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The Aspect War - Chapter 2

Posted by Thaddeus on August 30, 2010 at 10:29am
War laughed.The sound was discordant with the scene of blood and eviscerated corpses all around him. The god of War stood over a battlefield and enjoyed the early morning smell of charred flesh and destruction. The bitter stench of brimstone and gunpowder wafted on the morning breeze, tingling his nostrils and reminding him of battles in other places and other times, each as memorable, in their own way, their signature of violence, unique in that moment. He surveyed the landscape with a practiced eye and was pleased with what he saw. The conflict, while relatively small, was satisfying for all of its human suffering.War was not like the other younger gods. War was not unnerved by the loss of human life. The Others felt that the younger gods should strive for harmony with mankind, harvest their worshipful energies, teach them how best to serve, and glut themselves on that spiritual effluvia. War had no such compunction. If anything, he had no interest in the direct worship of man. Instead, man was his plaything, his action figures; he felt humans were built for war; petty, selfish, mean, childish, hateful. They had so many handles that could be manipulated. It was only natural for them. This did not mean he did not respect them. No, War had a healthy respect for the destructive nature of man, the same way a dog trainer was cautious with a breed of dog known for biting, he trained men to bite everyone but him, and then sent them to attack other men when they got the idea to attack War instead. They were so predictable, it was almost no fun.Through the fog of the early dawn, the landscape promised to be arid, dry and hot. There was not much left to see but the rising smoke from the fires, dirty soldiers making their way back to their field commands, and occasionally stopping to put a man out of his misery. They did not shoot those men. Bullets were expensive, so the work was very personal. War was pleased. He began walking toward his tents, where his retinue were packing up and preparing to move on to the next campaign area. His troops were mostly child warriors from nearby Darfur, with a smattering of older and more experience soldiers, really bullies mostly, leading these groups. There were about a dozen mercenary groups hidden away at a nearby base awaiting instructions. They would arrive by helicopter only if the expendable troops were not able to get the job done.War was dressed in the body of Mani Kunjufu, an African warlord, about two meters tall, strongly built, well fed, with a harsh countenance that his troops found unnerving if he stared too long in their direction. He had a terrible scar on his face, running down his right cheek from a knife wound. It had healed badly and had a puckered, unhealthy appearance. War was sure to show that scar to anyone who would question his authority.The tale associated with it was told around the camp whenever he was not around. One of the bully guards was beating a child soldier at the end of an encounter. The boy had failed to hold his ground and ran from the fight. As the bully was disciplining the boy, he made the mistake of impugning Kunjufu's desire to engage in combat; something about him being weak, dirty and unable to fight like a man, hiding behind his soldiers. Before War claimed him, Mani Kunjufu might have been all of those things. War did not choose him because he was a good soldier. He chose him because he could do what was needed. It was clear that he did not know about War's possession, having only recently been hired and like most bullies believed his own bravado and toughness could not be matched by some new warlord come to town.Unfortunate for him, War was nearby and keenly aware of the discourse. When the bully guard was finished beating the boy, he retired to his tent and waited for one of the camp whores to show up. War visited his tent, instead. When War was seen leaving the tent, he was covered in gore, and there was a deep cut on War's face, oozing black blood. Each drop of War's blood hit the ground and burrowed sinuously into the sand. The man was found in his tent, from the neck down, flayed to the bone, blood and organs everywhere. His throat had not been cut and yet he did not make a sound. A knife handle was found in his hand, but the blade was nowhere to be found. The next day, his tent was gone, viscera and all. No one knew what happened to it; everyone was too afraid to go near it. Rumor was that giant black worms rose from the ground and consumed it, body and all, in the night. No one contested those rumors. There was no more dissent.War, a consummate professional, his uniform was a set of local khakis, dun in color and baggy. He only carried a relatively small 9mm on his hip. Finishing another cigarette, he looked around and noted if he needed a firearm, there was a surplus of them all around him. And if he was really pressed... well lets just say, he had been killing men for several hundred years now, and knew of dozens of ways to get the job done with and without using Essence.As he was leaving the battlefield, his sharp senses heard the snap of a twig two or three hundred feet behind him. Turning, his senses already targeting the unknown movement, he could already tell several things about his target. Tall, physically massive approximately 125 kilos, deliberate movement, not making any attempt to hide, moving in his direction, confidently but haphazardly, as if he were lost or drunk; first this way, then that. War found that strange but waited patiently while nearby carrion birds screeched their pleasure at the excellent feast before them.The man approaching him seemed to be out of place, his brow furrowed in the morning light. Clean-shaved, also wearing a set of khakis, but