About The Geeky Dewd
I wanna talk about me
Wanna talk about I
Wanna talk about number one
Oh my me my
What I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I see
I like talking about you, usually, but occasionally
I wanna talk about me
- Toby Keith
I intend to make this blog helpful and meaningful to you, to share lessons I have learned through the bad and good times in my life. The posts in my blog will be about you. I hope you find them useful and inspiring and you tell all of your friends and I write a book and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold and I use the money to start a foundation and I make the world a better place. This page, though, is about me.
I entered college as a major in chemical engineering. After a run-in with Schrödinger’s equation and a few bouts with the calculus, I decided to spend more time partying and switched to studying computer science and management. I got a job in the computer lab, worked my way through school, saved $100,000, married a pretty girl, and settled into a career managing software developers and computer operations. It was not very satisfying but the pay was great. I often wondered if I’d made the wrong decision in college, but I had over a hundred programmers working for me, was making and saving lots of money, and was on track to having enough money in the bank to retire at age 52. Still, I had doubts. I hated going to work and kept my inner geek barely at bay by building computers at home in the basement.
One beautiful spring morning, that life ended. As I finished completing tax returns, I thought to review the year’s credit card bills to see if I might have missed any deductions. In doing so, I noticed two unusual charges. Following up led me to uncover a trail of lies; I learned that the pretty girl I married had been cheating on me and stealing from me for twenty years. Following my painful discovery, I fell into a deep depression.
A series of remarkable events pulled me out of the depression. At first, I was able to dismiss these events as improbable coincidences. People do win the lottery. Something one-in-a-million happens, well, once in a million times. But the chance of two such events occurring is like the chance of winning the lottery twice — one in a trillion. That, surely, is long odds but, before I emerged from the depression five such “coincidences” had occurred. The odds of that are one in one with 30 zeros after it. With the universe being only 13,700,000,000 years old, coincidences with odds with 30 zeros just could not be attributed to chance. I became convinced that a higher power or law was intervening in my life, that I was here for an important, but yet unknown, purpose.
When my ex’ lawyers had finished, I had, strangely, $100,000 left – almost exactly what I had started with twenty years earlier! Also, strangely, I was blessed with extraordinary vigor. Though in my forties, I was still playing recreational soccer with and against college varsity players. Being unhappy at work wasn’t too awful when I was close to retirement, but, having lost twenty years’ savings, retirement was now a long way off. My employer was also not so happy with my performance as a manager, especially given the issues with the depression, but was delighted with my performance as an engineer. We agreed that I should return to school to update my skills and return to engineering full-time. Emerging from the darkest times of my life, I was blessed with a chance for a “do over.” As if by magic, twenty years was erased from my life and I was returned to college to take the other path and try again.
I enrolled in the Master of Science in Computer Engineering program at Colorado Technical University and set a goal to complete it with straight A’s. CTU determined that I needed to complete two remedial classes, a math refresher and an electrical engineering survey class, before beginning my program. There were five students in the remedial classes, which were taught personally by the Dean of Engineering, Scott Von Tonningen. I should have read the course description more closely; I thought the first class was a calculus refresher but on the first day learned that calc was a prerequisite. The class covered discrete algebra, differential equations, and probability and statistics, each subject typically a full-term by itself, in five and a half weeks – plus I had to reteach myself the long-forgotten calc! I burned my accumulated vacation and studied harder in those weeks than I ever had in my life. I spent many hours in Dr. Von T’s office and, when it was over, I had survived — but with only a 3.5. My goal, to graduate with a 4.0, had not survived the first class!
A seemingly insignificant incident in the second remedial class, electrical engineering, changed my entire thinking about my long-time nemesis, math. The answer given for a problem was 1/j2πf but I kept coming up with 1/j2πf+δ(f)/2. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to make δ(f)/2 go away. I gave up and showed my work to Dr. Von T. He laughed, “Simple! Ignore it! It represents random noise,” he explained, “so it cancels itself out and has no effect on the signal.” That incident forever changed my relationship with math. Math became meaningful to me. It was no longer a “religion” of perfect truth, beauty, and pure intellectual thought. Instead, it represented things I could touch — real things in real life. Math became a powerful sledgehammer – a tool I could wield to beat problems into submission. In an engineer’s perspective, an exact, perfect answer is not required, it is only required that one hammer a problem until one has an answer that is close enough to provide a practical solution! If the legacy of your experience with math teachers, those acolytes of the religion of math, has left you with math anxiety, free yourself from fear. Adopt an engineer’s perspective. Most times, you don’t need an exact answer – only one that is close enough. Forget math as a religion and make it, instead, your hammer. I will write more about using math from an engineer’s perspective in an upcoming post.
To make a long story short, I continued at CTU earning Masters degrees in electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science with a cumulative GPA of 3.99. I had challenging projects to work on during the day and I was teaching at CTU some evenings. Still, my life was incomplete. I was having fun but felt that I should still be doing more, feeling that I still had an unfulfilled purpose. Then, a little over a year ago, my life took another turn. I met a remarkable person, a retired champion athlete; an ultra-marathoner; and a commercial pilot and flight instructor with over 16,000 hours in the cockpit; a person who excels at everything she tries. Her discipline, organization, and purpose inspired me. I began to try to emulate her, discarding baggage from my past and becoming more organized, deliberate, and focused. I will always be indebted to her for the changes her friendship inspired in me.
That brings me finally to the purpose of this blog. There are scientists and mathematicians and pilots and doctors and teachers and others of all professions but, in the end, it is the engineer who takes ideas from paper and creates material things that work. There is much to be gained from understanding an engineer’s practical perspective. Follow this blog and I will share lessons from my life – the good times and the bad – and work. I will show you the way of the engineer, how to use tools from the engineer’s toolbox to examine issues in your life. I do not promise perfect outcomes. In life, as in engineering, there are always trades. However, I do promise that you will become more creative, gain insight into your options, and achieve highly satisfying outcomes as you learn to use an engineer’s perspective.
