Heeding Inevitability
After nearly 3 years of constant blogging, I am surprised that I’ve been so content on the free WordPress. I started on Blogspot way back when, and it wasn’t sophisticated enough for me (it still isn’t). Oh, I could have mucked around with the HTML and CSS (I am fluent in both), but WordPress was so much easier to get going. And I would have kept with this free version, too, if I hadn’t started chafing at the restrictions.
So I am striking out into a new frontier. I bought a domain and a hosting plan, whipped up a WordPress install that I can control, and will be migrating this blog over. Everything that’s here will remain here. You are all free to continue your conversations here as you’ve been doing, but I do hope that at least a few of you find your way over to the new site. In any event, I doubt I will be posting much here now, except to answer in the comments. I hope we can continue our vibrant conversations at the new site.
So what’s the tally? 149 posts, 728 approved comments, and a smidge over 48,000 views. So thanks for that. I don’t do this for money, so all I have are collected stats. My hope is that I can do even better in the future.
Come and visit me: http://blog.aaron-helton.com
We can resume our discourse there.
PMF Orientation 2009: Open Thread
Wow! An open thread twofer!
In this thread I want to collect the experiences of anyone who attended one of the three 2009 Presidential Management Fellows 3 day orientations in Shepherdstown, WV. This includes the following three sessions (I attended the December session, in case anyone wanted to know/cares):
Session 1: October 13-15, 2009 (Tuesday – Thursday)
Session 2: December 15-17, 2009 (Tuesday – Thursday)
Session 3: January 20-22, 2010 (Wednesday – Friday)
It doesn’t matter which PMF class you’re from, just that you attended one of these sessions. Also, this is NOT a survey, and I am not affiliated with the PMF Program Office. I am merely interested in providing a rich information set to the comparatively small group of people who go through this program or are considering it. Look at it as a “day in the life of” kind of discussion as well as a reinforcement of the networking you did when you went to the orientation (it’s up to you to figure out how to reconnect with someone you met at orientation; I’m just providing a discussion thread).
What did you think of the orientation? What were some of the most memorable features (good or bad)? Can you share some of your totally awesome/mind-numbingly awful team building experiences, preferably in a non-incriminatory fashion? Have fun 
2010 PMF Assessment: Open Thread
[Update 2/1/2010: There aren't too many ways to say this: None of what I say on my blog constitutes official or even semi-official advice. My only perspective is that of a PMF appointee who went through this same process last year. While it is true that I work for OPM, who administers the PMF program, I would like to assure you that all of the information I present, either in the articles I write or my comments on the site, are drawn from publicly available sources and do not constitute proprietary or inside knowledge. What you choose to do with this information is up to you. If I've misrepresented something, it's my personal fault; simply point it out and move on. The analysis and opinion represent my own thoughts on the subject and do not represent OPM's position, nor can any of them be considered official information, so take that for what it's worth.]
While walking down the halls of my office building yesterday, I saw a sign indicating that the PMF assessment was in progress/had taken place (it could have been up all week for all I know; I just happened to see it yesterday). For those of you who took it in DC, you know what office building I’m talking about. Anyway, I guess it means that testing season has kicked off. I’m not sure what the assessment schedule is like for the other locations, but it’s entirely possible that the assessments are on different days in different locations, so let’s get a sort of roll call (to be fair, I *could* go ask, but I have neither a true need to know nor the desire to go chase something like that down; plus, I would rather let anyone who took the assessment or is planning to take it have the discussion). When and where did you/do you plan to take the assessment? What did you think of it? Are there any last minute tips (for those of you who took it already) you’d like to share with everyone? Finally, did the materials on my blog, Courtney Fong’s blog, or the PMF website help you?
Noughties Recap Part 2: Personal Journey
The Journey by alicepopkorn
The time in a person’s life between 20 and 30 is a time of tremendous personal growth. Many who go to college finish out their degrees early in that time, and some of those go on to graduate school. Most are starting out somewhere in some field, chosen or otherwise imposed by circumstance, usually hoping for advancement and the opportunity to find meaningful work. And a good number will get married and have kids in this time frame.
My circumstance was similar, but I just had to go off and do things in a different order. Having washed out of my first attempt at college in 1997, I instead joined the Army that year and was married by 1999. So that sets a bit of the stage for how the decade played out.
