Mr. Braden was always made of win. Especially for the seal story.
M fits epignosis -- which helps with the home schooling. I think the years of being my tech support forced him to improve that side of his tech/geek skills.
Having a child ('round middle elementary level or thereabouts) explain back your explanation of anything technical usually is a good clue on whether your explanation worked or needs work. Kids cut to the chase pretty quickly -- their brutal honesty is a good measure of the 'boring/incoherent' factor as well.
This is, in a nutshell, my entire job. I routinely describe it as "geek to English translator" and I spend every day trying to make the world of IT relevant to the rest of the campus. I spent the past hour discussing the Secure AFS project with the project manager and how it's the last piece of the Protect Your Data, Protect Yourself presentation I need to be able to play the "What's in it for me?" game with the campus community. That is, until we got distracted and started talking about literature, and suddenly we were doing a wikipedia search on Beowulf. I do love my job some days.
Well, that is perhaps the most perverse part. My title is "Campus Readiness Specialist" which the normal, non-IT person thinks means I do some sort of earthquake preparedness. It is therefore yet one more thing where I have to act as geek-to-English translator. It's a title that only works at Stanford, so it makes finding work outside of this little universe much harder. I do a weird mix of presentations, training, documentation, curriculum development, article writing, end-user testing, and communications. It's good that I like it here because finding work elsewhere would be tricky at best.
Despite having worked as an IT guy for only a few years, and having been kind of bad at it, I seem to be forever damned to be "the computer guy" in biotechnology labs. Despite being very smart and very well-educated, most people in biopharma still seem to be under the impression that the computer will explode if one presses the wrong button.
It sounds great to me, FWIW, but I'm not coming from as far away. :) Good luck!
Re: post topic, I find it funny that I have made my living two different ways being what purchasemonkey calls an intellectually sexy geek, yet in each case, (a) I've earned less than the people to whom I explain things, even though my explaining is vital, I do nontrivial things besides explain, and my formal education is fancier; and (b) I am still plenty socially awkward. So it goes.
I am a good geek-to-other translator but pretty lousy at being social at parties. I think that has to do with the interest level of the receiving party.
If they want to hear what I have to say, damn I am good at making it understandable to almost anyone. If they are politely listening, I tend to go brain dead and stand around looking stupid.
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M fits epignosis -- which helps with the home schooling. I think the years of being my tech support forced him to improve that side of his tech/geek skills.
Having a child ('round middle elementary level or thereabouts) explain back your explanation of anything technical usually is a good clue on whether your explanation worked or needs work. Kids cut to the chase pretty quickly -- their brutal honesty is a good measure of the 'boring/incoherent' factor as well.
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I still get mileage out of his story about the proper plural of "hippopotamus."
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http://xkcd.com/627/
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Re: post topic, I find it funny that I have made my living two different ways being what purchasemonkey calls an intellectually sexy geek, yet in each case, (a) I've earned less than the people to whom I explain things, even though my explaining is vital, I do nontrivial things besides explain, and my formal education is fancier; and (b) I am still plenty socially awkward. So it goes.
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If they want to hear what I have to say, damn I am good at making it understandable to almost anyone. If they are politely listening, I tend to go brain dead and stand around looking stupid.
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