Setting the Tone

When can you look straight in the face of foreboding and lie to yourself and call it “foreshadowing” instead?

Eager to start my first official full day off on the right foot, I headed down to the school, where I have my pristine, well equipped setup that I use every day to do livestreams on audio education, test software, and direct our daily coding chores for aiXdsp, and record and mix songs for pipelineaudio. I fire up the computer, launch Unity Hub, and fire up chrome to get on the team a Slack.

And darkness.

A snip in the fiber of the coconut wireless.

With ten minutes to go before clock in, I frantically tried restarting routers and looking for any outage reports. No go, time is ticking away so I head home to clock in late, and try to work past the background of screaming chickens, gas powered lawn tools and the never ending Kailua construction.

As I started working thru the assignments something that has been gnawing at me for a decade or more really started making its presence known. I have always been an odd duck. Before the internet age, I could tear thru technical manuals at warp speed, digest them, and regurgitate them into plain English terms in order to get teams of skilled or unskilled labor to do some rather hi tech work. I was the audio industry equivalent of a useless trivia machine, and I had piles and piles of that trivia, and would scour every college or trade library I could to devour more.

This quickly led to a lifestyle of managing ten emergencies at once, in real time, with a lot of money and peoples’ fates on the line. I thrived in chaos and anarchy. I’m proud of what all we accomplished sometimes with very little money, no time, and a tech landscape changing so fast that dinosaurs were born every minute, condemned to obsolescence before they even cracked out of their eggs.

But I’ve noticed over the years, that while I could still troubleshoot. While I could still teach others to fight challenges and problems quickly, and without all the clutter. While I was actually even getting better at that. I was losing focus. No longer could I really fly thru a book, or even pdfs. I was still learning every tool and system I came across, but I more felt it than read it. As if it was just a part of my ecosystem that I instinctively understood instead of actually read a manual for (which was in some ways good as manuals were becoming as rare as floppy disks).

Today this fog really held me up on picking up concepts as fast as it should of. Thinking that you may not be groking correctly is a terrifying thing. At least for me. Earlier in life if I had trouble with immediate epistemology I would count things that I had record of the number of just to be sure I was sharing the same reality as I was yesterday. I’m hoping the focus comes back, and quickly, but today has been a day of setbacks.

Later today, when we knew the internet was working for sure, I headed back down to the school and got cracking. And then, of course, Visual Studio decided it did not want to communicate nicely with Unity Hub. Every bit of a lifetime of troubleshooting came out and I blitzed to get this issue resolved.

Nada in any of the usual places.

Social media had little help, and peoples’ attentions were elsewhere given the election.

So of course, there’s a google attempt. So far in this course I have been surprised by how relevant google still is! Type in a search with “Unity” in it and you will likely get some results that are relevant. LOTS of them! I’ve done a few shows on just how useless Google has gotten for searching in so many industries, trades and hobbies over the last few years, and whichever shows weren’t specifically on that subject were still very likely to have a few mentions and aspersions at the google environment, when it comes to meaningful answers.

But I tried! Google even got me a few other people having the same problem

But no answers.

There was really only one place left to go, but dare I do it?

Discord.

The dark depths of the bowels of the earth. Not to get sucked into the rabbit hole, just ask some questions, answer some clarifying comments if need be then run. Run! Back to the light Carol Anne!

Within five minutes Discord had my answer and I am back and running again.

If the muddiest lurk-fest on the net had so much positivity for me so quickly today, maybe its not foreboding after all. Nor Foreshadowing.

Just the future throwing down the gauntlet of challenge.