I know nothing part 2: A tribute to Dion Polk and Robert Rodriguez

In college I had one class with a guy who did webpages as a hobby: Dion Polk. He was an older guy ("older" compared to a kid fresh out of high school) that I hung out with after class quite a bit. I owe him a lot. What did he do for me? Very little actually. We'd talk after class, I'd ask him questions about how he wrote webpages, and he enthusiastically answered my questions. The big thing he did for me was write down a url for an online tutorial for HTML. You can hardly go online now without tripping over a million such tutorials, each one equally as good as the one I saw then, but back in the pre-Google days of the internet, such wasn't the case. Back to my point: Dion's can-do, can-learn attitude reinvigorated my passion in technology.

Flash forward some [mumble, mumble] years to watching the extras on the DVD of Sin City. Love it or hate it, Sin City is a visual masterpiece. On the DVD, co-director Robert Rodriguez spends some time explaining his mantra of "Mariachi-style" movie making -- where "creativity, not money, is used to solve problems." He talks about how he got into the movie biz and tells how he did pretty much all jobs himself. Then he casually mentions how the viewer can do pretty much all effects seen in Sin City using an inexpensive camera and the free software that's probably already on their laptop. I was floored! He's really suggesting that your average person can do this. In fact, he himself did this in many professional movies -- including for all the stunning visuals in Sin City.

Although I was interested in computers since childhood and got pretty good with certain aspects, especially for a kid, I largely abandoned computers for my teenage rock n' roll years where I spent most of my non-school time playing in bands. In fact, throughout high school the only programming I did was writing pseudo-BASIC scripts on a graphics calculator to figure out my math formulas for me. Learning all this "computer stuff" in college was really starting from scratch. But I did it. One step at a time. From then until now I have faced countless times where I started out completely deficient in the knowledge needed for my desired field. Until I learned more. Now I have a fledgling skill-set I'm starting to be proud of. Not because I'm special or overly smart - I'm not. Not because I learned it in school - I didn't. It's because I said I can - and I did.