2010: Patterns Don’t Age

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 51 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Each year at this time I look back, like most people, in order to go forward. I celebrate successes and rue failures. Then I go on.

In retrospect this should go down as my best year ever. The financial clouds around my family lifted. While millions of Americans slogged through rejection and unemployment, our family rode high. We were making a ton of money, and had come into an inheritance of happiness, highlighted by a long (and long delayed) trip to continental Europe.

But my life has always had a boom-bust cycle. When I learn something too well, whenever I thought I had solved life's puzzle, idiocy would come and bite me on the butt. Sometimes it was market idiocy, as in the Internet crash of 2000. Sometimes it was corporate idiocy, as when Newsbytes canned me in 1994 or NetGuide let me go while it crashed and burned in 1997.

Sometimes, as in this case, it's my own idiocy. I became arrogant toward readers and toward sources. I got shit-canned at the start of this month, and I think for damned good reasons. It's the first full, sudden stop I havce suffered in half a lifetime and I won't tell you it don't hurt.

Only, thanks to my being 55 (56 next month) the pain is tempered. In my career every closed door leads to an open window. What has driven me through, and forward, has always been a big story, a future I can see but others question. While it's true I become Cassandra when times are glorious (as in the late 1970s and late 1990s) so I become sunny while everything around looks darkest.

That's definitely true for my new interest, renewable energy. I am, in a way, coming full circle, as I began my professional career covering the detritus of the 1970s Houston oil boom. Back then money came out of the ground, bringing with it not only unimagined riches but the crazy idea (among some people) that they had it all figured out, that they deserved all this wealth, that it made them better people.

The best people I met during that time, like developer Gerald Hines (right), understood that all they had was opportunity, that they were luckier than good, and that success meant having to work twice as hard. Few were that wise.

I wasn't. I had come to think that I could ride booms forever. I had grown up in the boom of suburban Long Island, moving to Houston while my family went on to sunny southern California and the boom taking place there. It was like we could smell out growth and ride it like surfers.

In retrospect Hines was right, and I was wrong. Houston's hyper-growth made me antsy. My own rewards — good assignments and what seemed like a blossoming career — left me suspicious. I moved to Birmingham to work for a daily paper, but mostly to get away from the doom I feared in Texas.

The doom happened, for Texas and for me. I was fired within four months, for working so fast that I would make small errors everywhere. I was picked up by my old employers for Atlanta, started the tech beat here, and got bounced for doing three times the work of anyone else in early 1983. And so the pattern was established. Perpetual change, highs and lows, booms and busts.

I have always had a bubble to keep me from feeling the worst of the economy's cold blasts. That's my marriage. Jenni is level-headed while I'm flighty, she's methodical, precise, and organized. She always likes her co-workers, she doesn't mind her bosses. Like me she loves to learn, but unlike me her other skills have given her an employer who values her, and by luck she's in a field that is in constant flux, where the only way to stay around is to keep learning.

I loved Jenni practically from the day we met, at Rice, in 1975. I liked her before I loved her, and I still like her. She's everything I'm not and because of her steadfastness all the crises that would drive me to my lowest ebb — family crises, kid crises, job crises, political crises — have proven to be fleeting, no big deal. A week from now will be our 33rd wedding anniversary, and life has brought me no greater gift, nor can it.

So this latest doom is no big deal, either. It is, like those which came before it, an opportunity, to learn new things, to see a new boom start, and as with the Internet to cover a story almost before its beginning.

Even those in the renewable energy space themselves don't see what's coming. Every great new industry rides a tide of skepticism, even cynicism, unbelief. These people actually believe that hard, flat polysilicon solar panels, the ones they're installing today, will still be viable 20 years from now because they should last that long. The vocabulary will remain — I type on my current machine just as I did on my long-dead Kaypro — but the reality will change dramatically, and constantly.

Alternative energy is about where computing was in 1970. The "smart grid"  isn't that smart. But we know that's coming. Local energy solutions are kind of a joke, but that's coming too — we just have to find the "killer app", the Apple of this new age, and the game will begin in earnest.

Meanwhile we have all these interesting parts. For consumers it's mainly a hobbyist market, a gadget market. The yield from a solar panel can only match its long term cost in a few places, mostly desert places. So we still use the vocabulary of "big iron" (or big utilities) to describe it all. We assume that a solar or wind or geothermal installation must be huge, must be smelly, must be situated hundreds of miles away for it to be any good. The ways in which we move energy around are primitive, and haven't changed since the time of George Westinghouse.

All this will change, and quickly. There will be breakthroughs, some of which will reach the market in extraordinarily short times. And there will be evolution, in utility networks, and in our own lives, which will be so slow we'll hardly notice them at the time, until we look back 10 years from now and wonder how we managed at all in the year 2010, before all "this."

All this what? That's what I want to find out. I don't feel like I'm about to turn 56. I feel as though I have yet to reach 26. Because there's a great story happening all around me, and it's my job to dig it out.