My Next Level

I'm keeping this short and sweet.

I think a lot about my future. Mainly, what do I want to do with myself?

I feel like I'm making good progress towards a career in tech. With the paths I've created for myself in school and work, it's clear what I want to do. The road ahead, however, worries me from time to time. I have made a lot of sacrifices in order to follow this dream that I have. I just hope that I've done the right thing.

I do foresee myself as successful. That's all there is to say about that. From here out, it's all about execution.

The stupid (and smart) reasons for Apple/Samsung patent lawsuits

This whole lawsuit culture between all of these tech companies is just really aggravating. The principle of being essentially forced to sue a company in order to keep your patents in place is mind-numbing and only really beneficial to the legal community. It sure seems like that as long as there is innovation there will be lawyers and litigation and bullshit, oh my.

Apple and Samsung have had a nicely profiled exchange in the court system over the iPhone and the Galaxy line of phones. This Engadget article shows the similarities of the devices, but regardless I don't think that the similarities alone cause any confusion. Of course, I'm not sure what the normal consumer would think if they were presented with either phone what decision they would make. I will say that there are several logical reasons why the layman would be able to make the proper choice.

• Apple has done a great job with marketing the iPhone.

  iPhone advertisements are seemingly everywhere and have are reasonably ubiquitous at this point. Even at the release the iPhone was advertised well, unlike the other smartphones that were currently on the market such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile. (Android hadn't even come out with the 1.0 SDK yet, more or less a device, although progress was being made and it would be released shortly after the release of the first-generation iPhone.) As such, most of the interested parties had inquired about the iPhone directly with their provider and been informed that they either have AT&T or the phone was not available (remember we're talking about gen-one.)

• The general population would perceive that only the Apple Store would feature the iPhone.

  The popularity of the Apple retail spaces serves as a good demonstration of the general public knowing exactly where to go for Apple products. Most people are actually pleasantly surprised that they can find the iPhone at AT&T and Verizon stores without having to deal with the lines and crowds of the Apple Store.

• Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7 all have a different feel.

  Without making a comparison of functionality or ease-of-use (in a nutshell you can't really go wrong with either), the difference is noticeable. Since you can't exactly look for the "iPod" button on a device that does not have iOS, it becomes pretty apparent that what you are using is reasonably different. The difference is the least noticeable on Android, which could be considered the most similar to iOS. The others are much different in the way the user interacts with the device and the operating system.

I will say though, I do have one distinctive idea why that my argument is irrelevant.

• Phone salesmen come in two forms: sleazy bastards and morons that read scripts written by sleazy bastards.

  All due respect. Sort of.

  As someone who likes to help people with their problems, I really hate it when I can see someone fail miserably at it. I can remember the last time that I was at the Verizon store, I overheard the saleswoman telling this man and her daughter that they don't have the option to use 3G because the modem was broken and was completely refuting the ability for them to be able to turn that off in the settings. When she stepped away for a second, there was no way for me to resist the urge to walk up to them and tell them the simple switch that they have to flip in order to turn the 3G back on. They thanked me and I was on my way.

  This is the unfortunate truth in a lot of stores. People are trained to get a little commission and learn what to say to get it. They don't take the time to truly understand the products that they sell. When people ask if they can get an iPhone, they can only tell them that they have something "as good as the iPhone" and "you don't really want an iPhone anyway." The competitors of the iPhone, when in the hands of the carriers (I can't believe that I haven't talked about the carriers yet in this article) are definitely marketed as the same device.

I'm not gonna say that I'm an expert about this. All I know is that I want the best phone that I can possibly buy, and I've felt that way since I bought my Blackberry Pearl. What does make me sad is the fact that bullshit about who copied who is covering up who's better than who, which isn't beneficial to anyone.

Irrational(?) fears about the future

Now, if I'm approaching this completely wrong let me know. I just kind of want to vent about what scares me about my chosen career path.

