Introduction
I’ve been an avid reader of Ziff Davis publications like PC Magazine, PC World, BYTE, and PC Computing ever since I was in high school (grade 13). You see, I completed a 1 year Cooperative Education placement in Accounting & Computers at Computing Devices Company (CDC) located in Canada’s Silicon Valley North. That’s the name we use for the National Capital region that’s made up primarily of Ottawa, Nepean, Gloucester, Orleans, and Kanata. It’s here that great companies like Cognos, Nortel, Newbridge Networks, Corel, Mitel, Norpak, Simtran, QNX, Lumonics, JDS Uniphase and a ton of others came to life.

Anyhow, CDC is now part of the massive General Dynamics military industrial complex. Aah, now I’m starting to understand the significance of all those “special projects” that were going on in the Anti Submarine Warfare department headed by Ken Charter back then. lol. Heck, I think those “Cold War” subs go for like $2 BILLION these days. Hmmn, can they at least drill for oil or do something else that’s useful? Good lords, no wonder the US has a $9.5+ TRILLION national debt…and climbing!!!

The good ole’ days…
Back then, I’d work in the mornings between 8:30a and 11:45, and attend classes in the afternoon. Too bad Ontario high schools now go up to grade 12. I believe that extra year of classes adds maturity in a student that’s lacking these days. How the hell does a 17 or 18 year old know what the heck they want to do on campus? Grade 13 back then, essentially, was equivalent to first year at most colleges and universities around the world…and it was FREE. Oh well, I feel sorry for peeps like my little brother who could probably use the extra year.

Thanks for managing me…
Anyhow, I started to get a warm and fuzzy after reading this ZDNet blog post: Signs you might not be IT management material. Why? Because I thought of old managers I worked for and realize that I was lucky as hell to have been “managed” by the right “managers” so to speak. Who knows, the wrong managers may have convinced me to pursue a different career altogether – like heading back to Barbados and working for my dad’s construction and transportation businesses. And I know he’d make a crappy manager because he didn’t have any people skills whatsoever.

Luckily, my 2 bosses (Claire Laliberte and Pierre Bertrand) at CDC were very flexible, caring and pointed me in the right direction most of the time. Thanks to them sending me in the computer lab to do all those Lotus 1-2-3 tutorials, I began to realize my true potential in the IT field. In no time, I was a spreadsheet guru, able to crank out sophisticated worksheets utilizing all of Lotus 1-2-3’s power. I vividly remember salivating at the prospect of getting my hands on the King Jaguar or Baler spreadsheet compilers for creating stand alone spreadsheet applications without the need for the customer owning 1-2-3, Quattro Pro or any of the other competitors.

Another great experience took place when I became a freelance temp worker out of high school. I remember my old boss, Wayne Parker, at Bell Canada’s Corporate Engineering (Planning & Standards Research division) department. He was a laid back techie who gave me tons of resources to crank out those massive macro-based Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets for the Transmission Quality Survey for the 416, 905, 613, 705, 416, 819 and 514 Ontario/Quebec area codes. My output (lots of graphs) was used by senior management to get a big picture on Bell’s telephone line infrastructure and where to begin the roll out of fibre optic cabling.

I fondly remember the time when I commandeered a room of about 10 computers and printers to simultaneously print graphs from all my data analysis. We’re talking spreadsheets with about 10,000 rows here folks! Heck, everyone in that department was so kool – except for that one crappy senior manager who has long since retired, or (gasp!) worse. Here’s a big shout out to Mr. Parker and his family – wherever they are. Oh, and to Lubna Qureshi (aka LJQ) who was a brainy electrical engineer passionate in antennae design, but “that” crappy manager didn’t even realize it. And how can I forget Estelle, the secretary. What a sweetheart. I do hope she’s enjoying her retirement.

Once again, I was fortunate to have encountered great managers at Northern Telecom (now Nortel) for that awesome summer student job where I created a large Mac FileMaker database of all hardware assets (computers, network IDs, serial #s, printers, etc.). This was at their massive Corkstown Road facility in Nepean. One interesting note: I met this kool dude name Manabu Kato who was an exchange student from Japan. His interest back then was Artificial Intelligence. After his summer gig, he left for California and then back to the Far East. I wonder what he’s up to these days! Hmmn, let’s try http://www.google.com/search?q=Manabu+Kato. Well whatever he’s up to, I’m sure he’s a smashing success.

I also want to thank Clay Grandy (CEO/President of AGO Industries in London, Ontario) for being a no-nonsense straight up manager while I was a summer student at his company. He knew his company’s products better than any body. Not once did he rest on his laurels. Heck, he’d even dip his feet in IT and once did his own tech support on all his PC equipment (even setting up and managing an office LAN) before he got too busy. You see folks, here’s a manager that leads by doing. Point noted Clay! By the way, Clay had a super sexy metallic silver corvette back then. Lucky for me, he’d be headed in my direction on my way home. Fast times indeed!

