It was a very busy last week for me. I was fighting the Fargo Moorhead flood of 2009. I spent most of my week either filling sandbags or building sandbag dikes. Thank you for all the great food and Moorhead State University after a long day of manual labor. My body told me there was a reason I sit behind a keyboard all day. Here are some original pictures I have from the effort. Our home should be fine. Sewer backup is our big concern, but unless the dikes give way that should not be an issue. My son helped sandbag for three hours on night. He is eight and he was very excited to go help. He did not complain once. I was proud of him for wanting to help. We and he have some friends whose homes are affected more than ours. He was sad for them when he understood what the flood could do to their homes.

fargodome flood fight.

fargodome flood fight.

the kid and I.

parker looking at the flood water.

flood water.

floodwather.

fargodome flood fight.

fargodome flood fight.

I am a non traditional college student. I am nearly 32 years old. I have been working on a Computer Science degree since 2001. I am nearly finished. I have only a handful of classes left. During this time I have been working full time as a system administrator. I mostly work on applications running on Linux servers. It is a pretty decent gig. I have learned something about myself over the last seven years or so though. Something that I fear will ever allow me to be a great programmer or a great employee. It sucks, but I do not know what to do about it. 

If I get a task to do, in school or at work, the task must be very clear to me. I can be a very tenacious person if “X does not work. We need X to work.” Or “Program X must do this, this and this.” Those two tasks are very clearly spelled out. No problem. I will sit and figure it out. There may be some caveman tech support, or caveman programming involved, but whatever. At the end of the day something will work.

I am currently working on a “system to manage lesson plans.” It is really not clear to me what I am doing or where I am supposed to end up. It is a fog. At work sometimes I am emailed a spreadsheet that somebody else created with something along the lines “these might be a problem, they might not. Look into it.” That is not clear to me. I really struggle without exact definitions. What can I do about this? How do I reteach myself to approach unclear problems differently?

If you article headline is:

Firefox’s Fennec Mobile Browser Hits Beta

and buried in the article is:

The Fennec beta is only available for the Nokia 810 Internet Tablet, but there are emulators for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Does that even really count? One device. Come on.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/browsers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215901238&subSection=News