From Ranger to IT

  A Little Comfort During My Days as a Private I was always hungry when I was a private. Hungry for food, yes—but especially hungry for something sweet. Looking back, I still don't know why Choco Pie, something I barely ate before joining the military, tasted so incredibly good. One bite, and it felt as if the hardships of military life simply melted away. Choco Pie is a Korean snack made of soft cake layers and marshmallow filling, all coated in chocolate. I loved that feeling so much that I wanted to keep the whole thing to myself. Maybe that was why so many soldiers hid Choco Pies in their personal boxes. Food wasn't allowed in the barracks because of the risk of attracting mice. If we were caught, we could be made to run around the parade ground for an hour carrying our full packs and rifles. Still, nobody seemed willing to give up their Choco Pies. And even after taking that risk to hide one, you could still end up having it stolen. Once, I reached into my personal box and...

 The Day Every File Became an MP3 About five years ago, a ransomware attack brought a small company's entire computer network to a standstill. I was the company's outside IT person. They paid me a fixed monthly fee to manage their computers, network, and backups. I had been looking after their system for years. It started with a phone call on a Friday morning. "Something's wrong with our files. They've all turned into music files." Music files? I knew immediately this wasn't going to be a normal Friday. I told the employee not to touch anything and drove straight to the office. When I arrived, the problem was already spreading. One employee had opened an email attachment that looked harmless. Within minutes, JPGs, GIFs, DOCX files, and almost everything else had been encrypted. The files had strange new extensions, and none of them would open. The company's computers were all connected to the same network. That was the problem. The ransomware moved fro...

  119 Days to Go Ranger training takes place in the mountains, which means it demands real nerve. Of all the courses, the ones that involved crossing  between peaks or rappelling down them brought out a special kind of fear. So I let trainees with a fear of heights sit those out and do PT instead. A small mistake up there could easily turn into a matter of life and death, and if it did, my assistant instructor and I would be the ones to answer for it. In the army, "answering for it" could mean military prison.  So I went over the safety rules more times than I could count and never forced anyone through. Even so, something unexpected always seemed to happen. The One Rope Bridge was one of those things. The One Rope Bridge Course The One Rope Bridge is a course where trainees cross a mountain gap along a rope about thirty meters long. They wear a harness clipped to a double safety line, so even if someone slipped, there was no real risk of falling. Still, once training act...

If you work with lookup tables in Excel, XLOOKUP is one of the most useful formulas you can learn. It was introduced by Microsoft in 2019 as the modern replacement for VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP—so if you haven't come across it yet, that's completely understandable, especially if you learned Excel before then. If you haven't read my earlier post on HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP , I'd recommend starting there and coming back to this one afterward—this post builds on that foundation. HLOOKUP vs. VLOOKUP vs. XLOOKUP HLOOKUP—use this when your reference table is laid out horizontally VLOOKUP—use this when your reference table is laid out vertically XLOOKUP—works in either direction and fixes several long-standing annoyances with the older two formulas Why is XLOOKUP better, not just newer? It can look to the left of the lookup column, which VLOOKUP can't do. It doesn't break if you insert or delete a column in the middle of your data You can specify a custom "not found" va...

A Golden Retriever in Doberman’s Clothing. During my service, I was a ranger instructor for American soldiers. I spoke some English naturally; the army decided I was qualified to yell at Americans in the mountains. At first, I was happy about it. I figured my English would improve while I was in the army. Then I saw the training grounds. My happiness disappeared. I couldn't imagine surviving there. The job was pretty much the opposite of who I was. The army was already crawling with guys in their early twenties, and the ranger course was the kind of place where you had to have enough testosterone to power a small city. It was also dangerous. One wrong move could lead to a serious accident, or worse, so everyone had to stay tense from beginning to end. And the instructors were expected to be intimidating. We were supposed to have enough presence to make trainees nervous just by standing there. Discipline was everything. Kindness was, apparently, not part of the curriculum. The first...

  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...