UltraCrepidate

I dreaded it for the whole summer, going to school that is. Unlike people who are born and raised here, I didn’t get a slow transition into high school from grade 7 to grade 12. Instead, I was injected into grade 10 alone to learn the rules of the game while the others have already jaded themselves and found their own comfortable niche.

My parents didn’t help me prepare for it, they were as clueless as I was since the administration only speaks French and scoffs at anyone who tries to communicate in English. “Apprenez la langue” they’d tell them.

Back to the topic at hand. It was my first day of school. So, there I stood, in the school yard envious at the crowd of people who knew each others from the year before, smoking, joking and generally merry making. An alarm bell rang and people all went inside. Not knowing what’s happening, I simply followed. I followed them until I realized that they were all going to their own classes. That’s when it dawned on me that I don’t even know my class schedule.

A class where the students dominate the teachers? That defies the very definition of a class.

At that moment of desperation, shame and despair overwhelmed my senses. “Am I going to get punished? What tools do they use to hit their students? They look bigger than the theachers from Taiwan, their slaps must hurt more. I don’t want to get slapped in the face on my first day of school.” Luckily none of my thoughts materialized and a nice secretary, seeing my despair, took me into her office and looked up my file. I was then escorted to my proper class and the rest of the day was a blur. I was just content that besides the initial embarrassment of getting to my class late, everyone seems to be ignoring me.

Later, to my amazement, I watched as the students disrespect their teachers in anyway imaginable and wondered why the teachers don’t call them up front and exercise physical punishment? You probably already know the answer, but to me that was the strangest idea ever. A class where the students dominates the teachers? That defies the very definition of a class.

“WHAT THE FUCK are you smiling at?” Nicolas screamed when he noticed me laughing along with the others at the joke. “YOU DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND ENGLISH”. That second part I understood perfectly well. I understood because everyone stopped laughing and just stood there staring at me. Even though I did not understand what the joke was about, I was perfectly capable at detecting the infectious laughter that everyone was experiencing and I laughed with them like a deaf boy would laugh with their peers.

I felt my smile freeze, then fades into a frown.

That sums up my dilemna with humour. After the incident, I stopped trying to pretend that I understand their jokes and resorted to stating the fact outright when people ask why I was being so serious. Simply put, I did not experience the same childhood that the locals did. I did not watch the same cartoons, listen to the same radio stations nor participated in the same activities as a native born north american.

Things like a “Kramer moment” or references to “The Simpsons” are usually completely missed by me, thus leading to the subsequent misunderstanding of all jokes that followed. To not feel out of place or destroy the group dynamic, I usually laugh along with people while storing away another reference to “Google” when I get my hands on a computer. This is probably why I am so good at faking genuine emotions on my face when Asian guys are known for their stern faces.

I hope people can understand that it is not because I am too serious or are trying to put them down when I don’t even pretend. It’s usually because I completely missed the fact that it was supposed to be a joke. I want to fit in really, but I also understand that those 16 years is half a life of difference in experience. I can’t expect myself to realistically be a 10/10 on all three languages. If anything, I can only say that I wish I could get to know you in Mandarin. But you don’t know that language and I just happen to know yours.

I’ve lived in a Western world for half of my life and the other half in Asia. Even though I’ve successfully integrated myself and speaks the language fluently, I still find myself in these awkward moments of silence. It leads to revelations of our differences in culture. I am a guy who’s half way in between and I wish to show you the realities of why we sometimes behave the way we do.

A reason question by stranger made me reflect upon my life and in doing so, the purpose of this blog that I am maintaining. The name fits my ideology and I feel right in maintainig it to stand as a witness to my life and job down the moments of extreme duress.

The question was: “How would your friends describe you?”

“Serious” was my immediate answer without reflection. True, it is a declaration that I have heard over and over, but not one that I am internally at peace with. Seriousness often brings about the impression of boredom and in doing so, decreases the interesting factor as a person overall.

I’d like to be known as the person who is “Fearless in facing the unknown”.

Among other one time descriptions, I’ve so far heard the following as well:

• Persistent
• Intelligent
• Smart

Which is generally true, although my humble self cannot fathom the acceptance of “Intelligent” without retorting with some lame excuse.

With woman, they all unanimously agreed upon one description after the first date. That I think in weird ways and that I think “Outside of the box”. Whether or not it resulted in good feelings, I don’t know. I don’t believe that it is what a woman looks for in the general definition of a man. It is not necessary for the continuation of genes.

The reason why I write this post is because I’d rather be known as something else and am surprised that it is not shown more prominently in my character to eventually become the first words that people describe me by. I’d like to be known as the person who is “Fearless in facing the unknown”.

The reason that I am not THAT is probably because the things I’ve done leading up to this point in life have not been anything unique that haven’t been done before. I don’t openly brag about them because I know them exactly for that: things that others have already done.

Perhaps I am just not being wild enough or loud enough in stating that fact. At least, I finally remembered why I started this blog in the first place after losing my way for a while.

It’s been going around in my head for a while now. Why am I writing? Why is my writing style so inconsistent and why am I writing for different reasons all the time? The majority of the time, I hear the answer echoing back from my own subconscious.

I write so I can be read.

