As I mentioned here, I’ve been going through old images and in doing so have found myself looking at different versions of me over the years. It’s had me sidetracked in a thoughtful way.

I’d written about some things before, such as this transition, which is somewhat rare because almost as a rule I like to avoid writing about myself or even talking about myself. I prefer ideas, and in a way that is peculiar because ideas changed me.

The top picture is of me in 2003 in St. Lucia, at the first CARDICIS. I had been plucked by Daniel Pimienta to be part of that CARDICIS, as well as others, because he thought I had things of value to contribute and I’d like to think I did. Yet at the time, I believed I had been invited by mistake.

The pre-CARDICIS Taran was a young man who had returned to Trinidad and Tobago because his father had asked it of him, to help him out on some projects he was working on. Since he and I were constantly at odds, I found myself downstairs in an old colonial style house, open aired, with a desk made of a sheet of marine plyboard sitting on red bricks and a tenuous internet connection. From there I leapt into virtual worlds such as Second Life, I wrote technical stuff for websites to get paid, and I had begun reading much from Gutenberg.org.

My life had changed significantly from being a senior software engineer in my 20s. Where the United States was fertile ground for what I did, Trinidad and Tobago was a wasteland – a wasteland that at the time held promise, which was part of why I had come down besides my father. I had hoped to start a local software company and do all that I had been doing while having a mango tree in my yard. It was not to be, and so I adapted.

I was beginning to grow in different ways after living almost completely around technology. The PC revolution and the Internet had been good to me, as had Free and open source software, enough so that I had spoken about the importance of Trinidad and Tobago building it’s own technology capital based on Free and Open Source software at a conference in Port-of-Spain rather than continuing to buy proprietary software. To be ‘free’ in a sense.

It was an argument that was simple enough that was made by everyone who spoke at the conference – grow developers locally instead of the continued brain drain as people left to do such things abroad, spend less on software licensing locally which would mean decreased foreign exchange going overseas, and eventually being able to participate globally in the technological market. It was well received.

Twenty years later, I can tell you that the marketing department at Microsoft has done a lot better than we did at that conference, and Trinidad and Tobago’s technological ecosystem is, sometimes laughably so, dependent on Microsoft products. In the land of the origin of calypso, I would have thought other paths would have been taken but… for reasons I won’t speculate on, it was not to be.

At least I got some beer out of it. The next image is of me pretending to drink straight from the pitcher (note the lips), but I might as well have that night. We all thought we had done something of note, we were happy, and we were around people with the same thoughts and dreams.

As it happened, we were all going in the same direction, but we all would have very different destinations.

Yet I remember, too, how much that experience and CARDICIS, as well as the infertile technological soil in Trinidad and Tobago would have caused change – even when I returned to the United States by a circuitous route. I’d picked up a gig at Linux Journal somewhere along the way, being the editor at 2 websites their publishing company owned, which in vision were ahead of their time and probably unlikely to have succeeded in meaningful ways. I attribute that to practicing the same concepts that the sites themselves were against, the boxing of technology snippets and piecemealed about, but it doesn’t really matter.

I would find that to be a common thread. People complaining about things while practicing the very same things in their own ways. It was frustrating to watch as rather than build new systems, people would attempt to leverage the very systems they were talking about replacing and swathing themselves in the very bureaucracies that stifled them.

I would find in time that this is just what people do. Very few go beyond what they know because it is uncomfortable, and being comfortable is more important to some people than creating better conditions.

When people have been locked in a prison long enough, giving them keys makes the key a new tyranny. As Heinlein demonstrated fictionally in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, after some generations the prison becomes it’s own culture and to leave it scares more people than we might like to consider.

And those people become our prison in their own ways.

I learned a lot in these past 2 decades, traveling, going back and forth and watching the world through my own lenses, not those as culturally enforced, and I have to wonder if I have accomplished anything more than being a better me.

Being a better me is enough, I suppose.