it was not apparent what was wrong with the look of him. Then War realized what it was. The man was crisp, tidy even. No blood, no dirt, no offal, no debris, as a matter of fact, there was not even dust from the road on him. He appeared cool, even in this blistering Congo morning and he carried a small clipboard as he stepped officiously through the carnage. He was making marks on the clipboard with some regularity, and occasionally would stop to roll a body over before moving on."A lapdog here to do his master's bidding I see," War's sarcastic tone was unconcealed."We have a mutually beneficial relationship, and I am simply doing company business. I am sure you understand," was the polite reply, punctuated with the grunt of a body being turned over and a notation being made on a clipboard."If your master were doing his own work, he would not need me to fill the graves and your tallies, Reckoner.""My Master appreciates your work and knows that you are simply fulfilling your destiny. It has always been in his best interest to work with you, despite your alarming propensity for grandiose displays of destruction--would you mind stepping over here, I need to see that man's face.""What is the point? All of these men are dead, why even bother to mark their passing?" War steps aside while the Reckoner continues his task."Their deaths mean nothing to your office, you are the god of War. Their dying needlessly and aimlessly is your specialty," a tone of bitterness tinged the Reckoner's remark, but he continued his work, attempting to maintain his objectivity. "I on the other hand, must reckon with the dead, their lives, their families, and their spiritual continuance, of which you know nothing, care nothing and discount as empty mummery, not even worthy of your respect. I am merely a servant of an Aspect. You would do well to remember that." The Reckoner stops his work and turns to the god of War."Ah, some backbone after all." War smiles and lights a local cigarette. "Want one?"The Reckoner looked at him, shook his head and replied, "no thanks, those things will kill you.""You know," War began after a deep drag on the cheaply made cigarette "your Master will not always be here to protect you and yours. Rumor has it your agency will be experiencing a change in management. If I were you, I would make a point of deciding where you stand when that happens.""We hear the same rumor, every sixty years or so. Not much ever comes of it. But thanks for the warning," was the chilly response. "Here he is." The Reckoner pulls a number of bodies off of a young teenager. "Lumumba Kisimba, age 16, survivor of the Shaba massacre." The Reckoner pulls the boy to his feet, turns him about and inspects him. "No lasting injuries, just a couple of scratches. Are you well, boy?" the Reckoner's voice is quiet and non-threatening."Yes, sir," was the meek reply. The boy is looking at War and moves behind the Reckoner."There are no survivors of the Shaba massacre, Reckoner," War's voice was low and threatening. "He will not be leaving here, these people are dying to make a point, resistance is futile. If he survives, he threatens that.""Be that as it may, I was sent to recover the boy. Are you saying your reputation might be stained if one boy survives? Surely you can bear it." the Reckoner's voice sounds almost jocular in its pronouncement.War flexes his muscles and grabs a hunting knife from his belt with one hand and pulls his nine millimeter with the other. "Give him to me, I will not be denied. Nor will I ask you again."The Reckoner, turns his back on War, putting his arm around the boy and begins walking away. "You would not violate the Compact to try and kill me, War. I claim the boy as a Hero-in-training. He cannot be touched by you or anyone else until he is done or dies in training. His name is Lumumba Kisimba, War. Remember it, I am certain he will remember you.""He will not be remembering anyone. He is not a Hero yet." War's combat knife began to glow with ethereal Essence. His 9mm begins to shimmer as well with a darker flame. "Give him to me, Reckoner. I have no quarrel with you or your Master. But this deed must be done completely; no survivors.""No," the Reckoner turned toward the boy and the air began to shimmer like the desert on a summer day. Sand began to swirl at his feet, a subtle power began to build."Damn the Compact, there is more at stake!" War's weapons, both glittering with Essence, let fly. The knife is thrown with deadly precision. The Reckoner, turns and using his clipboard as a shield, catches the knife, its blade clearly penetrating the surface, but stopping short of cutting through the board. As their two powers meet, there is a displacement, partially physical, partially spiritual, akin to an exploding shell and the boy is blown backward to the ground. The gun's staccato voice resounds in the morning air, a killing sound, literally; the carrion birds and anything else within a quarter mile, drops dead. Meanwhile its projectiles appear to streak in slow motion toward the boy.Lumumba Kisimba, Hero-in-training, sees his death and is resigned to it. He sees War as he truly is, a monstrous being of dark energy, barely contained within the shell of the evil warlord, Mani Kunjufu. He sees War extending his tendrils of force toward him, but those energies are moving slower and slower, as if he were watching a film that had stopped. Then he looks at the Reckoner, and sees him for what he is, a man powered by a more powerful and more ominous force. As powerful and fear-inducing as War is, when he looks at the Reckoner, it takes his breath away, this overwhelming spiritual pressure. Which makes the next sentence he hears even more strange and impossible sounding."Listen carefully to me, child, for in a moment, I will be dead."
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Last Sun

