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By Brian, May 31, 2006 2:22 pm

I’ve been not blogging much as of late due to being sick, and dealing with a failing computer system. My old HP Vectra VLi8 was cooking hard-drives on a nearly daily basis due to an airflow flaw in the design. Try as I might (I ended up cutting holes in the side of the case and installing fans) the damage to the IDE bus was already done, and thus I’ve had to build a different PC into another case.

Somehow during this time I managed to catch a throat infection – got over that and ran smack into bronchitis. Who gets bronchitis in the Spring? Bah. Anyways – I’ve got my prescription, doing what I can to get healthy and I’m back online and blogging. Just in time for this lovely hot weather we’re having in Ottawa. (31+ degrees Celsius BEFORE the humidex)

Beats freezing, in my books.

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By Brian, May 31, 2006 1:55 pm

There once where some givens in life. If you grew up living on a farm, more than likely you’d become a farmer. If you grew up the son of a blacksmith, you’d likely become one yourself. A hundred years later, generally there aren’t very many blacksmiths, and farms are run with large equipment that allows a single farmer to tend to twenty times the land, which is getting scarcer to find due to industrialization and urbanization of said land.

Jobs are no longer lifestyles, and careers are no longer stable. Just as we started to adapt as a society to industrialization the information age came and changed the rules again. When I was born, the only computers available required teams of trained staff to operate punch-card readers, and anything small and solid-state you had to invent or at least assemble yourself and they didn’t do very much. The very next year Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak put out a computer called the Apple Two. It was small, self-contained and almost affordable. Plug it into your television and read programs off your tape recorder – devices many people already had in their homes.

Suddenly anyone could word-process, balance their checkbook and play arcade games in their home. IBM was forced to reckon with this change and develop the PC to compete. Bill Gates bought an operating system that was a copy of CP/M (the owner of CP/M thought he was crazy and refused to be a part of it) and adapted it to the system IBM created and after this the world was never the same.

Now the secretary pools are obsolete since CEO’s can hammer out a memo in their own words, spell-checked and formatted in a few minutes. The jobs promised people of my generation are rapidly vaporizing. Auto-mechanics need computer skills since our vehicles are become largely information appliances on wheels. Assembly is being outsourced to newly industrialized Asian countries who can do the job cheaper. Computer tech’s are being phased out due to hardware and software becoming obsolete and replaced long before it actually breaks down. I have a feeling that as wireless technology improves and becomes cheaper, network administrators will be no longer required in force. One person could oversee an entire office network with ease.

So what’s a fellow to do? Even the computer skills that I’ve belabored to develop are getting behind the times. I once believed if I knew C++ I’d be set! That’s the kind of thing we where brought up to understand – the industrial concepts applied to information technology. Learn your trade then make a career out of it. Set for life.

People are doing jobs now that didn’t exist only a few years ago. Not only has the information age changed the landscape, it’s doing it on a daily basis. I’m only 27 (well, OK, in two days I’ll be 28) and already I’m starting to feel the sting of being behind the times. These things where all emerging when I was a lad, and nobody anywhere at the time knew what the impact would be. Once you could plan on having a career, now they’re telling young people that’s not going to happen – plan on two or three, or more!

I guess I’m going to have to rethink our industrial work paradigms, because the world has changed and they no longer fit. I do hope this is a fun ride…

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By Brian, May 16, 2006 11:44 pm

Things in Canada where changing while I was a wee lad – too young and unawares to follow or care to perceive them. During this time Canada was declared bilingual and it was also declared multicultural. Enabling immigrants to preserve their cultural identity while creating a new culture made up as a mosaic.

On paper, this is a very altruistic concept – and truly Canadian, to be sure. A funny thing happened to Canada when this concept came out of the court house: The law of the land had changed, but the people had not. Perhaps it’s because the concept has only been around us for a few decades, but I see a country confused.

For example, in Ottawa, it has been deemed legal for women to go topless in public. It was never illegal for men to do so and therefore this is a fair law. Regardless of law, the people haven’t changed – seldom to women appear topless (I’ve actually never witnessed it first-hand) while men still do. Most people still believe it to be morally offensive, or have simply grown up with the taboo of bared breasts.

These things are the source of the confusion, I think. The law is idealistically correct and fair, but the people it governs do not necessarily all have the same altruistic viewpoint of it. Most have the same beliefs, ideals and prejudices they had before the law changed.

I wish that at this point I had a solution to propose, but sadly, I report I do not. These are just my observations. Having grown up during these changes, and being a rather unfocused child, I rarely took any time away from the computer screen, a book or building an elaborate (and ultimately unfinished) tree fort somewhere.

Besides that, the rural schools I went to in the ’80s where not exactly pictures of diversity due to the population of the region, so there likely was little change to see had I taken the time to notice. I guess the question I’m wondering now is if Canada’s flavor of Socialist Democracy will survive test of time, or will we ultimately fail in our idealism like communism did? Nice as a theory, but never in recorded history has anybody ever tried to govern over so many people as there are in the world today.

It’s rather sobering to consider that the luxuries, freedoms, and health-care we depend on is all part of an untried system.

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