People have always told me it’s a mistake to be a generalist.

People are always wrong.

Especially in IT, it’s a mistake not being a generalist, as technologies and even basic applications change so fast.

Being a generalist means I have a basic understanding of just about everything important, so when the virtualization du jour technology changes from VMWare to HyperV, I already know how virtualization works at a fundamental level, so it’s just a matter of figuring out which buttons to click or which command line switches to choose to get things going.

I don’t have to go back to the drawing board pretty much ever. Instead of spending a year learning something as those who don’t understand the basics have to do, I can be up and running in days or sometimes in as little as minutes.

I realize this won’t work in every field, but in most fields I believe people hobble themselves by not working enough on basic understanding and too much on specialization.

Anything I can look up on the internet quickly, or in a book, does not need to be in my head. It’s a waste of space.

I don’t want to put my story on this site, as I think that is a space better used for women’s stories as they receive the principal harm from sexism, but it reminded me of a potluck dinner I attended at a job a few years ago.

I’d made lasagna, and the lasagna I make is damn good.

I brought it in and more than one person (and one of whom was a woman, too) said, “This is really good. Did your girlfriend make this? Who made this for you?”

This is after I’d already told everyone that I made the lasagna. Because of course it’s impossible for a man to cook something tasty with no female assistance….

Instead of bothering to write a completely new and atrocious UI and UX, Mozilla should’ve just gotten rid of most of their developers, used the open source portions of Chrome, and called it good.

If you use Firefox, Firefox 29 is out today.

This is the one with the appallingly bad Australis redesign.

It, like the Windows 8 “Metro” design, is tailored to three-year-olds and those who don’t need to get any work done. It is aimed at consumption, not power. It is shockingly bad and poorly-designed.

This commenter said it best about how terrible it is.

I was just thinking about some of the crazy ridiculous shit I did in elementary school that would get me expelled or perhaps even arrested if I were in school now.

There was this kid – a total snot whose parents were rich – who taunted me and others on the playground constantly. One day at recess I was throwing the packaging of my snack away at and he punched in the side of my head a few times and said, “What are you gonna do, shrimp? What you gonna do?”

His friends laughed.

I’d had enough of that so I rushed him and picked him up and threw him in the metal drum garbage can.

I wasn’t allowed to go to recess for two weeks after that.

The kid in question never talked to me again, not in the seven more years that we went to school together.

Another was this hideous kid who – though I didn’t really know what to make of it at the time – held one of my female friends down and sexually assaulted her. He basically spent about 20 or 30 seconds pawing at her crotch through her pants. She was crying hysterically.

The teachers broke it up. I only saw the last of it or I would’ve broken it up myself.

Anyway, I wanted revenge for her, but he always had a pack of too many friends that I couldn’t take on alone and everyone else was afraid of him. One day not long after I was swinging on the swings and noticed this kid kept running by.

Good opportunity for an air strike.

So I started swinging as high as I could and when he ran by, I jumped off at the highest point and landed right on top of him. I think my knee hit his head, even.

I got hurt nearly as bad as he did, but I got in fights all the time and was expecting it, so whatever.

But he was bleeding in multiple places, and barely conscious. Thinking about it now, I’m honestly surprised I didn’t hurt him worse than I did.

I played it off like it was an accident, hobbled back to the classroom, and didn’t even get in trouble for it.

Later that week his friends beat me up pretty badly, but them’s the breaks.

Thinking about it now, I realize this kid had probably been sexually abused or witnessed sexual abuse at home, but my thinking about it wasn’t that sophisticated then.

I’m not proud of those things. Growing up a misfit in rural, very backwards North Florida in the early 80s was a violent life, that’s all.

Those are some things that happened. There are many more stories like them.

Why Americans Are Moving Less: New Jobs Aren’t Worth It.

You can be poor where you already live. Why move somewhere else to go be poor there?