Learning is a life-long skill. It is useful to everyone out there, from children to the elderly and everyone in between. Without it we can not function in any world, and even aliens would need to know how to learn. Depending on one’s brain composition learning can happen several ways. But it always involves organizational skills, sorting, rehashing, and remembering and recall. Whether we enjoy it or find it a burden, we have to learn new things every day, from weather changes, to road conditions, from news about wars, to peace summits. Life is always changing, and even a meditating monk still can spot a change at least in the dust gathering on the floor around him.

I am someone who loves to learn. Though I say that loosely because I am not obsessed by it. Life is not something I measure by the quantity of things I know, even though I know a lot, but by whom I can help with that knowledge. My greatest gift I suppose is the desire to help others, to steer change in positive directions, to undo harm caused by those who are careless and reckless by sharing knowledge, skills and expertise. Technology plays a key component in my dreams, as it should in all living beings, alien or human, AI or organic. Technology can be as simple as a sharp rock, or as complex as an AI-driven medical database. Mastering the skill-sets to wield technology is crucial in the modern world, as it was in the stone age. Hunters with bows and arrows could hunt at a great distance than those that used merely their hands. They had greater gains, longer life expectancy, and above all else, better meat! Mastery of technology gives us better meat, too, or veggies if you’re not into dead animals.

Being bombarded with new trends every day, bitcoin, web3, AI, NFTs, and all manner of startups, makes one crazy at times. What do I study? How do I choose? Which will yield a prosperous and healthy future for myself as well as for all? These are difficult questions and some of them border on philosophical even. I don’t like splitting hairs and I don’t like sifting through thousands of choices, but it has to be done. How can I know if NFTs are a scam, or if bitcoin is inherently insecure, or if the latest fad of everyone using a VPN for $5 a month is a useful trend if I don’t research each and every one? Do I use my gut instinct? There is no such thing as a gut instinct when you really think about it, it is just an illusion for choices we make without careful scrutiny. Yes I know some will argue otherwise, but you don’t choose a dentist based on gut instinct, you look for diplomas, certificates, years of satisfied customers, you look for a personal recommendation. All that goes against gut instinct. Same goes for technology - we invest our time wisely and carefully for we have but one life to live and we don’t want to waste years. Think of the stock market. On average it yields 15% profits, but there are those who get 30% from it routinely. There is a system, a mastery of which will provide ample returns.

I believe I have found a way to give myself a leg up on the competition and it is a time-honored method that works in many areas of life. I will commit to writing a new technology based blog article every week for a year. This will mean by 2025 I will have written fifty two articles. I suppose I could even go for 365 articles and write one per day, but that would be an entirely different project, one of quantity and not quality. I am not interested in that way of life. I am not interested in gulping 2L of coke every day. I am interested in one perfect cup every weekend. That type of approach. I will write one article per week because I want to spend the previous six days researching, amassing knowledge, memorizing, and properly studying the topic. I want to spend a minimum of three hours per day looking up whatever makes up that week’s topic. Then I will summarize it all, assemble a blog post and share it with the world. After one year, I will know everything I have ever wanted to know about the modern technological landscape. And there are countless topics that interest me. I might even venture and record a video after I publish a blog post. But that would be an entirely different project. Maybe one topic can be how to put together videos for YouTube or other platforms. I hope to cover even programming topics and networking trends that aren’t around anymore. Things like Novell NetWare and IPX (as opposed to IPv4/IPv6) interest me greatly. I often wonder how AppleTalk used to work and why FIDOnet was so efficient at distributing messages and how it compared to WWIVnet.

So if you’re into old tech, new tech, or any tech, look forward to what I have to share. I hope I do not disappoint but the most important thing is that I will be writing for my benefit and not for that of others as my first objective. I will still put effort into editing it properly and trying to make it professional sounding. But the ultimate goal is my personal expansion of my too narrow tech horizons.