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A personal history.
I grew up in New Rochelle, New York, spent some time in Binghamton, New York, where I went to school at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton, or Binghamton University as it's now called (grumble, grumble, grumble...) In July '91, I joined Dendrite International, a software company for the pharmaceutical industry in Warren, New Jersey. I finally moved to Morristown, New Jersey in June, 1994 and left Dendrite in October of the same year. After a quick stint at Bellcore(which ended sometime in February or March of '95) I was laid off, where I started a now defunct business called Song Express. A fascinating project, and if you want to know how to deal with Dialogic Voice Processing boards, give me a yell.
I got a job in early May '95 working for a tiny company called Software Associates. We deal with the pharmaceutical industry (surprise!) and my first assignment was a seven month job in a Chicago suburb. I could write a book about my experiences in Chicago. It's a wonderful city, and I would happily live there. One thing I learned in Chicago was how important being near my family is to me. One event sticks out in my mind more than any other: my neighbor's funeral. In October '95, my next door neighbor died in a motorcycle accident. He was 26, just 5 months older than me. We went to school together, and my brother was one of his closest friends. In a strictly personal sense, the most terrible part of the tragedy was due to a miscommunication, where I was led to believe that it was my own brother who had died, and not my neighbor. I couldn't understand why my mother wasn't more upset than she was! I never felt so far from home. I believe this event reinforced my need to be around my home, but I'm afraid that my wanderlust will take me away as soon as my job loses its sense of fun. I missed New Jersey alot. Now that I'm back home, I miss Illinois, but nowhere near as much.
I'm still working for Software Associates, but where I started as Employee Number 1 or 2 (two of us started the same week), now there are at least 35 of us. After some work on other clients, I'm now primarily responsible for "infrastructure", which means stuff like rolling out Source-Code Control and Defect Tracking systems, network based application servers. I also write technical procedures. I appreciate doing this stuff early in the history of the company, so I'm willing to do this for a while, but I'm anxious to get back to team development. (Even though my boss knows all this, including this sentence will not prevent someone from going back to him to "snitch" on me. Smirk! His name is Don. Give him a call!)
It looked like it was time for an update. Things have changed quite a bit in the last few months. I've been working on a client project for a while. It's nothing interesting, the sort of thing I've done time-and-again, with its own layers of bullshit. After this project ends, I'm told I will start doing research. This sounds like it could be very interesting. On the personal front, I haven't been dating much lately. I started playing Ultimate Frisbee again, which was a wonderful idea - I don't know why I stopped playing for so long. After a couple of months of practice and tournaments, I pulled my hamstring, which is just now starting to recover. I've also disposed of my old Nissan Sentra. It was almost 6 years old, and it had 152,472.3 miles when I practically pushed it into the dealership. Now I've got a nice, shiny 2-door Acura Integra. Whee!
I have a great life. My Ultimate Frisbee teammates have become very special friends, and I spend most of my social time with them. I still go home to my family all the time. My relationships with my two brothers and my mother have been so much better than ever before. Recently I visited the cemetary where my father is buried. I met my mother there and she showed me all these other graves that I otherwise would not have visited. For example, my grandmother on my mother's side, well, she's buried with my dad, so I always see her. But both my father's parents are buried in a different part of the cemetary, so my mom drove me to their plots. My fourth grandparent is buried in a free cemetary on Staten Island. I am told he gambled and drank, and ran out on my grandmother. My uncle told me that he grew up in a shtetl, and when he came to America with all its uninhibited permissiveness, he did not resist. It turns out he was too poor to afford a cemetary plot. There's a Jewish Free Burial Society that buries destitute Jews in this Staten Island cemetary. Until seven-odd years ago, my mother never knew he was there. My uncle knew, though. Mom found out when he was preparing to place a stone at the grave. So we all trudged out to Staten Island to have an unveiling. Does this sound sad? It isn't really. Or maybe it is. It's life, you know? How can you not expect sadness in your life? It brings substance to life (or life's substance). Otherwise it's all smarmy fake crap. Smarmy is a wonderful word to use once you know what it means. I've finally realized that I don't need to get somewhere in life, so I'm enjoying right now. When I got out of college, I thought that the answer was to build a life around my job - that a job was everything. And, at the time, it was. In six years I've proven myself in many facets of the software industry (at least to my own satisfaction. Your opinion may differ.) I'm certainly less interested in building a career and more interested in having a great job that lets me live a wonderful life. Have you ever read The Prophet? I think it's a very insightful book. I enjoy reflecting my life through the book. I recommend reading it.