Information overload

But I don’t need that. At least not anymore. I admit it now, it more of a case of fame envy and different contributing factors. For one, I now have a personal wiki where I store all the informations, relevant or irrelevant to anything. Because of that, I no longer feel the need to blog about what I found out. Frankly put, the things I find out are in a constantly flux so it doesn’t do them justice to set them in stone in a blog post. The advantage of this is that I can forget about copyright and just copy/paste whatever I find on the web. When I do find something, I enjoy taking the time to write a long post, polish all the pictures, correct the grammars and reducing the post’s complexity. Which inadversely affected my ability to post frequently.

What was I blabbing about?

Which brings me to the other point. I’ve been organizing my blog posts recently and saw a weird trend. Actually, I felt weird inside. I started writing in year 2000 and continued till today non stop. The archive only goes back to 2003, because the previous one was done in a special database I made myself and that hasn’t got ported over yet. It started with me writing down the daily happenings in my life to transition into a period of reflection and enlightenment.  Recently, it’s presentations on things I do and events I go to. Most of these are written without thought and refinement which really made me wonder. What am I trying to say? Who would want to read this? I don’t even want to read them. My original entry about my daily life is actually more interesting.

Essentials

It has something to do with a change within. I find myself reading and skipping lines in posts that I read. Disinterested by the repetitive information that the mass is producing on a daily basis. I started finding myself doing the same thing. Add to the fact that I have finally realized that my life is nothing special and that there really is no need to broadcast every achievement I have. Thanks to a certain person who does exactly the opposite, I was able to see how meaningless such a gesture is. I am great! So what? You just showed everyone that you are a moron.

What does this mean?

So you are probably going to get less and less posts like this one. Writing for writing’s sake or getting something out of my chest. Instead, I decided to use the time to actually work on the stories I’ve been writing and getting those photos up on the web. Less frequent posting = more time to work on fewer articles.

I want to write, to write good stories.

There is a reason why you should visit Montreal on a Sunday during the summer. The tam tams.

I’ve pretty much figured out where I want to go with my photography style. Where I want to specialize and am working towards acquiring the skills to do that. I want to capture moments in dancing.

To achieve that, I’ve been researching techniques to take pictures under low lighting conditions (dances are usually performed indoor). I’ve also been practicing the prediction of a perfect moment for a power move. This, I have an easier time with because of my dance background. It’s usually the camera delay that’s making me miss the moment. Another thing to note is that, unlike the other pictures I take, I don’t have a photoshop style assigned to dance photography yet. Maybe in time, I will figure out a good balance that accentuates the motion, but for now, whatever I try seems to detract from the beauty of the dancers themselves.

What I didn’t expect though, is how different it looks on picutre without the memories of what happened previously in the dance routine. I found myself thinking “This doesn’t convey what I was capturing.” A dance is a story, how do you capture a story with one frame?

The back story

I always had problems of putting my 100% on the job. I do enough plus a little bit more to complete and impress the customers and nothing else and life has been like that for a while. The nine to five job doesn’t motivate me nor teach me and I come home everyday exhausted from the effort to keep up.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the skill I have to keep up with, it’s the sheer number of distraction that is wearing me out and a lack of a clear defined goal. Ever since my investment returns have come close to the limit where I can be self sufficient without needing a paying job I have started to wonder (no tempted even) about what it will be like if I work for myself? I took a day off to find out.

The good

First and foremost, motivation and focus. I was able to wake up at 8AM, get to work right away and stop at 6PM. I literally had to tear myself away from my desk to eat lunch because there were so much I wanted to do.

The bad

Like a new kid on the block, I was not used to the freedom and am still influenced by my current job’s need to multitask. As a consequence my mind wandered and I spent a significant amount of time trying to stay on one task at a time.

The ugly

There’s nothing that I wanted do that can be completed within a day. So by the end of it, I had to do swap all the effort into a pagefile. Another fragmented effort. The awesome day, also gave me a huge adrenaline rush which lead to insomnia.

The conclusion

Because of motivation and the interest in the work I was doing, I became a super worker able to give 120% of my time without complaint and feeling fufilled at the end. It made me feel better because I’ve started feeling like a slacker. I also proved that a long chunk of uninterrupted time is more productive than 1.5 times the same amount of time spread out or interrupted over several days. At least for me.

It’s one of those thing that you dream, but never ever write it down for fear that it will never happen. Something that someone said is too complex to do and you agree with yet still secretly and not so surely decided to do. A decision that you don’t even know yourself until a few years later, you found yourself completing half of the requirements already. Yes, I did one of these weird thing and only after fully looking at myself honestly did I realize that this is one of my life’s goal. To understand computers completely.

To realize that, I decided to take on the grunt jobs at each level of the process from a list of jobs that I determined as each level of layer in order of hardware to software, low level to high level:

1. Fab process engineer
2. Digital and Analog circuit designer
3. PCB design engineer
4. Firmware engineer
5. Drivers engineer
6. Hardware systems architect
7. Kernel developer
8. Compiler developer
9. OS developer
10. Software developer
11. GUI interface designer
12. IT systems admin
13. Database developer
14. Web site admin

So far, I’ve worked in positions of #2, 4, 5, 11 and took on #12 and #14 as a hobby. Hopefully, I’ll have time enough in my life to do the rest before new technolgies come out to make all these knowledge outdated.