So for a little bit of background, I want to be a programmer. I've always had this attraction to it since I learned HTML in middle school and started writing scripts on my TI-83 to help out my friends in geometry class in my sophomore year of high school. For periods I drifted away from it, but eventually I would come right back. The more that I do it and get (slowly) better at it makes me think that I could really do something great if I just keep going.

However, there are a couple things that just plain scare the crap out of me about it.

• I'm scared that I'm not good enough.

  Plain and simple. I really don't think that I have the skills yet to jump into an internship alongside people who have been doing this their entire lives in their basement (no disrespect.) As I learn more and more about what I'm doing, I believe that I will eventually gain the confidence to ditch this fear. Soon enough, I believe.

• I'm scared that I would have to relocate.

  Unfortunately, not every wonderful tech company is within walking distance from my house. I can accept that fact. I've had a 20+ mile commute for the past three years, so driving somewhere within reason is not out of the question. What scares me is having to actually pick up and move. In the immediate future, it would put way too much in limbo, especially with school. Now that I'm actually in a school that will offer the classes that I would need to graduate, I would hate to jeopardize that any longer.

  The other obvious reason would be my girlfriend. We've already had to deal with long-distance crap for what is now a majority of our relationship. As of now, that's over. I really would hate to have to start that again.

• I won't be able to work on what I want.

  I would hate for programming to lose its fun-ness (for lack of a better term) just because I took some job writing bank software a la Initech and constantly get stuck with TPS reports and a perpetual case of the Mondays. I want this to be fun. Call that immature or with a lack of reality or forward thinking if you'd like, but it scares me.

• I'm completely wrong and I'm gonna hate it.

  I really don't know how the process of software development works. I don't know what kind of pressure I will be in to get things done. I don't even know the metrics for measuring "getting things done." I'm not completely sure what the "things" will be. I guess the main part of this fear relates back to the previous fear of not working on what I want.

Eliminating all of these things may be idealist, but that's just what comes out when I think about taking the risk. At this point it's just a matter of time before I make the jump, but I suppose these are what keep me from doing it tomorrow.

I really hope I’m not burning out.

I haven’t been doing the best job of keeping my resolution to post more. And I’m doing my best to change that. Who knows, maybe the act of posting is enough motivation to post more.

Stress has abounded lately. I haven’t received an acceptance from CSUF yet, which is not necessarily worrisome as much as aggravating. I am certain that there isn’t any problems, but that unfortunately isn’t enough to calm my nerves about the situation. This would usually be the point where I would calmly tell someone to “chill the fuck out,” but my own medicine is hard to swallow.

I hope that this is the reason that I’ve been stressed out at work too, and not the opposite. The last couple weeks have been good though, since I’ve been doing a lot of work formatting training material on the company wiki. It’s nice to be able to just type for a living. What I don’t want to happen is getting burned out. As welcome as a change may be, I hope that I wouldn’t do it for the wrong reasons and without the proper contingency plan.

Combine this with next week off while my sister is in town and things sound like they’re looking up. If they don’t, I have bigger problems on my hands.

It appears I’ve got myself into a little project.

It’s funny how one little conversation can put so much onto your already overloaded plate.

I stopped at a pizza place yesterday after work to grab a beer, and ran into some old friends that were sitting at the bar. Needless to say, I sat down with them and started chatting it up. We talked about the good beer they had on tap, the irritations of driving behind mindless fools on the freeway...the normal mindless bar conversations. One of these friends that I saw there, however, skewed his conversation with me in a completely different direction.

I’ve known this guy since high school, and we’ve known each other to be huge geeks the entire time. Turns out that, not unexpectedly, that we haven’t changed at all in regards to that. I knew that he had the idea of building an alternative app store for Android. I figured that would be an interesting project to get into. That and, since Kierstyn is back at school, maybe it would give me something to work towards a little bit.

I’m not horribly experienced with development in PHP, but it’s nothing that I can’t learn. That and I need to learn Git so that I can get the source files that he already has done. Add that to the Python and Perl classes that I’m taking this semester and soon enough the notes I write on sticky notes will be object-oriented.

So I guess I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.