Posted by Thaddeus on August 10, 2010 at 3:00am

Our world is a silent one. Not by choice, but by necessity.

There can be no waste, not a breath, not a sound, not an echo. We communicate with sound but our walls recollect that sonic energy, our clothing absorbs that energy and storing it for future use. Contemplation before speech; no rushing to communicate our thoughts. Telepathy is preferred.

Our world is a darkened one. Not by choice, but by necessity.

We use no light we do not need, so our eyes and ears are adapted to darkness. Tiny, light emitting matrices dot the walls of our living ships, providing light only while we pass and only when necessary. Every erg is cultivated from our environment. The long rays of dying stars, the short waves from our only source of nearby light, Sindin, red dwarf, last star for five thousand light years and from where we sit, the last living star we know of.

Our world is a nearly motionless one. Not by choice but by necessity. We are trained as children, that all of our lives will be filled with activity, energy and movement and not to waste it. Silent and still concentration drills are a fact of life for children, being trained to harness all of our bodies energy.

First we control the mental energy, marshalling our minds, our very thoughts, ordering them, structuring them into a crystalline lattice of logic and reason. Then our bodies, first in the physio-chambers that toned our muscles, enhanced our hearts, challenged our lungs, tempered our carbon-hardened skeletons, tightened our muscles until we were like polished onyx, smooth, cool and without flaw. We learned to control our very internal energy, raising and lowering it at will, our organs under our mental command, generating biles and fluids to regulate our life-force.

We are then injected with sehrwinzig that allow us to manipulate the very molecular energies at the very threshold of existence. We can harness those energies for limited feats of physical strength, speed or endurance far beyond our primitive ancestors of our distant homeworld. In homage to them, we have not changed our outer appearance, but our inner appearance would completely belie our origins. We had no choice.

We are grown in labs, without contact, and almost all aspects of our being has been changed to maximize our use, creation and dispersal of energy. Our skin is a photo-absorptive mesh, dark in hue, blue, purple, burgundy, black, dark brown are the choices that ensure maximum absorption from our wan sun.

We no longer have the luxury of gestation. We are now fully functioning and able to exist outside of the birthing chamber in less than three months. We are able to mature to the size of a five year old in three to six months. During that time, knowledge is encoded into our brains with programming that will allow us to develop our personality.

We develop that personality in simulacra, living virtual lives at a timescale that allows us to experience all the things we could as children in a world more conducive to happiness. Yes, it is virtual happiness, but it will likely be the only happiness we know.

There was a time when we did not allow this childhood period. Some deemed it an unnecessary expense in energy and resources. We lost far more than we saved for our efforts. More of our people choose death, far sooner than ever in our history. Childhood was reintroduced when too many quality minds were lost.

When the childhood phase of our lives ends, and we are aged toward puberty, that is the time of the first physical changing and linking that teach us how to harness our life-force both as a resource and as a weapon. We begin to live without the benefit of our simulated worlds of light and life and are acculturated to our real world. Our births are regulated, so no one is born unless someone chooses to die. Even in a community of near-immortals, the choice of death occurs more often than one would think.

The burden of living becomes more than even the most resolute spirits can carry. Some of us, who are weary but not to death, choose the rest chambers where we sleep a century or two until something new or interesting happens that meets our criteria before we entered sleep. Then we rise from our rest and carry on the search.

