My passion for electronics took a detour through computing that I'm still on, but I never lost that passion, just realized how broad and deep it is..
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Just make sure you are honest and open with your current partner who is it sounds like a real find if she appreciates your geek side..
I think you only need to look nit very far to see all sorts of new creative alternatives.. It is a very long time since I was bored or lacking electronics projects to play with. And learn.
I am very interested in radio and want to get my ham license, but the thing that puts me off is the sad and heartbreaking situation of many who I hear on the airwaves. I met some of them when I was a little kid, playing around with CB, now its 50 years later (I moved away from the area I live in today and spent half of my life 2500 miles away) I returned to where I had started, after having had a lot of experiences I never would have had here.. I am certain that making that move was the best thing I could have done. Ive been exposed to powerful tools and now I see that the future is a bright one.
Thanks to things like FOSS, which I was exposed to elsewhere, not here, my life has changed a lot. A couple of years ago I got a cheap logic analyzer and my possibilities opened up dramatically.. wow..Already online via SLIP and various text mode programs, running on Unix, I was ready for the changes, although I didnt know that. Some friends who I knew from going out were scanninjg rave flyers and putting them online.. I knew that they were able to display graphics, but couldnt see them on my Mac.. the Internet connection didnt have the capability to carry TCP-ip. So I used text, via programs like screen. A local ISP started offering access to The Internet but nobody I knew had that kind of connection. It was around 1991 when I saw XMosaic running on a Sun machine in a museum (Exploratorium) in San Francisco and fell in love with hypertext..Even then I knew that I was looking at the next world changing technology..
I downloaded "A beginners Guide to HTML" by TimBL . I got my slow Internet connection (56k) TCP-ip capable by using a Mac extension that allowed it. This wasnt that easy. Lots of people were getting online but only at a beginning level. All my friends were struggling to begin to swim in this new ocean.. But it happened.. At the beginning it wasnt about e-commerce, in fact, it was frowned upon. The first few years of the online world were a noncommercial time.. In retrospect, lots of the activity around buying and selling was shameless hype and bullshit. At the beginning I with my rudimentary Unix knowledge was way ahead of the flood of new people who got online in he early 90s. They were whelrs and dealers and scammers, largely.. Wild eyed types who wanted to con technical types into doing their work for free. I steered clear of them but I wasnt above taking advantage of being taken out for dinner by them. It was the era of the Internet "boom" but few of the people flooding into the online world were as smart as they were trying to seem.
I hit the ground running and a wealth of new ideas started presenting themselves.. it was amazing how rapidly new ideas started breaking forward.. But few of them were actually that original. Businesses were attracting these people like flies.. Many had started out in multimedia, but multimedia nomatter how magical it was seemed flat and limited in a comparison with the rapidly growing net.
The cheerleaders for globalization insist the changes that are coming are all good, but they arent. Its no longer the positive world it was then, there are too many who are just trying to get rich quick. They reek entitlement.. but they dont have the willingness to do positive things to create the ecosystem that will build positive value and especially community and trust.
Because people are struggling, and many are trying to keep people in the dark.
This is leading to a real disaster for many. But we can do so much better and break out of the rut. But it wont happen without our work to have good outcomes. We need to support public education! Not all can afford private schools.. and privatized everything. The future is not privatization of everything as some would have us think.
I have to realize that I was very lucky and had an opportunity to see how things could work, in an ideal world.. How creative the world can be..
I might easily have just stayed in my rut and I was fairly poor, I lived in poverty.. Everything was very expensive then too, tool wise, too expensive for me. I was lucky because I got in to a new fild where everything was new, right in its infancy.. I saw my opportunity and ran with it. No matter how smart young people are, the gates are closed to many of them because of "costly screens" that keep people back. They not only cant get ahead, what they do have will be taken from them because they are not just standing still, they are going backwards.. Even the people who think themselves as fairly prepared for the future will find themselves suddenly struggling as a great many jobs inn he developed countries jobs are integrated into international supply chains. People have no idea how companies are planning to meet the competitive challenges they are seeing. Without the tax base that comes from employment, countries will be facing huge challenges. Where will the money to maintain the infrastructure of the past come from? There is no instruction book. But the system we grew up with, the system that kept everything running, is being dismantled because of its expense.
Please dont get me wrong, the future is bright, but its important to meet this challenge with your skills. Headon. I was lucky.
So many people never have anything like that opportunity I had. So they stay in a rut. These guys sound as if theirs have not. they are now old guys with major health problems. Its so sad. There is so much to life..
Whats the point of life without evolution, without fun? All these things are not necessarily incompatible. Just dont be unrealistic about things. Technology is supposed to wipe out a huge number of jobs over the next few years. People are going to need to have skills to take the new jobs, to replace the old ones that are going to vanish. Studies I have seen estimate that we'll (here in the US) lose from 26% to more than 45% of our jobs within the next few years, without any improvements in technology. This will happen just because of improvements in communications technology and deregulation of red tape that inhibits trade and digital trade across borders. Almost half of our jobs may vanish, gone, poof. Soon, And many of those those will be professional jobs too.
So, get ready.. Find something you like and do it.. because people find it impossible to devote sustained efforts at the required level, to become truly world class unless they like what they are doing. That said, doors open when you are expressing your best self..
Maybe something will present itself. Just try to make your time productive. Dont sit around doing things that dont support your goals.