KnowProSE LLC

If this sounds a bit like a life story, it is - but it's a great explanation for the change of KnowProSE.com.

Back in the 1980s,  I would visit an Uncle of mine who was allegedly studying for his ENT specialty. He had an Apple II, a few girlfriends, a hamster and a fairly well stocked refrigerator. Since the hamster was rather dull for me and the girlfriends out of the league of any 11 year old, I sat with the Apple II for hours - it had more RAM than my Vic-20 and he had a larger budget for games. Aside from some games I typed in from magazines and some code I actually wrote myself, he had a few games that I spent hours on while my Uncle played with his girlfriends. A decade later I was a professional computer programmer and he was an ENT surgeon and married. True story.

Nostalgia struck some years ago for the simplicity of Galactic Adventures - a turn based strategy game that let me explore a seemingly endless universe of aliens attempting to kill my digital posse in all manner of grids. So I Google'd it and ended up finding this page which was either written by Paul Murray or Tom Reamy. From there, a quote:

...To me, the most amazing thing about doing these games (and I'm about to date myself) is that I did virtually everything myself. I designed the games, programmed them, drew the graphics (quite primitive), wrote the rule book I did get help from friends and people at SSI in testing and making suggestions. Compare that with today where new games are developed with a million dollar budget and use teams of 30 or more people, programmers, artists, tests, story consultants, etc, etc. And you know what -- the games of today are better (Gee, why is that a surprise?)...

That is almost exactly why KnowProSE LLC is, for all intents and purposes, neatly pressed and hung up in plastic in the back of the closet. I realized that I couldn't do everything myself despite how much I can do and do well.

I've been through the era of the lone disconnected hackers of the 1980s and early 1990s, where I did a lot of things that simply don't seem so impressive in this 'modern world'. Then from the mid-90s til 2000, I did some really cool stuff and began working the web. In 1999/2000, I started blogging. In 2003, I started using Drupal. In 2005, I ended up running some projects for SSC that were happening even while Tux Magazine was getting prepped for launch. I ended up hacking Drupal code, and before you knew it I was a Drupal developer working on things that rarely (unfortunately) made it back to the Drupal code base because of the nature of the work. And so this year - 2011 - I started KnowProSE LLC as a one man shop after many adventures and misadventures which included a one month Directorship of a paper company that was to be a continuance of my paternal grandfather's business.

Things this year would be best described as rocky - and educational.I reaffirmed that I was kind of tired of coding for profit but really wanted to write - programming in English, as it were. Personal growth.

I cast my eyes around. I found a Communications Manager position open at the groovy Treehouse Agency, where I'd met some folks at the Drupal 7 release party in New York City. I applied even as I was extricating myself from the family business situation. There were two interviews and instead of sweating the details I simply was me.

And I got it.

Since I'm starting on Monday, 26th September 2011, I'm closing off business for KnowProSE LLC and going to do what I love: Writing, playing with English and working with smart and creative people.

So what happens with KnowProSE.com? Back to being a personal blog, though to maintain a distance from OpenDepth.com (my free writing/personal personal blog) this blog will be more about writing, reading, the Intertoobz and technology.

I'm happy. Be happy. :-)

Yes, that's right. KnowProSE LLC now has its own electronic newspaper that you can now find previews of on KnowProSE LLC in the sidebar off to the right (lower), at least for now. It makes my life a little easier in that I can keep track of things that are interesting/entertaining for myself both personally and professionally.

Over the years, I've blogged up storms here on this site in its previous evolutions but the amount of content available as well as the amount of time spent finding the appropriate content has made this 'newspaper' almost a necessity. But there's a danger in such things, too, in that looking solely at what is aggregated through tags and keywords leaves one looking at only those things: I'm an advocate of discovery by accident as well. Serendipity, I think, is also a great part of innovation and imagination. The newspaper, outside of aggregating based on keywords, is limited because it lacks that human touch.

Because it handles that aggregation for me, it also frees me up to add that human touch to other things - and it does the same for you.

Still, it is set to update in both morning and afternoon - allowing me to follow things on a more regular basis without having to be a slave to a constant barrage of feeds. In my eyes, technology shouldn't have me tied down staring at feeds all day. We have other things to do - basically work and play.