Our world recycles all of the energy that is created within it. There is no excess. There are no stars save the tiny red dwarf we circle. It is estimated that sixty trillion souls surround this tiny beacon of light. Sixty trillion beings huddled against the dying of the light in our Universe. We harvest and store every second of this light.

We are so desperate, that we harvest even the cooling husks of no longer lit stars, beaming long wave energy to receptors scattered throughout the galaxy. Storing that energy, it is periodically collected through the slow-motion gate system allowing for objects to be moved with the minimum amount of energy lost between gathering and movement.

In our way, we are returned to our primitive arboreal ancestors, gathering energy, everyday, hoping to have enough to feed everyone at the end of the day. Even with all our solar arrays, long-wave gathering, planetary compression systems (planets of immense size are crushed together using gravity and the resultant heat is absorbed) Magnetic field manipulations, kinetic draining systems, there is only one inescapable truth.

Our universe is dying. And we are dying with it. From where we sit, our Universe is dark, no stars remain, one trillion years after the birth of our Universe, it is ending; not with a bang but with a whisper.

The ruddy light of Sindin Prime was home to sixty trillion lives. Circling in a variety of close orbits, mega-constructions with superconductive surfaces struggled to pull in the vital energy from this, one of the last dying stars in the galaxy. As the stars have waned, multiple intelligent races have come together to harvest what energies remain from the Last Suns of our galaxy. Around Sindin Prime, there have been over three hundred separate species sharing space above the worlds.

Several factions of the government are losing control of their people. Predation from the Outer Dark has increased as Entities, life forms who have adapted to the darkness, but still hunger for light have begun to circle Sindin Prime, in ever closing orbits.

They once attacked every few centuries, now decades separate their stronger and stronger attacks. They destroyed an orbital construction above Sindin Prime, killing two billion sentients. There is very little energy to spare on defensive technology because we are so energy poor.

Recent computations indicate they will be making another pass in a decade or two, so plans to slowly accelerate asteroids toward their likely entry points to the system should kill an estimated thirty to forty-two percent of the approaching attackers and hopefully low energy point defense systems will do the rest.

I am Judira Corm Hex-aka and I am charged with creating a technology that will likely murder fifty trillion sentients, eighty percent of all the known life left in our galaxy for a chance for ten trillion to have a life in a statistical possibility, a parallel universe. This technology is called a dimensional emission array. My fathers and mothers have spent hundreds of standard years working on this project with the permission of some of the collective governments.

Time is growing short. Sindin Prime's energy output is diminishing and we will need to utilize it as the primary power source for the dimensional bridging array. This will exhaust the last of the nuclear potential of the red dwarf leaving only an burning cinder when we are finished.

If we fail, we will all die. Not quickly. No we will struggle against the coming darkness. We will expand our technology to harvest the dark stars final wavelengths of energy, extending our reach and our lives, such as they are, for another two hundred millennia.

A last gasp after the lights go out.

Thaddeus Howze © 2011

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A Time Traveller's Career Advice

