Today Janet and I went to a meeting with our son Brian (8th grade) and the high school couselor to select his classes for next year (High School classes! Where has the time gone?).  Brian has been seriously slacking in his academics this year,  and we were after him to improve things after a very slow start last fall.  This last 6 weeks,  everything fell back to all C’s,  after 2 A’s and 4 B’s,  and one C — just barely a C — was in his Advanced Algebra class,  in which he had just made a A the previous 6 weeks.  The couselor was encouraging,  pointing out that his 7th grade Teranova showed his capabilities (all subjects other than spelling were in the 95-99 percentile…don’t know what the deal is with the spelling). 

While Brian is still very much in the “development” stage in terms of a career,  I find myself in a very uncertain time as well,  although I have specific skills and interests,  I am worried about the livelihood that can be found right now.  No matter how much I agonized over the lack of support I found for much of my “strategy” that I considered important to Religious Publishing on the Internet,  I did have a job that utilized some definite skills and afforded me the opportunity to get a taste a lot of tools (although this was the area where I was constantly being “marked down” during performance evaluations:  my “tendency to chase rabbits” — which ,  from my view,  was not “playing” but “learning”.  The skills I emerged with when I left were all a result of such “playing”;  finding the right tools and skills to get a job done.  Most of the valued skills I was utilizing at the time of my departure were things that I kept getting warned about in earlier years:  “Stay on task” and “avoid chasing after new tools”.  Anybody that knows the world of Web development knows that it is required of us to “keep pace”.   Now it’s Weblogs and Web Services and .Net (pronounced “DOT NET”).   Dot Net was the issue that led to my dismissal.  It was considered to be one of those “distractions” that I did not need to be “distracted with”,  even though the entire Web infrastructure was beginning to utilize Web Services and convert our Membership data from LDAP into Web Serviices for use across the enterprise.  My own “online training electives” had .Net courses available,  and when it came time for Visual Studio.Net,  the company was also in the process of purchasing copies for the various developers in IT,  even ones who rarely had occasion to use Visual Studio.