Lastly, I have to give major props to Lindsay Phillips (and Nancy Bartlett) at the Bank of Montreal’s swanky Institute For Learning in the Applied Technology department. He’s the one who drove 2 hours down the Highway 401 to UWO to recruit me for my 16 month Computer Science industrial internship. This forced me to relocate to the amazing city of Toronto.

In fact, this act got me to explore Toronto’s amazing night life which is second to none. Here, I found my passion for Electronic Dance Music (House, Tribal, Acid Techno, Dark Progressive House, Tech Trance, Funky House) at spots like System Sound Bar, The Guvernment, Kool Haus, Life, Film Lounge, The Comfort Zone and lots of big party events by sponsors like Bensons & Hedges, Smirnoff, Heineken among others. Talented DJs like DJ Myka, Kenny Glasgow, Mark Oliver, Goldfinger, DJ Addy, Dekoze, Jelo, Joee Cons et al continue to inspire me with their delicious sounds that are out of this world. Let’s just say that my life has never been the same after discovering the EDM scene. Stay tuned for DJ Sinister to the max folks. That’s my next major hobby in a year or 2.

Anyhow, Lindsay was one tough manager in the sense that he didn’t put up with crap. Yet he gave me a lot of freedom as well as provided me with lots of good advice when I first started out. He was forward thinking by allowing me to go on that Windows 2000/SQL Server 7 training workshop with Executrain. He also trusted me enough by giving me full responsibility to mentor 2 high school internship students. Personally, he didn’t like the “corporate bureaucracy bullshit” that much so I’d say he was a very hands-off manager. One other thing…he taught me never to accept crappy products and services from IT vendors. Is this why I’m super critical of companies when they provide crappy service these days? Perhaps. Who knows? Well, I’m sure Lindsay’s retired on some island by now. I recall he loved to travel.

Inspire me…
I guess what I’m trying to say by highlighting my most memorable managers is this: A great manager inspires you to want to perform for them and yourself too. They give your work a purpose. Now, I’m pretty good at inspiring myself, but I’m a little different from a lot of people based on my upbringing in 3 different countries mostly as an only child being raised between my mother, aunts, step mother, grand parents, and dad. However, I truly believe that the mark of a good manager in this present era is one based on his/her ability to inspire the drones (er workers/employees/associates). Times have changed. Employees are no longer loyal to any company. Mobility can be a costly bitch for a company that’s turned over its staff to the wrong manager.

Food for thought…
In the above blog post discussion, a web surfer named Jeff Foxworthy highlights a funny but slightly true observation about IT managers. Perhaps some of you future managers here in Africa can learn from this.

You might not be IT management material…..
If you’re not monetizing your synergies.
If you’re not delegating the architecting.
If you think DNS stands for Doesn’t Know S—.
If your employees whisper about routing around the damage, but stop talking as you approach.
If you forgot to send out the memo about the TPS coversheets.

Since I’m house-sitting my pal’s house here in Lavington (a Nairobi suburb) until the end of April, I’ve had the privilege of daily Internet access courtesy of her $200 per month iWayAfrica satellite (VSat) hookup. In a way, my friend Samantha (of Bedouin Camp fame) is doing me a favour by letting me house sit for her.

Decisions, decisions…
Well, I was peeking some enticing IT articles & discussions on ZDNet, SlashDot, Jon Auza’s blog, and a host of other spots in cyber space. And I ran into this gut-wrenching scenario that a programmer had to face: Should he choose a programming job using a language (PERL) that he loves versus a 66% pay rise with another company that’s using Microsoft’s .NET framework.

Heck, in my state of affairs, I’d take the damn .NET job if I was that dude. I can always do PERL scripting in my off time, or even take part in a kick-ass PERL project on SourceForge, which just happens to be the world’s largest Open Source Software repository. Here, you’ll find tons of FREE amazing software projects – like the OpenBiblio Library Information System (LIS) that I implemented for the Jewish Youth Library of Ottawa (JYLO) back in 2004.

Anyhow, I urge you to peek the discussion…lots of interesting points for and against taking both jobs. See Choosing Your Next Programming Job: Perl or .NET. I even blogged about .NET here a year ago. See, I was right! .NET is gaining momentum. Heck, I’m sure a lot of .NET coders are paying off their mortgages in 3 years or less.