Ten years ago today, my wife and I went to a dinner and dance to celebrate the Millennium. We enjoyed the dinner, but I must confess I’ve never been much of a dancer, and I was positively a stick in the mud. To this day I do feel a bit badly about being unwilling to dance, but I digress. We attended the party knowing nobody else in attendance. You see, I had been in Kosovo for 6 months and had only been back in Germany with my wife since the fourth of December. This had been our first year of marriage, and of it, we spent a grand total of three or four months together on account of both the Kosovo deployment and the fact that it took nearly four months to get her to Germany in the first place. Somehow she had weathered all of those things and plenty of others in all our years of marriage; why she puts up with me I’ll never know 
So my first year of the decade was spent entirely in Germany, working, traveling, and just enjoying what the country had to offer. That, of course, came to an end when I received orders to go to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. One might think that, being from Texas, I would have been thrilled, but in fact it was the last place I wanted to be (well, before Afghanistan and Iraq became options). Nevertheless, we made the best of it, and I spent my final 3 years as a soldier there in El Paso. It’s not to say there were no positive aspects, but it’s so far removed from any place else that it might as well be another country itself.
It’s probably a good time to note that I was in El Paso in September 2001. I think I will save the details of what I was doing then for 2011, when I can do a proper 10 year retrospective on it, but suffice it to say 9/11’s impact on the Army was profound, and its effect on me operated on multiple levels. There was of course the emotional one, and that can’t be discounted, but the impact it had on my enlistment was sufficient to throw my future plans into disarray. One of the results of declaring war on terror was something called “stop loss,” which has been termed a backdoor draft. The idea was to keep soldiers trained in critical and understaffed fields from leaving the Army. IT was one of those fields.
I remember adopting a routine for a while of going to work and getting online first thing in the morning to check the stop loss status. I did this every day for a while, and I will admit the idea fostered in me a bad attitude. At the time there was nothing worse in my mind than to know that I was simply waiting to leave the Army but not knowing when I would be allowed to. It never got bad enough for me to give up any hope of an honorable discharge, but my spirits were pretty low. In fact, a good portion of 2003 could be considered one of the low points in my career.
During our stay in El Paso, both my wife and I (childless at the time, aggressively so) concentrated fully on our studies, with the result that I finished my long overdue undergraduate degree in the Spring, and she in the Fall, of 2003. It was at this point that my enlistment ended. What I hadn’t counted on, of course, was that the economic impact of the Dot Com implosion meant that I would have a hard time finding a job in my field, which from the start has been Information Technology. I went to stay with my parents for a couple of months after I got out of the Army so the wife could finish school and I could look for a job in a place where I had reliable internet access. It didn’t really pan out, and by Thanksgiving we were nearly out of ideas. To complicate matters, we had finally decided to conceive our first child, and so we had a baby on the way. With no job prospects and nowhere to go, we applied for food stamps, she applied for Medicaid, and I got my paperwork together for unemployment, which I would start collecting near the end of December.
Sometime during this period, we took a trip to Austin to follow a lead, not for me, but for my wife. She managed to land a long-term substitute teaching position in Round Rock, while I continued to throw resumes into the void. We only looked at Austin because I had some friends living there and because it was sizable enough that I figured I could find a job (Amarillo and its surrounds, had family but few job prospects in my field). Otherwise it was essentially random. But that’s where we moved. Three months after that I got a contract job at Dell doing customer support. Looking back, I figure everyone in IT probably has to pay their dues in call centers. It was the worst non-Army job I’ve had (and I’ve not had many). Fortunately I only needed to be there for two months, since a job at Hire.com I had interviewed for two months prior was suddenly offered to me. At nearly twice the pay, I jumped on it and never looked back. Sure, I was a contractor for a year, but I could actually afford to feed my family.
Shortly after starting work there, my first child, Daniel, was born. My wife and I had been married a full five years before having a child, and I can look back and divide my marriage into two convenient segments: before kids and everything else. The whole time before kids was one way, and, well, everything else has changed. The saying goes that kids change everything, and I concur.
A year and a promotion later (or within a couple of months), we bought a house, our first. Somehow we were sensible about it and only bought what we could afford on one income (and in fact LESS than what we could afford). Shocking, I know! But that became an important factor later.
We stayed in Austin from January 2004 to June 2009, four and a half years, and during that time we also had our second child, Thomas, and actually got kinda cozy there. Things were going pretty well, in fact, and most of our decisions involved the next project we were going to undertake on the house. The only reason we moved is the loss of my job in 2008 and my the entrance into the Presidential Management Fellows program in 2009, which brought me here to Washington, DC. The details of 2009 are more fully explored in a separate retrospective (I’m certainly glad decades don’t end too often; I don’t know how many more retrospectives I can write).