Posted by Thaddeus on November 1, 2009 at 3:30pm
Reasonable men adjust themselves to their environment. Unreasonable men attempt to change their environment to suit themselves. Therefore all progress is the work of unreasonable men.-- George Bernard ShawHistory is often unkind to unreasonable men. But I also know that nothing is every accomplished by reasonable men. They are content with the status quo. They exploit and profit on the frailties of the human condition without making any changes to improve that condition. I strive to make the world a better place despite being told it was impossible. I am not a reasonable man.--Thaddeus HowzeI was asked to give a short presentation to a group of young people of color who were trying to get to the straight and narrow path that a career might offer. Some of the young men had fallen from the path of education, of self improvement and had been convinced by the efforts of a dedicated few to return and try again. All previous sins forgiven, all that was required was a re-dedication to the efforts to improve their lives. I was asked to speak to them about taking some coursework in IT done at an accelerated rate in an effort to prepare them for a summer internship in the middle of next year. I became involved with mixed feelings.Not because I do not think it is a worthy cause. On the contrary, I believe it is the worthiest of causes; without such efforts, my own redemption at an earlier point in my life would not have ever occurred and I would likely be dead, or in a state such that death might be a preferable condition. My trepidation came from having to tell these young men the truth about my occupation; or at least, as I knew it. I love what I do. I have done it now for over twenty five years; not the same job, but the same industry, information technology and communications with overlap into the publishing, banking, government, technology, game design, publishing, retail, small business and educational sectors. How do you distill that into something someone can use?It's impossible to write something technical that would be useful to someone who has never even done IT, so I decided to write down the things that I learned along the way; stepping stones that have to be touched on the stairway to occupational success. Thinking about these things, I decided these would be the things I would tell myself if I could meet myself on my way to my first IT job interview.These are the fundamentals. If you aren’t careful,violation of these rules can cost you your job.1. Pick your battles. Sometimes you have to lose a battle to win a war. Keep your eyes on the war. Give up some things to gain everything. Outlast your enemies. Just because you did not make them your enemies did not mean they did not declare war on YOU.2. What got you to the top, won't keep you there. Don't get complacent. Stay frosty. Sharpen that saw!3. Previous success is just that; what you did before. It has no bearing on your present circumstance other than it appeared on your resume. Succeed in a different this time! Innovate, create something new each time.4. Don't be afraid to fail. Failure is a tool and a quite necessary one.5. You learn nothing from success. (You got it right the first time!) Failure teaches and the world's greatest minds learned best from this harsh schoolmaster.6. If you work somewhere you cannot fail or failure is a punitive event, leave. They are not doing anything important there anyway.7. Real innovation is risky. When forced to choose between innovation and efficiency management, the long-term win is in innovation.8. Know the difference between being effective and being efficient. The first deals with deciding the right things to do and the other deals with doing things right.9. Hire the guy who came in second. He tries harder. Persistence is the real talent. Plus he will love you for taking that risk and work even harder to prove he’s worthy. It has always paid off for me.10. Be right. But don't be an ass about it. Do your research; know your craft. Be right but if you make everyone hate you because of it, you won't last long there, even if you were never wrong. Sometimes it is better to be heard than to be right.11. Never compromise your work. Stand up for what you know, through dint of your effort, research and intellect to be the right thing to do. Find a way to get it done. IT that is compromised serves no one well and costs everyone.12. When you become master of all you survey, allow your team to innovate and fail. The things they succeed with will amaze you. Empower your team. Give them the ability to make decisions on the things they work on. Less paperwork for you, more autonomy for them. Make them responsible for their work, because, well they are. Insist on diversity. Hire people smarter than you. (Don’t be afraid. They don’t want your job. If they did, they would certainly have it already.)13. Hire people who don’t look like you. Avoid groupthink. Give your team the power to tell you that you are wrong. This may be the second greatest thing you ever do for yourself. The first was hiring someone smart enough to tell you that you are wrong.14. Just because everyone says it can’t be done, does not mean they are right. Believe and do it anyway.Those core rules are non-negotiable and will likely work for any occupation. These are my IT-related truths. They too may be applied to any occupation. Adjust as necessary.You must learn to love new things.1. Every three years all that you know may become obsolete. Even if it does not, the IT industry will certainly have expanded further than expected. You have a lot of learning to do.2. Start your career learning about everything you can. Specialize once you know what feels good to you and you are able to do with maximum efficiency and minimum wasted effort. Be a generalist when you can, specialize if you must but maintain your versatility. Your employment may depend on you being able to do an array of things.3. Maintain your versatility over time by taking a variety of IT careers in a variety of business models. Business skills will become more important the further up the command structure of the corporation you want to go. Get some training or some education related to business if your mission is to conquer the executive suite.4. Learn the