I love meeting people at SysAdmin events. Having a blog that people read does mean that people have mostly heard all of my best stories, but it’s still fun getting to know new people and hearing what they’ve been working on. The single thing I hear most often is a question, and the question is, “Don’t you sleep?”
Time and time again, people will read my blog, see me making things, or doing things, or organizing, or whatever, and internally, they compare that to what they do, and they feel like they aren’t doing enough, or as much as I am.
Can I let you in on a secret? I feel like I do crap work most of the time. And I compare myself to others, and to their work, and I feel like what I do is often bad, sub-par, and not worthy.
Do you ever see something that just speaks to your soul? I saw a Tweet, of all things, that did that to me last year. Here it is:
The first version of everything is janky. Don’t fear jankiness as long as you’re solving a problem. ![]()
— Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian) March 9, 2014
The image from that post features the very first Iron Man suit from Tales of Suspense #39 in 1959, which Tony Stark built in a cave, with a box of scraps. It worked…to a point, but it wasn’t long before it got upgraded and replaced. If you’ve seen the first Iron Man
movie starring Robert Downey Jr, then this will all sound pretty familiar, because it was recreated in film.
It feels sort of childish to admit in an open forum like this, but the story of Tony Stark creating Iron Man is actually really inspirational to me. I like making things. I like building, and doing, and I really, really hate just about everything I create. Especially the early stuff, and Tony embodies the concept of continuous development and iterative improvement that are so vital to making things in 2015. So I try to learn from it, and in my spare time, I try to figure out how repulsor beams work on pure electrical charge.
Earlier this year, I decided that I was going to go to Boston Comic Con for the second year in a row. When I checked out the website, I couldn’t believe my eyes – along with the normal array of comics celebs, Boston was going to be playing host to none other than STAN LEE!
If you don’t know the name Stan Lee, you probably know the characters that he’s made – Spiderman, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Thor, and yes, Iron Man. When I saw that Stan Lee was going to be signing autographs, I knew I had to get one, but the only question was…what would I get signed?
I could always go get a relatively rare Iron Man comic and have him sign that. But none of the individual comics meant as much to me as the character itself. What would be perfect is if I could get that picture from Alexis’s picture above signed, but it’s a PNG, and the quality didn’t really lend itself to blowing up. After thinking for a few minutes, I realized, I didn’t have to use the picture above – I could just recreate it. So I did!
It took me a few hours to get it to the point where I thought it would be acceptable, and fittingly, it isn’t perfect, but here’s the final version that I made:
Click the image above to get the full-sized image. If you want to print your own (don’t sell this – Iron Man is the property of Marvel), you can download the EPS in glorious 41MB fashion from this link.
So yesterday, I visited Comic Con, stood in line for hours, and got to (very briefly) meet Stan Lee, who laughed as he signed his name to my new poster:
I actually printed out two versions – one to keep at work, and this signed one, which I’ll keep at home. Both of them will remind me that, even though I’m probably not happy with the state of whatever I’m working on at the moment, I shouldn’t listen to the negative voices in my head telling me to quit because it isn’t good enough. Thanks Stan!