How did you grow and mature over the last decade? Feel free to share in the comments!
Noughties Recap Part 1: Technology
Y2K Ready by Mil
The double oughts were a pretty wild ride. I started the decade as a solider in the US Army, stationed in Germany, celebrating my first year wedding anniversary, and newly returned from a 6 month Kosovo deployment; I ended it as a Federal civil servant in Washington, DC, having just celebrated my 11th wedding anniversary (on the amended schedule, since we purposefully changed the date during last year’s vow renewal), and a father of two awesome boys. But this first post isn’t so much about my own journey as it’s about how technology shaped it. I’ll explore my personal journey in more detail in Part 2.
Ten years ago there were many things I was doing that I either can’t do today or now fully realize I shouldn’t do today, and there are many more things I can do today that just weren’t possible then. While neither the internet nor the web were invented in this decade, both technologies flourished with the rapid drop in computer processing, storage, and network bandwidth prices. For me, these technologies overwhelmingly defined the decade.
This decade saw the rise of Google, the birth of what we now consider social networking, real time web, and the supremacy of user generated content. It also ushered in streaming media, namely music and movies and a massive shift toward ebooks. These technologies also heralded the death of traditional media distribution, especially those based on physical formats, such as printed newspaper, printed magazines, DVDs and CDs. Note that I am not saying the formats are dead, merely that they are certainly not in the state most people predicted they’d be 10 years ago, and there’s plenty of evidence that some of them will indeed disappear. And finally, we can’t forget the increasing role of these technologies in both politics and government, from mobilizing voters to pushing government transparency and efficiency to new levels (not the highest, just new).
With that backdrop in mind, let’s explore the things I was doing technologically 10 years ago and how that’s changed over the decade.
10 Years Ago I…
…was downloading music on Napster. When that died (before being resurrected) I moved to the decentralized networks with clients like Limewire and probably a dozen others I’ve since forgotten. In my day I probably pirated some 10-12,000 songs because it was so easy to do. Would I have ever bought those? Not a chance, at least for most of them. I can admit this now because I actually don’t have any of it anymore. In fact, of the 14,000ish audio files I now have sitting around collecting digital dust, every last one of them came from one of three sources: 1) ripping my CDs, 2) downloaded from legitimate commercial sources (though rarely paid for directly), or 3) downloaded for free because they are or were free at the time.
…couldn’t dream of waiting long enough to download video files, then dig up some obscure player just to watch 3 minutes of something (at the time, if I recall, that something was usually a funny video or a music video of some sort; full length movies were out of the question, since I was in Germany with a dial-up account).
…had a Geocities web page (or two; probably had some in other places too, but I’ve since forgotten them), complete with eye-aching backgrounds, embedded MIDI music, blink tags, awful font colors, and gratuitous, well, everything. You think the crap that shows up on places like Twitter, Facebook, and my blog are bad? Try hopping in the time machine. Warning: I’m not responsible for the profuse eye bleeding that will probably occur. UGC is mostly user generated crap
…used things like email, instant messenger (Yahoo, MSN, Skype (yes, really), ICQ), IRC (that’s Internet Relay Chat for you n00bz), and newsgroups and forums for social networking. In fact, it was a bit bewildering when people started calling social networking a new thing when MySpace and Facebook arrived.
…still didn’t read newspapers. I never developed the habit, which means I don’t really mourn the loss of so many of them today. Perhaps the internet short-circuited me on that, though, because I’ve had access to it in some form or another continuously since 1995. By the time I reached an age where I started paying attention to news, the internet was there, waiting for me.
…bought CDs and DVDs. Yea, though I walked through the valley of free musical bounty, still did I drop $15-$20 on stuff I wanted to own (hence the 14k tracks mentioned above). CDs I still buy on occasion, but nowhere near the level I used to. DVDs, not so much. Netflix (especially Instant Queue), has pretty much replace that fix.
…bought things online. Mostly books from Amazon and junk from Ebay. Of the two, I only still use Amazon. I also bought computer parts, read reviews, and compared prices online. Who knew?
…thought ebooks would never truly replace dead trees. I still don’t, and I still buy (and will continue to buy) physical format books.
