I'm getting my ducks up, my cats in a row, my cows in a pen, my geese in a gander, but it is taking a good long time to implement solutions because we now think by committee here, and I know the answers but I hate to be a know-it-all jerk hotshot.  But sometimes maybe I should be.

Maybe that's my part to play, know-it-all jerk hotshot.  "Oh," they used to say at Nelles Jamesbury "the pros from Dover!" and we'd all laugh but they hated Gabe and I because we were extraordinary.  I say this because I am not extraordinary any longer but at the time I could solve any problem anywhere within record time and it was my goddamn pleasure to do so.  I loved the problems, the ways they presented themselves, sticky and incomprehensible.  Loved the fact that the majority of the problems I had to solve were not solely technical, they were linguistic, emotional, psychological, memetic. Connecting the description of the problem to the error, then figuring out what the programmer was thinking when he wrote that error, and figuring out how to think around it.

Maps and maps and maps, each corner a new mousetrap, the whole line of troubleshooting and solving followed some Rube Goldberg device from point B to point Z.  You could fix one thing and break fifty more.  You could apply a patch and nuke half the known universe from orbit.  You want to keep it simple, stupid.

Oh man those days, leaving the site knowing full well that you just literally made magic happen from the time you walked in 'till the time you lit that cigarette on your way out to the car.  The sun just starting a late afternoon arc, time enough to head back to the office and try to explain in linear, human terms what just happened.  Normally I could, sometimes I couldn't.

Now when I hit problems like that I have a team of people around me googling the answer, and I race ahead of them to try and solve the problem rather than apply some collective template to it.  I hate google, I hate the crutch of knowledgebases.  I hate not finding the answer in the problem, instead relying on copy and paste of a million monkeys pounding away on a million Dells with no clear idea of the actual problem, the actual answer.  Thinking that a disconnected stranger somehow knows the intimate details of the problem, despite the difference in time and distance, is offensive to me.

This is where we are now, though: everywhere at once and any answer you could need is available right now now now right here and everywhere.  No mystery in the solution, just find yahoo answers or some random website.

The answers.

I create here and elsewhere because creation, that process, allows for a completely individual line of thought that meanders in parts of the brain I used to use to solve VAX problems.  I create here and elsewhere because my capability to do so has been so thoroughly enhanced by years of training, in thinking about thinking and solving the thinking of other people, and in their thinking about my processes and correcting my logic.  I cannot perform my prime function as a provider of solutions to impossible problems because as of about five years ago?  There are no impossible problems.

So I hit up google to check my spelling and I pound away at this here in an attempt to provide meaning to a suddenly lost but crowded map.