From Ranger to IT

  If you've worked in a spreadsheet where formulas broke the moment someone added a row, or where a chart stopped updating because it didn't "know" about the new data, you've felt the pain that Excel's Structured Tables were built to solve. Despite being available for well over a decade, this feature remains one of Excel's most underused and underestimated tools. Once you understand it, it's hard to imagine creating a business spreadsheet without it. What is a Structured Table? A Structured Table is what you get when you select a range of data and press CTRL + T(Windows) or CMD + T(Apple) . On the surface, it looks like a simple formatting upgrade: banded rows, a bold header, and a dropdown filter arrow on each column head. But underneath that visual polish is a totally different way of treating your data. Instead of thinking of your data as a static grid of cells(A1:H13), Excel now treats it as a named, self-aware object with defined boundaries, colu...

I still remember that day vividly. The sky was clear, and there was no training. We lay on our barracks platform bed, nursing a week's worth of exhaustion. Then the word came down: there was going to be a little get-together. When we got to the dining room, there was makgeolli, a Korean rice wine, spicy braised chicken, sausages, and snacks someone had brought from the PX. Alcohol, in the army. We were all fired up. A few drinks in, the tension loosened, and before long, between jokes, someone brought up the platoon leader. Getting beaten for no reason. Punishment drills. The insults, the humiliation. How doing something well just meant more work got dumped on you. How he'd seize on the smallest mistake and tear into you for it. One story led to another, until we were practically competing over who'd had it worse. L said nothing. That was strange. If anyone had stories to tell, it was him. L was the platoon leader's orderly. Washed his uniforms. Shined his boots. Ran to...

Not $600. Not $6,000. Sixty dollars—That was my entire income for the month, back in  2000, when even then, it was a painfully small amount. This is the story of how I got from there to becoming a college instructor in Canada—and why, even in the age of AI, I still think it was worth every sleepless night. No One Would Hire Me After immigrating to Canada in 1999, I wanted to continue the IT career I had built in Korea. So, I sent countless emails to companies across Canada, hoping someone would give me a chance. Not a single company offered me a job. Looking back now, I realized how unrealistic my expectations were. My English was still far from fluent, and I had absolutely no Canadian work experience. I was essentially asking someone to take a chance on a person who had nothing to prove himself with. Going Back to School at 37 So, I decided to start over from scratch. I figured that if two things could objectively prove my abilities in Canadian society, they were education and cer...

The hardest part of a job interview usually isn't knowing what to say. It's saying it while you're nervous. You can have the perfect answer sitting in your head and still ramble, freeze, or sound like you're reading from a script the second someone actually asks the question. That's why interview practice was never really about memorizing perfect answers. The point is to make the interview feel familiar enough that you can stop performing and start responding. There's a tool doing that now that almost nobody uses this way: you can rehearse a job interview out loud with AI. Several major AI assistants support conversations. Give one a real job posting, assign it a role, and you can run the interview as a back-and-forth conversation instead of a list of questions on a screen. Give AI the job. Then give it a personality. Start with a job posting for a role you actually want, and paste the full description into an AI assistant that supports voice. Then give it a rol...

  It was during free time after dinner. Three privates said they were going to bed early. They said it was the platoon leader's order. "They look tired," he said. It was strange. He was not the kind of man who did favours for his men. Being tired was a reason to get yelled at, not a reason to rest. But it was still too early to be surprised. When the platoon leader came in for roll call, he accepted a few quick salutes, shouted, "Everyone, get to bed," and walked out. On any other night, that would have been when we all boarded the train to hell. He would walk from one man to the next, picking at the smallest things. Our boots weren't lined up properly. The folded underwear wasn't stacked to the right height. He would find something—anything—and keep at it until he lost his temper and started shouting. Some nights it started with our boots. Other nights, the fold on our blankets. It didn't matter what—he'd find something, and it always ended the ...

