and in doing so, I intentionally took a support role instead of development.
So far I have had a very good run, and I am glad I made the choice I did. Lately, I have started to get bored with what I am doing, and it has taken 9 years for that to happen. For me, that is amajor record. What do I do to alleviate the boredom I am starting to feel? I have been looking at options within IT, and I have come down to only two real conclusions so far. I think I need to get into database management/development or into software development. I have learned some very basic programming in 5 different languages, but have not done any code writing in almost 10 years. I feel like I am starting all over from scratch as I type in some "hello world" programs in a couple different languages trying to find one to jump into.
2 hours of sleep sucks