Irma L. Olguin Jr.

I work all the time. I get up and I work, I stay up all night — often — just to work. I try to relax and I begin longing for my keyboard and my Inbox. But I’m not a workaholic. I don’t need to work.  It’s not something I can’t help.  Oh, no.  I have a different problem: fear of letting people down. I get my ya-yas off being the hero.  I mean, who doesn’t? I don’t like to be the only guy that can do XYZ — infact, I think that’s a recipe for disaster — but I love being the best of 10 that can do XYZ, or the most efficient, or the most reliable…I love it.  I’ll put my own health on the line with too much adrenaline and too little sleep in order to be that guy. … Continue reading →

Warning:  There are a lot of parenthesis in this blog post. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Over and over again you hear this thing: ”Do what you love,” or, “Do what makes you happy,” or some variation on that theme.  Which, I have to say, sounds like great advice except that it’s useless to me. And if you’re like me (you are, I can tell) you have a pretty severe problem with that advice.  The problem is that you don’t know what you would love to do. Or put another way: We don’t know what makes us happy. Does that sound ridiculous?  Ok, kind of.  But not when you think it through.  Consider this scenario: You are given enough money to make your ends meet for 6 months; no strings attached.  That’s enough to quit your job and start fresh.  What do you do? (Or … Continue reading →

I’m just going to lay it down in small words: “If you build it, they will come,” is a crock of shit. To borrow a phrase, if I had a nickle for every time a website launch was delayed on account of the imperfections… As a web programmer, I see a lot of projects come and go. We depend on the project manager’s ability to say, “We could spend more time polishing and adding features, but let’s get this in front of some eyes,” which is a hard thing to say, I’ll admit, because there are 10,000 things that could be better.  If you happen to be the project manager, then that burden is on you. And what makes it even harder is this strange voice in your head that says, in no uncertain terms, that as soon as you upload those … Continue reading →

…will lead you to your destination. — Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Long Way Home I went to school on an academic scholarship, and I wish I could say that I got to do that on account of my incredible foresight,  determination, and hard work.  But that’s not at all what happened.  Here’s how it went down: When I was fairly young (7), I realized it felt really good to do well on my homework.  When you’re seven, you don’t really think of things in terms of hard and not-hard.  You think of things in terms of in-trouble versus not-in-trouble.  I didn’t think about being smarter than everyone else, I just saw an easy way to not agitate the adults at home or at school, and that seemed just fine to me. Compliments about being smart were nice, but really, I was … Continue reading →

There’s a healthy debate going on in which youngish people are wondering if going to college is worth the money, the time, the effort, the … hustle.  In fact, coverage of this very thing can be found on this website, Nettuts, which is known for it’s tutorials and not so much for its articles (you’ll see why).  If you ask me, the go-to-college-vs-get-a-job debate is tired.  Historically, college graduates make more than non-graduates, but that gap is closing.  I, for one, think there are better reasons to go to college than your salary, but I digress. Really, there are two things that I hear often enough to write about on account of their absurdity: “My friend so-and-so got her degree in [ something ] and hasn’t been able to find a job in [ a number of  ] years.” “My … Continue reading →

The things we don’t say to students (but should!) in a neat little Top Ten list. Continue reading →

About being brutally honest with yourself, and the words you use. Continue reading →

…is that you’re aiming at a moving target. And it’s hard to say who you’re serving in the first place.  Is it the students?  Their parents? The board? The principal? Oh sure.  Take the easy way out and say it’s the students.  No Child Left Behind.  All children have a right to learn.  Blah blah blah.   There’s a very good argument out there that says that teachers are very much like prison wardens. “And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a … Continue reading →

A tribute to my dad who died in 2003. These are just a handful of the powerful memories he unwittingly left for us. Continue reading →

My commitment to use this blog as a means of communicating the details of my medical journey. Continue reading →