My first job, back in the early 1990s, was as an Apple technician. On my first day, someone handed me a Macintosh—an IIci, I think, with a Motorola 68030—and basically left me alone with it. No manual, no training, no instructions. I spent three days poking around and figuring things out on my own. *Macintosh IIci from Wikipedia* That was the whole point of the Macintosh: a computer intuitive enough that anyone could use it without a manual. And it worked. I was proof of it. That experience shaped everything that came after. Palm Pilot, then BlackBerry, then the first iPhone in 2007. I never looked back. My whole family went the same way. iPhone, iPads, MacBook Pros—they've been our devices of choice for more than twenty years. Where the Cracks Started. But now, in 2026, I'm seriously considering a Samsung phone for the first time. I know switching won't be painless. Moving twenty years of data to a different ecosystem is a pain no matter how you do it. Still, this is the f...

Three Shouts Between Life and Death This happened when I was serving in the military as a Ranger instructor for U.S. soldiers. The American soldiers camped out in a valley at the Ranger school. There were more than thirty courses, ranging from PT and basic obstacles to mountain obstacles, and none of them could be called easy. On top of that, the training was dangerous. What worried me most wasn't the training itself, but safety. On some of the courses, one small mistake could lead to a serious accident, so I repeated the safety instructions again and again. The most dangerous course was called "Slide for Life."  In this exercise, soldiers rode a metal cable about 150 meters down a hillside, dropped into a pond, and then swam to shore. It was a tough course. The hill itself was about the height of a ten-story building, so simply standing at the top could be psychologically overwhelming.  Soldiers with a fear of heights were allowed to do PT instead. But in fact, the most ...

  In the late 1990s, I worked as a general manager in the supply chain management department at a peripheral device distributor in Korea. Back then, no one in our department had any idea about the PMT formula, which calculates a fixed monthly loan payment. That formula was first introduced in 1985 in Excel 1.0 for Macintosh computers, so it already existed—we simply didn't know about it. Looking back, knowing the PMT formula would have let us walk into the bank with an exact number instead of guessing our way through every repayment plan. What I never learned back then, I now teach my college students. A Formula Even the Pros Often Miss I'm not the only one who found this formula unfamiliar. Several of my students who already work as accountants told me they'd never encountered PMT before, and they were genuinely grateful to learn it—proof that even seasoned practitioners often miss it. According to Statistics Canada, where I currently live, about 35.5% of Canadian homeowne...

Two men trapped under the same harsh discipline—and an apology that came eventually This happened after my first overnight leave in the army. On my way back to the base, I got caught in a bad traffic accident. Traffic came to a complete stop. There were no cell phones back then, so there was no way to call the base and explain what had happened. I could only sit there and wait. In the end, I arrived ten minutes late. I was a brand-new private and had no idea how seriously the army treated lateness. Discipline was brutal in those days, but I figured I had a perfectly good reason. I'd get yelled at, maybe do some push-ups, and that would be the end of it. That was about as bad as I imagined it could get. Instead, the moment I reported back, I was taken to the military police. My offense: failing to return on time. Military police? Over ten minutes. I was terrified. And I couldn't understand how this could be happening when I'd been stuck in an accident. My mind started imagin...

There is a strange phrase in my web development class. "Hold tight, my love." I say it in every class. At first, students just assume it's some odd little pep talk of mine. "Hang in there, you've got this, you'll get used to it soon"—something like that, they figure. And when I finally reveal what it means, they crack up every time. I have to admit, it makes me a little proud. I'll tell you what it means in a bit. First, let me tell you where this phrase came from. Two Years of Wondering Why a Single Tag Was There Twenty-six years ago, I studied web development at BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology). It took a full two years. Looking back now, the question I struggled with most during those two years was actually pretty simple: "Why does this tag even go here?" When I first learned HTML, this is what I saw: a tag inside another tag, inside yet another tag. Some had to be closed once opened. Some had to be nested inside others. A...