I was tagged by ajbennett. in his Blog It Forward - Anthony Bennett. You can find out more about the challengehere and track it here.
Hi there, I'm Leigh Mason, recently married to the love of my life, SAP Consultant of 5 years, Java, ABAP and asp.net developer, trying to learn iOS, Ruby and getting back into C++, part time CRM functional guy and SAP Business Workflow protégé of jocelyn.dart. I now live in Penrith NSW.
I've spent most of my SAP life in Government projects from State to Federal Government in Australia
My IT career really started when I was 5 years old when I wrote my first lines of BASIC code on an IBM XT. My father was a program writer for Control Data and our family had just moved from Canberra to Melbourne and he brought home one of these babies:
How good were the Function keys on the left hand side of the keyboard :smile: . When we finally got a CGA graphics card ( ZOMG 4 Colours ) we had some of the most nostalgic games ever created:
From Left to Right: Big Top, Serpentine, MoonBugs
Both ajbennett and I spent a good chunk of our youth dialing into old BBS's in Australia such as Tweetie's Nest, Suburbia, Cafe Chrome and Games Universe. This was when IRC was barely known and you had to use one of these bad boys:
Ahh, that ol' OK CONNECT sound still rings in my ears....
Besides my wife and family, there are two things I admire most: Space Exploration and Conservation.
Space Exploration
Because it's the pinnacle of human evolution and destiny, it's not just an American or Soviet story, it's a human story and one of the last great fields for peaceful global collaboration.
I sometime's imagine the pressures of working on an SAP project and then try and imagine the project team who put the first people in space and on the moon, do you think they were nervous before their go-live? :smile:
Conservation
Infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources? We've only got one planet we should treat it as such, you can see how small and fragile it is above.
I love Carl Sagan's reflections on this matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot.
Left: My Wife an I on a tree planting excursion with VicSuper in 2007.
Right: Our Oak trees grown from Acorns, waiting for an appropriate plot of land so they can reach their full potential.
Conservation in my view is the human race's last great hope for global collobaration, if we fail to protect the Earth, live in harmony with it, each other and fail to respect our symbiotic relationship with this great planet then we are all doomed.
To the questions...
Which 5 things do you absolutely want to achieve in life?
1) Invent something of value that contributes to our species survival.
2) Witness with my own eyes, that magnificent curve of our Earth from Space
3) Have contributed something of value back into the intellectual pool of the human race, I love this quote from Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
4) Play Pink Floyd's "Time" from start to finish on guitar
5) At the end of this journey, to know that I did as much as possible as an individual to protect and give back to our global community
and not try to do anything ghastly to my fellow man and hopefully have raised children who follow the same path.
What 2 things do you like the least about working in IT?
1) Disorganisation, first and formost. This drives me batty. Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail. I've seen it way to much already.
2) Sometimes you just can't put your creative side to work.
What 2 things do you like the most about working in IT?
1) The collaboration of a team of diverse people that produce an outcome that is actually beneficial to a business, charity or Government. Getting that outcome, there is nothing sweeter.
2)Every project is like starting a new job, you never stagnate and every year throws new challenges your way, plus you're expected to keep evoloving as technology evolves.
Time to blog it forward...
jason.bell
des.fisher
Your Questions:
1) What are some ideas for the SAP Community play a larger role in conservation activities globally.
2) What was your first computer
3) What did you do you your first IT project.
Over to you guys... Cheers
Leigh Mason
Feel free to pick up other questions from moshe.naveh 's original blog - Blog It Forward Community Challenge
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