Gripe central…
Since I’m using Samantha’s iBook G4 laptop while she visits the south of France, the UK and Dubai, I’ve gotten a bird’s eye view of the Mac OS/X operating system. And to be honest with you all, I’m not that thrilled with it. The major reason is just the little things. Have you ever used cut & paste in the Windows Explorer? Well, I couldn’t find a similar feature in OS/X at all. I had to bloody copy a file or folder from somewhere, paste it to the destination, and then delete the original file. Damn it, but how bloody ANNOYING is that? Yeah, Windows has some warts, but give me Explorer over the Finder in OS/X any day of the week. I think I’m just gonna turn Windows Server 2008 into a workstation (see info on how to do this here, here, and here) on the laptop I plan to buy within 30 days – if all goes well. Let’s just say that I’m skipping Vista after hearing so many horror stories.

Thanks Steph…
By the way, my good pal whom I met on XVI dropped by Nairobi en route to Rwanda and Uganda to do 6 months of academic research. You see, she’s doing her Masters in Peace Building & Conflict Resolution through Royal Roads University. Oh, that’s waaay over there on Vancouver Island, which is in the beautiful province of British Columbia on Canada’s west coast. She hung out with me for 4 days, and I got her to deliver the goods. You see, since Stephanie was coming from Canada, I got her to download a ton of software on her super fast DSL broadband connection before she left for Africa.

Now I have the latest versions of PC-BSD (a kool desktop distro based on the popular FreeBSD server O/S), SimplyMEPIS (a Linux distro that’s getting tons of rave reviews), OpenOffice (a free alternative to Micro$oft Office that runs of Linux & Windows), PostgreSQL (a free database manager that competes admirably against Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase et al), VMware Player (Linux & Windows versions), and XAMPP for Mac OS/X.

Heck, I would never in a million years attempt to download all that stuff over here. Nope! Anyhow, I’m gonna take them all for a spin and I’ll review them right here. It’ll give me a chance to spread some open source love here in East Africa. I hear po-po (er police) has been going around Nairobi nabbing peeps in offices and cyber cafes using pirated software. This is a good thing as it’ll force EVERYONE to utilize open source software like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenOffice et al.

Happy computing!

Oh, I found Java too verbose and Sun’s bloody licensing scheme was annoying. Now, Microsoft’s .NET is taking over where it left off. C/C++ was kool, but very macho and, damn, did you have to do lots of debugging to get anything running properly. Screw that. Besides, I’d rather use Borland’s Delphi, which is the souped up re-incarnation of Turbo Pascal. Heck, the executable code runs just as fast or faster than C/C++…and it’s smaller too. No sh!t dudes. Betcha didn’t know that.

Enter Python
Now, if you’ve been living in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, then you probably will not have a clue about the Python programming language, which is truly a secret weapon in many IT shops around the planet. Trust me on that one. I wrote about it here, so I won’t bother reinventing the wheel.

Anyhow, I think it’d be a great language for peeps here in Africa to learn instead of that crappy outdated VB6 language they’re still teaching in most of these IT (ahem!) schools. Buyer beware. Oh, Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, now works for Google, which is now the most admired company on the planet. What does that say about them and their committment to being #1? Everything. And the official Python mascot is such a cutie. Don’t you agree?

Python jobs on the rise…
According to this blurb on the Oreilly Radar , Python jobs are on the rise. Take a peek at this:

O’Reilly editor Sarah Milstein writes: “My brother, a Python geek who attended PyCon last week, reports that it was hiring fest: ‘at PyCon: *everyone* was hiring. I was asked if I would be interested in moving to 2-3 cities for a job, just in casual conversation. Half the lightning talks ended (or started) with “We’re hiring”. Which was pretty deeply reassuring.’” This information is consistent with our analysis of the online book and job markets. Ruby has more momentum among startups, but Python is also a hot startup language, and is becoming one of the officially sanctioned licenses at many larger companies. For example, it is one of the three “official” languages at Google (C++, Java, and Python)

Wow! Isn’t that totally AMAZING? The beauty about Python programming is that the language is simpy a joy to use. It’s easy to read…not cryptic at all, and powerfull as hell. You can create desktop apps, web apps, networking apps, use it as your middleware stack, write commercial video games, use it on your mobile device. It simply is the chameleon of programming languages, and that’s why I think more people here in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Kigali, Lagos, Cape Town, Kampala et al should be USING it. Say goodbye to VB6 and Java for heavens sakes.

Thanks Eiwot…
I’m a member of the Ottawa Python Author’s Group so I get a lot of emails on what’s going down in the world of Python. Here’s some info from Eiwot – a member:

Hi all,
I created new blog about Python programming and Python Articles at http://pyarticles.blogspot.com. Let’s check it out

Cheers

Damn, everybody’s using Blogger/BlogSpot eh? I guess Google can’t keep a good thing under wraps (secret) for too long. Anyhow, I urge you to peek his blog. I’m quite impressed with his posts so far.

Happy computing.