soft/social skills of how to deal with people. That is a skill set that will only grow more valuable with age.5. Find the time to take an assessment exam and to read books that deal with occupational growth and career design (i.e. Myers-Briggs, What Color is Your Parachute, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, the Success Principles by Jack Canfield.) These books guide you to consider your reasons for working in the occupation that you do now and how to maximize that experience, or suggest a career better suited to your skill set.6. Learn 10 things today that you did not know yesterday. Real facts - don’t cut corners. (3,650 new ideas every year will keep you sharp, and yes, that means you learn on the weekends, too!)7. Knowledge, Information and Data are not equal. Data is the raw stuff of databases and reports. In and of itself, it does nothing. When organized and understood, data can become information and has the potential to influence events and empower the person using it. Knowledge is the state that information assumes when it has helped to accomplish work. Knowledge is the ultimate expression of data in use. Knowledge is Power. Data is just data.Know your limitations.1. If you don't know your weaknesses or limitations, ask someone you trust and don't take it too personally if they tell you something you didn't know. Then you should take the time to know yourself better. When in doubt find an enemy and ask him. He has nothing to gain by not telling you the truth.2. Lose a bad habit a year, every year until you approach perfection. You are not likely to become perfect, but people may like to be around you a lot more.3. Know yourself; do work that complements your skill set. If you don't like databases, don't become a database administrator, even if you know how. You will resent your work and it will show.4. Learn your strengths and use them, they will grow even stronger. Don't dwell on your weaknesses; you don't plan to keep them anyway.5. Be introspective. Introspection is a lost art. Introspection is the art of looking into yourself to find out who you are. You cannot do it with your iPod or stereo blasting at 11. You cannot do it while you are texting your friends or playing World of Warcraft. Introspection can only be done, in silence and the harsh light of honest analysis of who you are and what you do (or have done recently). If you cannot stand a silent room or be alone with your thoughts, ask yourself why? Then do it anyway. The life you improve will be your own. If you find introspection especially difficult, learn/take a class on meditation or yoga, (or both).No one outside of IT will really know what you do or understand it. So kudos may be slow to arrive after you pull the company fat out of the fire for the fourth time this month.1. Love, admire, respect and support each other’s work. It may be the only acknowledgment you receive from your workplace. Cross-train so you can help each other over time and allow everyone to take a vacation sometime.2. Complements are rarely given to the technical masses that do the most difficult of work. Know that the bulk of the people who benefit from your work, appreciate it greatly. Why management is less able to do that is still a mystery…3. In some work environments, your work will barely be acknowledged; do it well anyway.4. Your work is your signature. When you leave your work behind, it should be a monument like the Pyramids of Giza; built to last, with vision in mind. Also see: timeless.5. When you become the boss of your own IT Empire, sing the praises of your team to everyone. That praise will be the greatest tool in your arsenal.6. Under-promise and over-deliver. Keep the masses clamoring for your support happy with this simple mantra. Learn how to budget and manage your time. Be realistic when you promise your client a delivery date. Then deliver on your promise, in spades.7. In IT, everything takes longer than you thought it would. Make sure you think of everything your client would want and a half a dozen things they never considered. Treat them as you would desire to be treated.8. Document everything you do. Keep an electronic paper trail of your labors. Hercules had only 13 impossible things to do, so he did not need to take notes. Make a to-do list every day. Keep it on a flash drive or in a wiki. It helps you determine how well you are doing, what you are doing and whether it is what you should be doing.9. Once a year, make a list of things you want to accomplish in that year and make sure those things get on your daily or weekly to do list. At the end of the year, check that list, if more than half are not done, where is your time being spent?You must appear perfect in word and deed.Unrealistic? So what. Who said life was fair.1. Your parents are responsible for what was, you are responsible for what is. If your life was not a bed of roses, get over it. Every day is a chance to make it better. Real life is progressive and iterative (meaning it builds on the work of the day before. So it will take time to correct all that was wrong. Do it anyway.)2. Mastery of self must occur before you can master anything else. Self-control means control of your habits, your mind, and your body. The most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to maintain your self-control especially when everyone around you is waiting for you to lose it.3. If you are out of sorts; get help. There is no shame in seeking support. The IT industry can undermine your self-esteem and morale. If you are psychologically stressed, IT work can drive you to the brink in record time.4. If you say it, it must be so. Your word is law. Keep your word, your integrity is everything.5. When in doubt, say nothing. Everything you say will be remembered. When you say nothing, you appear wise and inscrutable. