Friday, July 25, 2003
I had a Confucius-like dream last night that made me feel a little guilty about yelling at my colleague the other day (see Tuesday, July 22 blog). The dream was this: I went back to work at my old job -- a software company that last I heard is still gasping air, although barely. I really liked that company. But it fell victim to not only ill-timing (i.e. just as they were ready to ramp up, the dot.com bubble burst), but also an unhealthy reliance on nepotistic staffing. In my dream, the personnel manager approached me at the end of my first day back and asked what I was doing there. She told me, in an uncharacteristically cross voice, that I should leave because unlike before, they were only taking people who were actually skilled.
That was the jist of the dream. I am leaving out the going-out-for-the-beer-afterwards part and other only-interesting-to-me details. I think the lesson of the dream was this: Confucius say you are either big fish in little pond or little fish in big pond… In other words, mediocrity is relative. So while my boss and the IS department at the State House think I am an efficient Über-Guru of sorts, somewhere else I am just a little tadpole in a big lake…My words of wisdom for the day would be that if you find yourself in a place where you are the little tadpole in the big lake, make sure you’re the best god damn tadpole you can be. Contrarily, if you find yourself the Über-Guru in the little pond, be the best god damn Über-Guru there is. Otherwise you are mediocre. Get it?
Near to the office where I work now, there is a little park tucked in between a flower-box lined street where I go to eat my lunch sometimes. Today there was a discarded Wall Street Journal lying on the granite bench which I promptly picked up and began to read. Two things caught my eye as I sat eating my mozzarella and prosciuto sandwich: nanotechnology and carbon sequestration… that and the article that was inexplicaably featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about how to properly bend in low-cut pants in order to avoid displaying your butt crack!
So it seems the environmental activist Greenpeace is starting a big flap about nanoparticles, manmade structures a few billionths of a meter in size and which will be used for all kinds of new manmade products. They think inhalation of this stuff might be carcinogenic or bind with poisonous metals which would then disperse like pollen through the environment. There is no proof of this but I guess the environmentalists think they should be proactive. Ironically, it’s thanks to Greenpeace and others that one of the bigger nanotechnology firms, International Business Machines, has now become the exciting new buzz company of the VC world. I guess the VC guys figure if the environmentalists are going after them, the company must be further along with the technology than they thought. So they are investing…
Carbon sequestration was the other item that caught my eye. This one is just great. It’s where industrialized countries too lazy to do anything about reducing gas-house emissions tell the public not to worry because any day now they are going to have the means to suck excess CO2 out of the air and shoot it into crevices in the earth that can absorb CO2 until said day we can figure out a way to make cleaner, more affordable energy alternatives. Never mind that you have to store this shit in obliging nooks and crannies of the world for one-hundred years before it dissipates (the first C02 farts of Model T’s are still circling the globe today). Is it really that great driving in an off-road sports utility vehicle to get to the supermarket that we are willing to make future generations pay for it? Just asking…
That was the jist of the dream. I am leaving out the going-out-for-the-beer-afterwards part and other only-interesting-to-me details. I think the lesson of the dream was this: Confucius say you are either big fish in little pond or little fish in big pond… In other words, mediocrity is relative. So while my boss and the IS department at the State House think I am an efficient Über-Guru of sorts, somewhere else I am just a little tadpole in a big lake…My words of wisdom for the day would be that if you find yourself in a place where you are the little tadpole in the big lake, make sure you’re the best god damn tadpole you can be. Contrarily, if you find yourself the Über-Guru in the little pond, be the best god damn Über-Guru there is. Otherwise you are mediocre. Get it?
Near to the office where I work now, there is a little park tucked in between a flower-box lined street where I go to eat my lunch sometimes. Today there was a discarded Wall Street Journal lying on the granite bench which I promptly picked up and began to read. Two things caught my eye as I sat eating my mozzarella and prosciuto sandwich: nanotechnology and carbon sequestration… that and the article that was inexplicaably featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about how to properly bend in low-cut pants in order to avoid displaying your butt crack!
So it seems the environmental activist Greenpeace is starting a big flap about nanoparticles, manmade structures a few billionths of a meter in size and which will be used for all kinds of new manmade products. They think inhalation of this stuff might be carcinogenic or bind with poisonous metals which would then disperse like pollen through the environment. There is no proof of this but I guess the environmentalists think they should be proactive. Ironically, it’s thanks to Greenpeace and others that one of the bigger nanotechnology firms, International Business Machines, has now become the exciting new buzz company of the VC world. I guess the VC guys figure if the environmentalists are going after them, the company must be further along with the technology than they thought. So they are investing…
Carbon sequestration was the other item that caught my eye. This one is just great. It’s where industrialized countries too lazy to do anything about reducing gas-house emissions tell the public not to worry because any day now they are going to have the means to suck excess CO2 out of the air and shoot it into crevices in the earth that can absorb CO2 until said day we can figure out a way to make cleaner, more affordable energy alternatives. Never mind that you have to store this shit in obliging nooks and crannies of the world for one-hundred years before it dissipates (the first C02 farts of Model T’s are still circling the globe today). Is it really that great driving in an off-road sports utility vehicle to get to the supermarket that we are willing to make future generations pay for it? Just asking…
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