I found the post below sitting in my drafts from years back, and while it’s not complete and I don’t think I could finish it now, I still think it would be good to share. I’ve had a question sitting in the back of my mind for the past few  months, and I think I’ve finally settled on an answer. The question I’ve been asking myself is just what makes someone “interesting.” It seemed that every time I asked the question I was getting a different answer. All of the people I find interesting are different, and I find them interesting for wildly different reasons. From my sister, to my certification trainer at work to people I’ve met at coffee shops and various internet personalities, no one seemed to have anything in common. The odd thing is that it took an introspective look on a rather uninteresting hermetic day for me to find the answer. Having been single for a few months, my mother had been pushing me to get out and find someone even if it meant signing up for an online matchmaking service. Not having the motivation to get any work done one day, I found myself thinking about dating services, their profiles, and just what I would put on my own profile. I came up with the normal ideas of “I like movies, music, time with friends” and was rather put off by the bland oft-repeated topics which seem to be nothing but fail-safes for those who don’t have anything more interesting going on. This is where my epiphany began. I realized that I was lacking in passion. No, not the kind of passion one might find from a dating service, but a genuine passion for something beyond one’s self. I didn’t have anything that got me excited. Yeah, there are a lot of things that I like, but nothing really got me pumped up. Life had gotten bland. I looked at those around me and saw my sister’s passions for cooking and for helping those with special needs. I saw Jeph Jacques’ passion for art and furthering his own artistic skills. I saw a pattern in everyone I found interesting; everyone that I felt drawn to had a passion.I spent the next few weeks trying to find my own passion. I looked at my animation work, at music, cooking, exercise, technology and everything else that seemed to make up my everyday life. While I enjoy all of these things, I didn’t feel passionate about any of them. But I began to notice something. I wasn’t worried about not finding a passion, because amid my search I began to feel something inside. It took yet another introspective day to figure things out.On my days off I have a tendency to stay home and avoid people at almost any cost. I had planned on staying home one day, but around lunch time I realized that I didn’t have much in the way of food in the kitchen, and instead of eating cold cereal I decided to push myself out the door and to the grocery store. I was feeling especially hermetic this day, so I was planning to get in, get some food, and get out as quickly as I could, but my plans have a strange way of constantly circumventing themselves.While I was at the grocery store, I ran into one of my favorite customers from work. Immediately my attitude changed. I no longer wanted to slink along alone just to get home and spend the rest of the day without seeing another person.At the end of the day, the advice I hope you can take away from my story is this: find your passion. Whatever your passion may be, find it, embrace it, and LIVE IT.

I have officially moved this website to Squarespace. I tried to host alextall.com from a personal server, but it turns out webhosting is an altogether different beast from any other server hosting I do. I’ll leave it to the pros. Anywho, I’ll be making some tweaks around here as time goes on, and hopefully I’ll be posting a lot more.

Its a new year with a new set of resolutions to break. While I’ve already done a fantastic job of utterly destroying some resolutions, I am bound and determined to start writing more. This means more personal posts, more work(ish) posts, and more random garbage. There isn’t a lot to say about this as a topic, but I will be returning shortly for more posts!

As a part of my ever-growing need to know all things tech-related, I have been exploring centralized device management… in the home.

I’m finishing up my third week in the San Francisco area for a business trip and I thought I’d try to sum up some of the more or less interesting things I can share.