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 An article on the Forbes website titled "22 LinkedIn Secrets LinkedIn Won't Tell You" recommended in secret
#19:
"Be personal. Your profile is not a resume or CV. Write as if you are having a conversation
with someone. Inject your personality. Let people know your values and passions. In your
summary, discuss what you do outside of work. You want people to want to know you."
Not wishing to offend author William Arruda by completely ignoring his advice, I set
about writing in effect a short bio explaining (apologizing for?) my existence and how
I got from 'there' to 'here.' That I got a bit carried away was made abundantly clear
by LinkedIn's software informing me that I had just pasted in 2,236 more characters than
they thought would be enough for any reasonable person. It's always the 'reasonable person'
thing that bites me in the posterior. Fortunately, there are other venues that do not
impose such limitations on excessive wordiness (even my use of the adjective 'excessive'
is wordy), and my own website, RF Cafe, is one of them. If your patience is long and
your tolerance of ranting is great, then please take a few moments to read all of what
I wrote. It's not that my writing or the life it describes is necessarily worth your
time and patience, but what the heck, you've come this far.
The Rest of the Story... What LinkedIn Did Not Provide the Space to Say
The text with a gray background is
what was omitted.
I'm the kid who stuck a screwdriver in the wall socket to see what would happen (sparks
flew). I once connected the two wires to my model railroad set directly into the wall
socket to get the train to run faster (it didn't). To my mother's dismay, I would climb
to the roof of our house to launch paper airplanes and plastic dry cleaners' bag parachutes
bearing rocks. Miniature canons made of bicycle spoke nipples (good thing I didn't know
back then that is what they are called) and match heads nearly got me thrown out of junior
high school. By sheer luck my curiosity for how things worked and love for all things
electrical and mechanical did not prevent me from progressing past childhood. Common
sense was not my strong suit in the early days, but then some people will tell you it
never has been. More than five decades later, following electrical vocational classes
in high school, working as an electrician for a couple years then doing a 4-year stint
in the USAF as a radar technician, earning a bachelor of science degree in electrical
engineering (and an associate of arts degree in electronics prior to it) while working
as an electronics technician, and then after graduating from University of Vermont in
1989, I set out to learn all I could about radio and radar design. A mix of defense and
commercial electronics companies provided an opportunity for a depth and breadth of experiences
many people are never fortunate enough to have, so I made the best of it. During that
time I wrote and sold DOS-based TxRx Designer software (now
RF Workbench), and
created many system design level spreadsheets (RF Cascade Workbook)
and a few sets of schematic and block diagram symbols for MS Office products. In 1999,
RF Café, an extension of my AOL-based RF Tools website, was launched primarily as a means
to conveniently amass engineering resources for use at work, since at the time there
were relatively few such websites on the World Wide Web. Sometime around 2002 a company
offered to pay to advertise. As of 2014, RF Cafe has between 70 and 80 advertisers at
any given time – and that is with never soliciting for business. Thanks to the dedicated
RF Cafe visitors and the folks who only stop by occasionally because of a search engine
result, I have had the pleasure of operating RF Cafe full time since 2007. It is a dream
come true for me to be able to be my own boss, working at home, and doing for the most
part whatever I want with the business. As was the case when I worked as a design engineer,
there is never such a thing as 'being done' for the day since there is always more that
needs doing. Between searching for daily headlines, writing stories on technical products,
events, and discoveries, scanning and posting articles from vintage electronics magazines,
creating engineering-themed crossword puzzles, generating quizzes based on newly released
engineering books, and a host of other subjects, my days are full from the time I crawl
out of bed in the morning to the time I crawl back into it at night. Then, I read magazines
for an hour or so both to keep the mental pump primed and to watch for good fodder for
the next write-up. RF Cafe, if my website server statistics can be believed, received
a little over 3,000,000 (that's three million) page views in the last year. I rarely
ever look at the numbers and was shocked to see that large of a number. The statistics
provided by Google tell the same story, so who am I to argue with such knowledgeable
businesses? While focusing on providing valuable content for visitors and not harassing
people with obnoxious ads that pop up when the page is loaded, or automatically playing
some infuriating video with the audio turned on, somehow the audience grew without spending
a penny on advertising, sending out despised unsolicited emails, or making uninvited
phone calls. Maybe my income would be much greater if I had stooped to practicing the
very tactics I hate having imposed on me, because evidently it works for plenty of big-dollar
companies. My moral values and worldview simply won't allow me to do it. To paraphrase
a well-known starship doctor, "Dammit, I'm an engineer, not a marketeer!" Thanks for
reading! -- Sincerely, Kirt Blattenberger
Posted April 24, 2014
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