Category: Just Shelley

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Just Shelley

The desks are the same, but the apples are different

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It’s not unusual nowadays for older people to return to school when faced with long periods of unemployment, profound changes in their lives, and/or redundancy in their field. In the past, many of these people have gone into the computer sciences in one form or another, probably accounting for the fact that the information technology industry is now faced with double-digit unemployment.

I’ve been exploring the possibility of returning to school myself, and not just for reasons of being unemployed; using this time as an opportunity to refocus my life, to explore new things, is a very seductive proposition. After all, I tend to think of our middle years (anything between 35 and, oh, 90) as a ‘do over’ time — a time to suddenly discover that there’s a path beaten through the forest between the road taken and the road not.

One option I’m exploring is going for a graduate degree in either psychology or the computer tech field, both of which I hold bachelor degrees in. There are so many new possibilities of study in psychology, ranging from the more traditional clinical or industrial studies, to new explorations into social behavior and neurosciences. As for the tech field, though we’ll never see the manic behavior of the dot-com era, I do believe the industry will recover eventually, and there continues to be new and fascinating exploration into uses of technology.

In particular, the possibility of someday being in a position to encourage more women to enter the technology fields is an attractive one; this is in addition to gaining a better understanding into why we’re so underrepresented in the first place. In some ways, this exploration could lead us to a new awareness of being ‘woman’ as compared to being ‘man’ that can stretch beyond just the study of technology.

However, I don’t have to focus on graduate studies in psychology or computer science — I could explore all new fields, either at the graduate or undergraduate levels.

I love to write so it seems natural that I look at the possibility of literature or journalism. There’s also my interest in history and politics, and in the last few years an increased interest in humanity’s earliest recorded history, which belongs more in the realm of archeology than history.

What I would really like to do is explore something that blurs the lines between all these fields. I would like to take a little history and the organizational and social side of politics, some information management, writing (of course), psychology, and a bit of archeology, and blend it all together. I would then use this academic soup to spend my time discovering humanity’s global unconsciousness, which manifests itself through tales and stories, rumor, legends and myths.

Categories
Writing

The roots of the gnarly tree run deep

The roots of the gnarly tree run deep.

The untroubled tree
grows straight and smooth,
beautiful and proud
treetops vanishing into the sky,
towering over lessor beings.

The gnarly tree rests close
to the earth, and twists about
from knocks and blows;
rough skinned from exposure
and bowed with time.

The untroubled tree commands
respect as you sit hand over eyes
trying to see the upper branches.
Wrapping arms around it your
hands fail to touch and the bark
leaves no impression.

But the gnarly tree invites one
to sit beneath its shade
and nestle among its roots;
To rub your cheek against the rough
texture of the bark
and breath in the rich scent;
To lean back among the branches
letting them wrap about you
in an embrace both green and old.

Shelley Powers

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Categories
Writing

Do not got gentle into that good night

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

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Categories
Just Shelley Places

Soft arcs of winter white

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. This is derived from trip notes recorded in paper journal

I started the trip to California under clear skies that lasted with me until Colorado. I arrived at Denver around sunset and the sky was beautiful, a blue-gold color that speckled the dark grey clouds gathering to the west, and gilded the green of the trees and the grass on the side of the road.

I stopped for the evening in Cheyenne, spending the night listening to the many trains blowing through town, each with its own distinctive whistle. I would begin to drift off when a whistle would blast, close by, startling me awake. I would listen, heart pounding as the whistle faded, the sound becoming softer, sadder as the train moved further away.

Leaving early the next morning, the snow started falling as soon as I left the city behind and entered the pass. The traffic, the few of us, a minivan, a small red car and myself, slowed, staying behind a couple of trucks that had downshifted for their trip down the mountain.

The driving was challenging but manageable, and the reduced speed allowed me to look about. I noticed ring-billed gulls, sea gulls really, next to the road. They lost much of their grace and speed under the onslaught of the cold snow and frozen rain, flapping hard to clear the land, rising awkwardly rather than with the sureness I had seen with gulls at the beach. They didn’t seem right there by the side of the road in a land locked state, chilled by the cold.

I was looking at one pair when out of the corner of my eye I caught an arc of white coming over the concrete divider between our lanes and the lanes of the freeway going in the other direction. A white car had lost control and was spinning on the highway, throwing snow all around, like petals on a flower suddenly opening in a spiral of white.

By some miracle the car missed a truck that shared the road with it, but I didn’t think it could miss the divider. I didn’t see how it could miss the divider. However, when I looked back, I saw it regain control and continue on down the road, unharmed.

I had tensed while watching the car spin about, and once I saw it was safe, I relaxed, yawning from the sudden cessation of stress. I didn’t see the two sea gulls in the road as they tried to take off. I did see the one lift just enough to fly safely to the side of the car. And I saw the other hit my window, flowing up and over the car and falling in a boneless, soft arc of winter white and silver grey to the road as I watched in my rearview mirror.

Categories
Just Shelley Technology

My life as a T-shirt

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

One of the boxes I brought back contained my t-shirt collection — a set of t-shirts that I’ve collected from various events over the last several years, but have never worn. If I had to put together a curriculum vitae, I would do so by taking photos of each of my shirts, putting them into a PDF album to be printed or attached to an email.

There’s the t-shirt I received for being one of the top 50 finalists for Microsoft’s Activate the Web contest. This contest, held in 1996, was used to launch Microsoft’s ActiveX web technologies. I and other contestants had to incorporate ActiveX technology into our web sites in some way. Mine was Hot Pink, using an ActiveX control to interactively tell the web page reader what technology was being used in the page. Coincidentally, Hot Pink was my first introduction of the “Flame of Knowledge” motif that I’ve used ever since, including Li’l YASD and eventually Burningbird.

There are t-shirts from several conferences where I gave presentations, including Internet Worlds and XML Dev-Cons, and even one from O’Reilly’s original P2P conference. Now that was a great conference — last of a kind, last of an era.

I have a Mozilla Hack t-shirt that the Mozilla team personally delivered to one hotel room where I was speaking because of my early promotion of Mozilla as a development tool and not just a browser. Back then Mozilla was getting a lot of flack for not delivering a browser right now

I have another t-shirt from Sybase to commemorate creating a sample application using Powerbuilder 5.0 that was included on the disk with the product. That application was a dynamic inventory control system that would allow a person to define their own categories of inventories items.

Groove gave me a t-shirt when I was meeting with the company about writing a possible book on the product. I also have a Microsoft Site Builder’s shirt, an Amazon Associate shirt, several from O’Reilly, and other shirts I’ve picked up for one reason or another.

My life as a t-shirt. Well, it could have been my life as a yo-yo or hacky sack.

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