Category Archives: Real Life

Education: Why I dropped out of school

Howdy,

Here in Iceland we’re having a lot of discussion on why so high percentage of young folks drop out from school. The reason for the discussions are due to a television show which talks about the school system and the dropouts.

I am one of those dropouts, I dropped out of high school after one year. The last 3 years of secondary school were a pain for me. Before those 3 years I would consider myself to have been a pretty good student.

During the last 3 years of secondary school I hit some kind of a wall. I stopped spending time learning, lost pretty much all interest in school and spent more time with my friends. I guess this is pretty normal for 13-16 year old kid. But the real reason why I gave up was that I did not see any future learning basic math, Icelandic, Danish etc. My future was in computing, that was for sure. Instead of learning from the school books, me and couple of friends started learning random stuff regarding computing we found after spending countless nights browsing the Internet. We didn’t have Google (Hello Metacrawler !) but somehow we managed to find loads of material that got us interested in networking, Linux (Hello Red Hat 4.2/Slackware 3.1 !), hardware, and UNIX operating systems.

The only course in school which had anything to do with computing was typewriting. The teacher was a math teacher who also did the typewriting classes at the school as well as handling the internal IT. Since me and one of my friends already spent the better half of the day on IRC it came natural to us (or we were already typing correctly, can’t remember:)). This class and English were the only classes I remember getting 9+ in.

Why? Because these were the only classes I was remotely interested in.

The one year I spent in high school was pretty terrible grade wise, but I had a lot of fun that winter…..maybe too much fun. But then real life knocked on the door. A lot faster and harder then I thought it would. And I had to get my stuff together.

Fast forward 15 years. I am a Systems Administrator. I have more then 14 years of experience in IT at age 31. I got to learn stuff that not many people really care about. And I have had to learn those things quite fast (Not having access to 3rd level support for X or Y at 03:00 when you have a system down helps a lot;)). But I actually wanted to learn those things. And I learned quickly that I was able to learn anything if I had any interest at all.

I do consider the school system to be highly flawed. It failed me pretty bad, it was unable to boost my interests in anything it had to offer. Had there been anything (even a optional class) on computers, programming or even industrial computers I would have been there. And it might even have showed me that it could actually pay off to stay in school.

In today’s world everything moves fast. Fast is probably not the correct word. We’re evolving daily. Almost every child knows English better then there parents at age 12. Hell, they are even quicker to find information on anything they want to learn about then there teacher, parent or uncle !

Why are we still doing things the same way we did them 30 or even 40 years ago ? Why can’t we stop this parrot learning style we have and move on to something more dynamic ? I have doubts that the current school system is able to keep my son focused – but hell, so far they are doing better with him then with me 🙂 But I do not have the solution to this problem. But I am sure it revolves around getting the kids interested in some field quickly enough and help them master that field instead of hammering them with Danish or Geography when it is obvious they do not want to learn about it, they can already look all that info up on the internet ! And then, if they want to learn Danish (sorry about bashing Danish, I have nothing against it!) they can choose to learn that. Or something else.

I might be rambling, but I really want today’s kids to get more out of school then I did.

Eventually, I will finish some degree. I hope 🙂

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Happy new year !

Howdy,

Well, 2013 has decided to show up. Happy new year to everybody !

My holiday did not exactly go as planned. It started with me going to my hometown for 4 days (22-26. Dec) with my son to spend the Christmas with my parents. I had to work on the 27th and the 28th and we were going to drive to the Vest-fjords to meet up with my girlfriend and her family to celebrate the new year with them (she went by air on the 22nd).

But noooooooo ! The almighty weather gods made sure that we would not be able to drive, fly or get there by any other means. It snowed like crazy and the weather got a bit windy as well.

So, we ended up spending our new years eve with my friend, his family and his in-laws. It wasn’t exactly what I had planned for the new year but I cannot complain, his cooking skills are amazing and the company was great 🙂

My girlfriend was not able to get home by plane this evening due to the airport being located in a fjord called Isafjordur. Planes repeatedly have a hard time landing there due to fog and weather conditions. Hopefully she will be able to get home tomorrow morning !

The new job is pretty great, today was the first day that has been quite busy. From the looks of it I am pretty sure that 2013 will be quite busy 😀

Well, so long and thanks for all the fish !

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Changes (that time of the year again !)

Howdy all,

Well, about this time last year I changed jobs (leaving one service provider for another).

My work changed from being responsible for a large shared hosting environment with a little bit of consulting on the side to being almost a 100% consultant. For a while it was quite fun, got to work with some of my old favorites (Checkpoint firewalls etc..) and other interesting things. But being the operations person that I am I knew that this would not keep my mind busy for too long. So after spending some time thinking about what I wanted to do right now I decided to find a job at an enterprise (not working for a service provider for the first time since I started doing IT back in 1999:))

I will start there in about 2-3 weeks. Cannot wait !

In other news I managed to reach the age of 30 ! Had some friends over last Friday night to celebrate/cry with me. Haven’t had this much fun for a while :).

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Still alive !

Howdy all,

I’m still alive…just been busy with life, work and everything 🙂

Going to do some changes on the site and hopefully become a little more active.

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Rebel yell…..changes?

Howdy all!

Been a long time since I last posted something. I’ve been quite busy with life/work/play.

This summer was pretty cool, a lot of motorcycle riding and just good old fun with my friends & my son. Found out I like heavy metal more then I could imagine, went to Eistnaflug (a 4 day long heavy metal fest at Neskaupstadur, My hometown). Saw quite a few bands there (Skalmold, Solstafir, Alice in Chains cover band and many…maaaaaaannnyyy more :).

So, in short, motorcycles, leather, mud, rain, rock/metal, hiking, beer and sun ruled my summer!

Since I was already playing a rebel I decided to part from Skyggnir/Nyherji where I have been for the last 10.5 years as a helpdesk operator, technician, network admin and at last, a sysadmin and consultant and move over to Skyrr/EJS to become a full time Network Administrator. I will start there at 1. December. The thought of leaving this company and the bunch of people whom I have worked with for the last decade is pretty tough but I really think this is a good time to switch to another workplace and learn something new.

So…since I have not been in touch with network equipment for the last 4 years or so I knew i had to brush up on my skills and decided to go for CCNA certification ASAP. A friend at Skyrr threw some books at me so I spend most of my free time reading for the exam….

The next 6-12 months will be pretty darn exciting and I am looking forward to have some new challenges thrown at me. However …again, it’s hard to part from a company where you have been a large contributor to and to part from the people who have been (almost) my second family for a long time.

But ….the winter is coming and I have to move my motorcycles to garages around town to keep them safe from the winter here in Iceland. However I am sure I can ride my Suzuki from time to time when the roads are not too “ice-y” 🙂

Well….off to fight my way through life!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Awesome day!

Howdy!

Spent the day riding on my Suzuki DRZ…..I still have a large grin on my face and I am sure it will stay there until sometime next month!

Need to get new tires thought…I “stopped” while going up a hill at least two times and somehow managed to drop the bike both times…..hill score 1, Finnzi score 0.

Planning to buy Michelin T63 tires on Monday so I can beat that hill 🙂

If the weather stays like this until Monday I am sure I will spend tomorrow riding my Fazer…..This is a awesome weekend!

Bgrds,
Finnzi (the guy with the large grin!)