Oh, I'm sure you've all asked that question to yourselves - "What do I want to be when I grow up?"

Well, quite frankly, I have no idea. I went to college to be an architect, but that fizzled out after a year when I realized that I'm good at the engineering "stuff" but not so much at being an artist. The first year of the five year Kent State architecture program turned out to be really artsy-fartsy. Way beyond anything I expected. So, I picked the next best thing - computers!

So, (eventually) I end up with this B.S. (that's Bachelor of Science, not the other B.S.) in computer science, and a good career so far. But the thing is, see, is that I feel stagnant. I've been at it for 10 years more or less and I just feel.... I dunno.... stuck in a rut. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis, who knows? One thing is for sure though, I've got to get moving in some direction.

I've been working a bit on my M.S. in computer science, and I've recently transferred back to Kent State with the thought that maybe... I dunno, that maybe I'll get my Ph.D. I'm just not sure. I could teach. I could research. I could become a museum curator. I'm a little bummed out because I work really hard to be a good geek, but there are all these other really successful geeks who have degrees in things like Psychology yet have really cool geeky geek jobs. Not that writing management and administration software for IP-PBXs and VoIP systems, and compilers for proprietary languages, and messing around with Jitter Buffers (<-- that's definitely geeky) isn't cool, but it's just not Cool with the capital C. It's cool with the lowercase c, as in "Oh, you like math? That's cool." kind of way.

So, the mission for January is to really figure out what I want to be when I grow up. <sarcasm>I'm allotting myself a whole month to figure this out, so it shouldn't be too tough. I've been toying with the idea for couple of years (decades) so it shouldn't be too tough to nail it down with a concerted effort. </sarcasm>.