Headline of the Day

Spotted over a BART rider's shoulder, in Spirituality & Health:

Is Head Better than Heart in Negotiations?

Well, it'll probably get you farther.

San Francisco

It's been one year (as of this past weekend) since I left Portland to move back to San Francisco.

http://asher813.typepad.com/dreams_into_lightning/2007/08/portland-oregon.html

Things I like about SF? Well, the intesnity, the variety of experience, and having the ocean nearby. I like Live 105 and the great selection of radio stations in general. And I like being around old friends, some of whom I've known for many years.

I like the Mission, where G and I are living. We have some really nice neighbors. (Well, there's the crackheads too, but we can deal with that.) I like the downtown too, and I've grown oddly attached to the Financial District and Montgomery Street area. Ms. X and TNG live in the Richmond, where I visit TNG regularly, and I still get out to the Sunset where I used to live with Ms. X.

And of course we've got the Legion of Honor the DeYoung, the Asian Art Museum and the SFMOMA (which is currently running a Frida Kahlo exhibit that I want to see). From a more pragmatic standpoint, this is the place to be if you're considering embarking on a career in the computer field.

I'm going to start carrying my camera around again, because I want to get back into posting photos here and on my Flickr page.

Geek School

So far, my CompTIA A+ course is going great! The class is at just the right level and pace for me, and I'm learning lots of interesting stuff about hardware, memory, Windows OS, and so on.

Almost the first thing the instructor said was, "You can't be an asshole anymore, like you could 10 years ago" in the industry. I laughed quietly because I'd just posted a response to a comment here, saying that my hesitation in joining the computer culture had been the perception that computer geeks were sometimes short in the social skills department.

The main topic of gossip was this guy -
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/sf-city-charged.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4350711.ece

A couple of the students expressed sympathy for Terry Childs, which I have a hard time figuring out. Needless to say, the instructor was less impressed.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to finishing the class. The certification test will require shelling out a few more bills and I'm a little short these days, but that'll give me time to review and prepare for the exam.

Going back to the instructor's comment, the context was that IT professionals these days are expected to have some customer service skills, and can no longer take for granted their indispensability as a guarantee of job security as was the case ten years ago. In other words, you shouldn't think that just because you've got the company by the short and curlies, they can't replace you. (That was the Terry Childs tie-in.) The newer CompTIA exams place less stress on memorization of things like IRQ codes, and more emphasis on customer service skills.

That's probably a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the maturation of the computer industry - it's no longer the exclusive province of a handful of individuals, and the market can afford to raise the standards on things like communication and customer service.

Class runs through the end of the week. I'll post more this weekend.

Dear Vlad

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTRkNGRjZWEyNjA2NGMzOGY0YTk2ZjA0ZGVlMDk0ZjA=