Well, well, well. It's been a hell of a long time since this page has been updated. So here goes: Professionally, I've taken a big step away from pure technical development and accepted a position as a Technical Project Leader (in fact, it's called Technical Lead, but I like the phrase Technical Project Leader, it sounds like there's an actual something to lead. I'll be spending half my time developing software and the other half as the interface between the management and a development team of 7 people (including myself.) According to my boss, I'm "responsible and accountable for all portions of the project ... to ensure on-time and quality delivery ... the single point of contact to the [Technical Manager] and [Project Manager] regarding the daily status of the developers and project." I started with programming because when I was younger it was easier to deal with computers than people. Now I'd rather deal with people. And though I don't know exactly what I want to do professionally, I know that one of the things I want to do is have the skills to implement ideas that are greater than myself, and this is a great step towards that. However, this was still a difficult decision to make because there's a cool cool cool project going on that I could have take part of in place of this one. Web technology, Windows CE handheld computers, that kind of stuff - my kind of stuff. The developers on the project got an office with a window (something I haven't had in over a year), and they are having loads of fun. I don't hold back letting them know how jealous I am. So, I'm excited *and* a bit nervous. It's a high profile position, and if I do well, it could look very very good. Whew! Socially, things have been crazy this year. I've been dating a bit, at odds with myself regarding dating non-jewish women. When I get lonely I decide that I should start looking for a wife. When I get burned by dating I decide that I should take things easy. The battle rages on. At least I'm finding cool women to go out with.
In many ways it's kind of ridiculous to try to summarize the last two years. In many ways this has been one of the most difficult periods I've ever had. The job as Technical Lead was very rewarding and at the same time it was incredibly stressful - I used to go to the conference room, close the door, lie on the ground and stretch my back, almost daily! By May or June of '99 we delivered the product and I was able to start enjoying the summer. That meant playing Ultimate fairly regularly again, which was wonderful, because it also meant being with my friends. Early in May '99 I also decided to move a notch down the food chain and cut out meat from my diet. Along with it I cut out donuts and dropped to one cup of coffee per day. The goal was to cut back on ingesting man-made chemicals. The chemicals go into the soil, the grass grows in the soil, the cows eat the grass. The cows are injected with antibiotics, the people eat the cows. That's it. As an unexpected side-effect I started losing weight, rapidly. I went from 160 to 145 pounds, which is my high-school weight - the weight I always wanted to be. Now don't get me wrong, I do eat meat once in a while. If people ask me if I'm a vegetarian, I'm not. Look, I'll eat meat if it's really worth my time. I've had two hamburgers in almost 18 months. One was a regret, but the other was so very worth it. Wow. Late in the summer I got involved with a woman. We knew the relationship was going to be static, there was no future for us. We alternatively pulled ourselves out and threw ourselves back in. All the time I knew it was unhealthy. From the moment we kissed. What I didn't understand was the deep-rooted psychological issues the relationship exacerbated, and after all was said and done, I became clinically depressed. So, how do I communicate this without sounding pitiful? I mean, you must be interested to some degree, cause you're reading this, so I'm not going to hide anything, but I'll try my best to take the drama out of the whole situation. First, let me explain something about depression and perception. If you've never had depression then you might associate it with, say, leprosy. In fact, this is what I used to do. If you've had it, or you understand it (how could you understand it without having had it?) then you might associate it with, say, pinkeye. If you were a runner and you sprained your leg then you would have to sit tight, treat the leg, try not to overstress it, and let it heal. Depression is exactly the same thing. Your brain is sprained. You need to sit tight, treat it, try not to overstress it, and let it heal. That's it. Only there's this stigma about it. I'm not exactly sure when it began, but it was sometime between late October to Mid-November '99. Early December I was diagnosed and given medication. The medication started working within two weeks. That means that the pills quelled the symptoms so that I could function day-to-day, and deal with the issues surrounding the depression. Many people say that depression is a blessing, and it's true, because it means that you finally get to deal with past issues and recreate your life. It took a few months but I went from survival to sophistication and finally, to life, as before, only much more gun-shy about getting involved, and much, much more cynical about romance and emotional relationships. My friend told me, "Depression tests your friendships." It's very true. An unfortunate cost of the depression was finding one of my oldest and closest friends chose to check out of the relationship. I don't know why, I was never told. Is it sad? Sure it is. But you know what? Perhaps that relationship was over, and this is what it took for him to make a clean break. Really, it's cool. I learned who my friends were, and I like what I discovered. Now this had a significant negative impact on my job. I was unable to handle job stress any more, and was completely unhappy and couldn't find anything I wanted to do there. So needless to say I had a couple of bad quarters. My boss was very understanding. I took a hiatus from development and got involved with Configuration Management and Source-code control. I loved the job; it was incredibly rewarding. It had bits of everything I wanted from a job. In July an opportunity arose to work on-site for one of our clients, in Southern California and I jumped on it. It's been a good opportunity to get away from New Jersey, SAI, and the stressors that have been driving my life. So here I am in Southern California, about an hour from LA. I've been here for seven (eight?) weeks now. It's been a hard project. We've been working endless hours, but we've got a solid grasp on what we've done and are in very good shape for the product's rollout. And so what is next? It's time to leave New Jersey, and the pharmaceutical industry. Time to move to northern California and work in the software development industry. Time to get a graduate degree in Computer Science. It's time for all that. The pharmaceutical industry has had its challenges, but it's time to move into an arena that is more challenging. This will be disruptive both socially, personally and professionally, but it's definitely the next step. My resume is up-to-date and out-the-door. In fact, my resume is kept in a folder called "Next Life". And really that's all that's happened in the last two years; one life has ended and another one is beginning. It may sound tacky but it's true. Whether the next life starts in two months or twelve months is irrelevant really. It's all going to happen.
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