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." No truer words were ever spoken. Remember them.6. The most powerful words you can say are: I don't know. But I will find out. Become a master of research!7. Rest; use your vacation. Learn to walk away. Many IT types have an inability to walk away from a problem. This dogged determination is how they solve the impossible issues that end up on our desks. But it leads to stress, wear and tear on our minds and bodies over time, rendering us less effective over time. Don't let this happen to you. Take time out. Plan for it. Then do it. You will be better for the time away. (Plus, it lets them miss you, especially if you are great at your job. Familiarity often breeds contempt.)8. Do things not IT related. The greatest minds in the world have often discovered that things apparently unrelated to your work can sometimes inspire you to find new ways of solving problems. Rejuvenate your mind by doing things that don't require a keyboard and a mouse. Read a book, take up painting, do crosswords or Sudoku, learn a new language, play a musical instrument... When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Get at least one physical hobby or sport that puts some wear and tear on your body. The sedentary life of an IT guru can add inches to your waist and pounds to you behind. Your mind is only as strong and resilient as the body that houses it. (Weight-lifting, aerobics, running, martial arts, bicycling, swimming, ultimate Frisbee, touch football, soccer, to name a few.) Get your heart rate up and keep it up for 50 minutes a day. Your life depends on it.Love IT as the complex and dynamic craft that it is.1. You must enjoy the challenge of finding the straw in a needle stack. You are about to become part of the largest, most distributed neural network on the planet and possibly the greatest technological wonder ever created by humanity. Savor the moment. Done? Now get to work. With that membership, you will also have the great responsibility to ensure that whatever part of that network you build, patrol, protect, guide or create, that you do it with a vision of the future, being mindful of present circumstances and with an awareness of what has gone before.2. It will, if you choose it, be the hardest job you will ever love. People will tell you that what you do is not work. Do not listen. This career is as challenging as any being done anywhere:* IT is as challenging as medicine, because your patient will sometimes span the world, be in more than one place at a time, and have thousands of discrete elements, with millions of parts and billions of lines of code holding it all together. IT changes faster and more consistently than medicine ever has. (To be fair, medicine may soon accelerate the pace now that they are embracing IT in their diagnosis, management and coordination of information. More work for you...)* IT may be as hard to handle as law, because there are no precedents for every event. Each time may be the first time that circumstance has EVER been seen. What was true this morning may no longer even be relevant by sunset. Human laws develop at a geologic pace compared to the shifts that technology witnesses every year. (On average, law firms are incredibly slow when it comes to utilizing the full power of IT. I am amazed to see how many law firms are still running Windows 98 or NT.)* As difficult as architecture and engineering because what you build must offer stability and adaptability and is constantly under attack from threats within and without and yet must make the people using it feel safe and productive. Depending on the IT you are responsible for lives may hang in the balance. Be vigilant. IT is ever-challenging and has constantly expanding horizons.3. Learn all you can, all the time. If you are not a strong reader, I recommend you work on expanding your speed and your literacy, because a strong and fast reader has a decided advantage in IT. Technical publications, both in print and online are your friends. Take an 8 hour work day, once a week and do nothing but read technical journals or publications on that day. Your productivity will still be higher than anyone who doesn’t.4. IT will offer you impossible deadlines, put you in positions to affect the highest stakes (you have four minutes to save the world...) pair you with some of the strangest and often brilliant people, keep you working long and sometimes nonstandard hours, and ultimately provide you with immense satisfaction. IT will give you the satisfaction of creating something out of nothing whether that be a circuit board, a processor, a network, an application, a database, or a website, you will be creating something from the realm of ideas (Logos) and bringing it into the world. Create something the world needs they will pay you handsomely for it. (Sometimes, even if the world didn't need it, you will get paid too, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.) Know that when your skills mature (in 5 to 7 years), you will be able to call yourself one in a million and mean it.5. Mastery of this craft makes you rare amongst humans. Even the most sophisticated and educated often pale when confronted by a computer on their desk and a demand to use it. And despite our recent economic misfortunes, work in this field will likely continue to expand to those who stay at the forefront of their fields of expertise.6. There will never be fewer computers on Earth than there are now. They may be virtual computers under unknown operating systems but the number of computers is likely to continue growing for the foreseeable future. And on the off-chance that the number of computers actually goes down, the skill level required to manage, understand and control those computers will likely be greater than ever. The only people who would have a chance of controlling or working with them would be people who already have the core fundamentals at hand. That would be you.If you don't love IT, you will leave it in 2-4 years for something easier, less stressful with a greater sense of acknowledgment from the common masses. Your powers will diminish somewhat but you will always remember what it was like to have your finger on the pulse of the world. Good luck.These ideas were from my private journey of twenty five years in the IT workforce. I am curious to see if anyone else sees anything familiar here. If not, share with me those things that made it possible for you to succeed. I am always looking for other great tools for my belt.About the Author: Thaddeus has a WordPress technology and science commentary blog called Storm Warnings: A Matter of Scale and can be reached at ebonstorm(at)gmail.com. He is also a writer at the Examiner.com.
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