Descriptions of the Nondescript

Writing Never Quite Lets You Go

I've been away from my blog for a long time. There were several little issues that I think of as "reasons," but the real problem was the damage I took in being relegated to the scrapheap by my former employer when they laid me off. I didn't admit to myself how much that hurt me --- how it left me unconfident and devastated, despite my sure knowledge that it wasn't personal, it wasn't even reasonable, and that I could be more than I had been in my new role.

So I'm writing again. A little. Here in this blog, and maybe some day soon I'll be finishing my A.N.G.E.L. story.

One hurdle in getting this blog back into shape was that I had started moving the whole thing to another hosting mechanism. I started with WordPress, found it appalling, then moved to Ghost, which was nicer but seemed just not quite what I wanted.

I found Hexo and it's just what I wanted.

I do have a new role. I'm a system architect for a gigantic electronics manufacturing company (no, not that evil one everyone knows from Apple's struggles with human rights, but one nearly that big). What I do isn't directly engineer as such --- it's more like I act as a translator (sometimes literally) between our customers and their needs and the "real" engineers, who are mostly located in Shanghai.

Ah, Shanghai --- one of the largest cities in the world, and a showpiece for the thriving future China envisions for all of its citizens. What a vibrant, exciting, self-contradictory place it is. I've spent many weeks there in the first six months of my new job, and I expect I'll continue that. The people I work with there are good folks with talents and energy and a real sense of espirit de corps in their work environment. This despite the causually dismissive attitude that seems to pervade the electronics and engineering communities when it comes to Chinese talent. These people are a product of their history, but they also have a lot of future create and they are fucking doing it.