Fatherhood

This is advice that Bill Gates gave at a high school about things they did not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teaching has created a generation of children with no concept of reality and how this concept sets them up for failure in real life. RULE 1 Life is not fair ... get used to it. RULE 2 The world will not care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself. RULE 3 You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both. RULE 4 If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure. RULE 5 Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping they called it Opportunity. RULE 6 If you mess up...

Here is a task I think I was meant to take on. I used to be a computer nerd ... pretty much in every way you can imagine one defined in the late 70s and early 80s.  Then, one day, my sister walked in and saw me managing three machines: one online, one being cleaned up, and one rendering a 3d modeled video I was creating.  Realize that this was sometime around 1986 when personal computers were really just coming into existence with some regularity. She made a comment that stuck with me ... "you're not a computer nerd, you're a computer squid." Computer Squid  ... it stuck.  Over the years, I've joked about that comment with a brother's fondness ... Now, I'm a father ... and being a computer squid has taken on a whole new meaning.  Working on projects that I used to just warn Jen about is now a thing of the past.  Projects are now assembling toys that take not just a Masters in Engineering, but a fluency in any one of a half dozen languages beyond ...