I am the Kinzua Kid

I am the Kinzua Kid.  We’ll tackle why that is in a moment but first I must apologize.  I haven’t been terribly productive of late, having been “offline” for about a month as I wrestled with some important decisions.  It’s all good stuff, really and I hope you can join me (and Ted, of course) for some fun times ahead.

First off, I left EMC at the beginning of November and took the month off to go hunting, enjoy Disneyland and manage the kid carpool.  I did quite literally the least amount of anything I have ever done in my life for a solid month.  That got old (seriously…do you know how dull doing nothing is?) so I accepted an offer to join the fine folks over at Datalink to help grow their Advanced Services business (read: consulting).  I am really excited to work with these aces.  Day two with the company had me moderating a panel at the Raleigh CIO Forum on Business vs. IT Transformation with 3 great CIOs.  I get paid to do this shit?  Seriously?  I love my work; sometimes I’m actually pretty good at it, too.

With the new job comes some changes to the blog, most of which I think you’ll enjoy.  I’ll be pushing out more timely content related to IT, Cloud Services, Service Management, and especially articles concerning how those things intersect with consumerism, since that’s kind of the point of Cloud and Service Management.  But that’s not all I’m going to write about…

• I’m a skeptic and a critical thinker.  If I feel like calling out some pseudoscientific bullshit I might just have to.  A lot.  There are a lot of snake oil salesmen and high priests of fraud out there so expect this to be a recurring theme.
• I’m an amateur astronomer, really amateur but I hope to become even just a shadow of guys like Jack Kramer and continue to add back to the community.  So you’ll see more of my astrographs if I ever get any good at taking them.  Yes, those are mine.  I’ll take your insults in the comments.  “Do you even polar align?!” is a good start.
• I’m an amateur magician.  My brother in law is a professional but I just perform mentalism, coin and card tricks for fun and mainly during the holiday season as a walk-around entertainer.  I am, however, featured on YouTube performing a miracle or two.  I might, therefore, have to cover that end of the world.  Guys like Randi, Penn & Teller and Banachek are my rock stars…
• …But only because Pink Floyd and Dire Straits aren’t touring any longer.  So I’d really appreciate any help getting David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler on stage in my back yard together.  That’s really the only reason we have this blog, anyway, to be ready for anything Pink Floyd or Dire Straits tour related.
• I have a secret talent heretofore unmentioned: I am an aficionado of flash games, having played and mastered hundreds (and probably thousands) of them.  Puzzles, defense, strategy, action, shooters, scrollers, tossers, launchers…I’m a sad man when I have 10 minutes to kill and access to sites like Kongregate or ArmorGames.  You might see a review or two.  There are some talented developers working in that space.
• I’m a patron of the arts because the arts was a patron of me, hence coming coverage of the Oceanside Theatre Company.  These people pull together amazing shows with no money and only sweat equity to push forward.  You might also see material from forensics competitions everywhere, because if you’ve never been given 3 minutes to develop a 5 minute speech or gone 1-2-4 you simply shouldn’t be speaking in front of people without adult supervision.
• I’m also a patron of my wife.  She’s an event planner and you people who organize meetings or conferences need event planners and meeting managers in spades.  I’m looking at you Gartner forums, EMC World and the ACC JPW Open.  Hey, it’s neat that you’re in bed with one hotel forever because they give you massive kick backs but fuck you very much for screwing the attendees over.  All of you.
• Which leads me to the fact that I was a competitive Cribbage player (mediocre, but I can hold my own).  I’m getting back to playing again after 12 years away.  Dad’s pretty pumped up over that one since he’s already there and is a ridiculously good player.  I’ll see you at the 2014 Grand National!
• And last but not least, I believe in treating people like decent human beings.  This is a concept utterly lost on HR departments and my good friend Nick Corcodilos has been speaking that truth for a long damned time.  Once again, I have a transition story that drives the point home affirmatively.  Nick’s right.  There is no talent shortage.

Lucky for all of you, that transition story is likely to be my next article because it touches on so many service management, HR, career, law and political topics from above.  I’m looking forward to writing it.

I say that and I smile.  I called Ted right after I resigned to discuss the future of our blogging experiment and I was concerned my departure (he’s still with EMC) would cause some friction for both of us.  I even went as far as to replicate the blog on the domain I always wanted, KinzuaKid.net, you know…just in case.  That turned out to be unnecessary because Ted’s not actually a douchebag and he helpfully reminded me that we hosted our own blog specifically because situations like this do happen, so I destroyed the database and KinzuaKid.net now permanently redirects to practicalpolymath.com.

Strap yourself in and enjoy.  Oh, right…I almost forgot:
My dad is the Kinzua Kowboy (his old handle/callsign from the 1970s) and I am just the Kinzua Kid.  This is Kinzua (Kin-zoo).  The polymath?  That’s still Ted; he’s the smart one.  I’m just here to piss you off.

Speaking of which.  Ask me the TB:FTE question again; I dare you.