…only played games on PCs, because I thought consoles were a waste of computing resources. Who would want a computer that could only do one thing (and sometimes not even that well)?
…had to use printed maps to get anywhere. Sure, MapQuest and Yahoo eventually had enough information to populate meaningful routes, but you still had to print out the map you generated online and hope it was good enough for the task. They also were hit or miss on the international scale, plus none of them were available for cell phones (GPS was expensive, and I don’t think either the phones or the cell networks were even remotely web-capable then).
…thought (rightly, at the time) that laptops were convenient supplements but poor replacements for a full desktop computer. Moreover, I figured they’d always be that way, and couldn’t imagine a day when I didn’t have a desktop computer in the house (I still do, but see below).
Now let’s look at things I am doing today that either weren’t possible 10 years ago or were in such an infant state that they were barely usable.
Today I…
…download (often streaming) movies and music from a variety of sources. If I want to buy music, I do so one song at a time (I don’t use iTunes, but do occasionally use Amazon). For free music (you know, actually FREE), there are some good independent sources around (Jamendo comes to mind). I played with the whole movie download thing in the early to middle part of the decade (2003 and on), mostly because BitTorrent had arrived. I still do that occasionally (for gray market stuff like unlicensed Anime; what, you think I’d post anything more incriminating?), but have since moved to streaming via Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube.
…maintain a blog and routinely use (read: am addicted to) Twitter and Facebook. I still use email, though it’s not my preferred mode of communication, and have moved to Google for almost all of my other communications (messenger, email, even some telephony via Google Voice). I have, on and off, kept my own server running my own site(s), but have since decided to pursue hosting with a provider, largely for ease of maintenance and reliability (no more wondering why my server isn’t available only to learn that the kids powered it down). I also occasionally use sites like Flickr (mostly to get images) and even have published on Youtube (hey, I have one video there). I don’t use IRC or newsgroups much anymore (though I hear they’re still around), and my gaudy Geocities page has finally died along with Geocities (though I think it had disappeared long before; anyway part of it still lives in the Wayback Machine somewhere).
…don’t read newspapers except online. In fact, I don’t even get news from the television anymore, since the reporting format leaves little room for in-depth coverage of issues that interest me. Good newspapers are still good, but I don’t mourn the loss of the others. Digital is the way things are going, and even Rupert Murdoch can’t stop it, despite his incessant bellyaching.
…still buy books, but don’t think that ebooks will have the same impact on the book market as digital formats had on movies and music.
…still buy things online, but pretty much only from sources I trust. Amazon and NewEgg, usually. And actually, I do most of my Christmas shopping online, since I can’t stand waiting around in stores just to buy gifts. I’d do all my grocery shopping online too, but nobody has really figured out how to do that well and make money. For everything else, I use Craigslist.
…always have the ability to find out where I am. My phone has Google Maps on it and is GPS enabled. As long as I have signal, I rarely have to drop down to a printed map for directions.
…use a laptop exclusively at home. What’s more, my wife does the same. We do still have a desktop, but guess what we use that for. Yeah, the kids get to use that, because buying a new keyboard or a mouse for a desktop is cheaper than doing so for a laptop. Also, it’s our media center. That means it’s become a simple utility device and we do everything else on our laptops.
…play games on a console and rarely on a PC (unless they are the ultra casual variety). I made the switch, largely because, as I moved to a laptop (specifically a netbook) for all of my computing needs, the relative power of the machine dropped. My netbook isn’t capbable of playing many PC games, but I don’t need it to, so I don’t care. My wife’s laptop is powerful enough, but of course you sacrifice some mobility to improve the interface (external mouse at the minimum, possibly external keyboard). For the things I need my laptops to do (internet, really), the ones I have are perfectly adequate, and I’ve discovered that I like mobility more than being able to play resource intensive games. One other reason I’ve moved to consoles is that they’ve improved vastly in the last decade, in terms of graphics, playability, performance, pretty much any metric.
…use RSS for all of my news. Why visit the sites repeatedly when you can just wait for a reader to tell you there’s something new? It’s also why I don’t feel compelled to write blog posts on any predictable schedule; those of you who subscribe get notified when I publish, and the rest of you get here by searching for something (my favorite to date was “Aaron Helton is gay.” Made me laugh).
I’m sure this is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but what appears here was most significant to me. If you’d like, how about sharing some of the things you do differently now than you did 10 years ago, technology-wise?
Up next, my decade retrospective on my own personal journey, likely to be interesting to nobody but me
