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Where
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Mental Health and IT Projects27th September 2006
Just can't be stuffed getting sucked back into the IT
industry The reason I don't want to take on these challenges is fear. I fear that if I throw myself at a brick wall then I will break again. I don't want to break again. The time before that was at enabling technologies, and that was a catalyst - though not the thing itself - that led to all my mental health
problems I am very good at making computers dance for me. I can make them do very useful things for people. But, a) I just don't enjoy it anymore and b) it is not worth the mental strain, so I figure is time to give up on computers in the professional sense. Mike Miller is a good friend of mine. He is the kind gentleman who hosts this site for me free of charge. Mike had been reading my thoughts and ideas on the website I want to build that will enable impoverished African women to sell their crafts. Mike knows about the mental health problems I had and that working in the IT industry was a catalyst to those problems. Mike quoted some of my own phrases back to me (bastard!), and questioned me about whether or not building this website will be good for me personally. It is a good question. I don't want to go back A place where the wretched are tormented for eternity. While not a perfect match for my problems - it was not for eternity for example- it is still a pretty good word for what I went through. The things I thought, the things I did to myself and the things I witnessed other people do were all horrific. I don't want to go back. I don't want to go back. I don't want to go back. Fortunately, things are looking up. I can laugh so hard that drool escapes, have fun adventures with friends and - most importantly - feel as if me life has some sort of purpose. That's not to say that the demons don't sometime resurface. See here and here for some examples. If you're interested in what happens during a typical day at the mental health institution I stayed at, click here. And yet here I am... Well, I think not. Creating a website for impoverished African women is a completely different story to creating a website that makes the rich richer (including myself) and put the poor out of work. While that's not the complete story of my professional life, it is a large part of the story. It is nice to think that I using my God given talents to help some ladies crawl out of the hole that is extreme poverty. It might work. It might not. We'll see. Mike did raise a good point and it got me thinking. I decided to scale back my ideas for this website. Gone are the automated news tickers. Gone are the automated products of the week. Gone are the whizzes, pops and bangs. All of these things can be done manually. Maybe they'll make an automated appearance in the future, but it is in no way necessary at the moment. In fact, I will be doing very little programming work for the website thanks to the Commerce Starter Kit (CSK) produced by some open source guys. Without one iota of programming, the CSK allows me:
Which is all very cool and will make my life that much easier. Most of my thoughts nowadays are about marketing, financing and process. Very little of my thoughts are about For...Next loops. Sanity plus Questions? Comments? Try contacting
me. (c)
2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena. |
