Randy Voshell:  

***** March 2024, I bought a house in Hill City, SD in the middle of the Black Hills. It's like living in a playground! It's "new construction", and I need to put in some landscaping, but hot summers in South Dakota aren't great for tender new grass so I'll put it off until Fall. Still working... it's just working behind a desk, remotely from home doing cybersecurity stuff. I still get satisfaction from it, but I'm filling more free time with Harley riding in the hills, dancing in country bars, karaoke in dive bars, pool anyplace where there's a pool table, hiking around the Black Hills when I can. And visiting Oregon to see my grandson as often as I'm able. I captain a couple of teams in two pool leagues, and play on another -- but I'm a much better captain than I am at playing pool, lol. ... gonna blog here for a moment, you can step out if you like ... Nearly 30 years ago, I was doing a small computer consulting company. Really, it started out as doing installations and repair, and then a little programming, but by the 1990's I had clients using my services for purely advice and consulting. I didn't really enjoy talking to people all that much, but I was find in a small consult meeting with one or two people asking questions. But then as a favor, I agreed to "teach" a class on computer networks. I was self-conscious and awkward, and I hated it -- at first. But I kept agreeing to do it "one more time", and lost that "self-consciousness". My classes became a regular thing, and I treated them as conversations with friends and colleagues. Once, someone was monitoring one of my classes to see what I was doing and he offered his opinion that the difference between me and other instructors that he'd seen is that others liked to stand in front of the room and spill all of the wisdom that they had -- whether the room wanted to hear it or not. He called them "the sage on the stage", compared to me as the "guide on the side". I was more interactive and conversational, filling in necessary content and background along with answers to questions. And I love to tell stories, and I guess students liked that. After 9/11, people weren't flying me into places to teach anymore, because everyone was nervous about flying anywhere (although I was on a plane by 9/18 to teach a class in Kansas City). When teaching went "remote", and I didn't have a room full of warm bodies anymore, I started teaching classes in my own place in Oregon, which of course led to even more consulting business as well. It was fun until we closed it to focus on the growing consulting business. MBTI informs me that I'm an introvert, and I certainly agree. Speaking to large groups of people is exhausting for me. My classes were 5 full days long, but were limited to 12 students, and had a generous lab component to them so I wasn't "on stage" for more than a few hours per day. I've also presented for just an hour to 800 Tektronics engineers from all over the world at an international conference they held when their oscilloscopes were morphing into specialized PCs, and electronics engineers needed to be computer savvy as well (Yes, there was a time when they weren't, lol, I'm THAT old). And I was privileged to teach a room full ...Expand for more