First post in 80 days
100 days to offload is going slower than expected. Two completely separate extended-family situations hoisted house-hunting and home repair upon me the past few months, but that’s no excuse - I could’ve written about the homes I was seeing, maybe even come up with some witty comparison between home projects and legacy websites. The book club I’ve been in has spun off a few projects, like stamp-making/letterboxing, watching movies, and it’s own writing and research; and the structure of the group has been tempting me to pick up another book that’s discussed on another day. I’ve also got a RasPi I’ve been setting using to experiment with my music equipment as a headless all-in-one jambox. I’ve always got plenty of pokers in the fire, let alone all the other projects that are on the back-burner indefinitely, and not to mention my never-ending battle maintaining the family toilet1. I’m only writing this because I realized that the hour I’ve been spending with my kids at the park can be used to write on my laptop - but an hour of writing is a lot less fun than an hour of playing with my kids.
There was a time when a blog post might just be a Youtube video, or a few pictures of your cat. This blog is supposed to be at least somewhat more professional than that. A display of my knowledge and abilities, but as a computer nerd that means I should be explaining something nerdy in detail and I’m just not interested in that. I could submit some of these articles to various aggregators, maybe somebody out there subscribes over RSS, but I’d rather not pay the price for being wrong2 on the internet, I’m wrong often enough as it is. Search engines know where I am, and if this site helps somebody out there with anything I’d be elated, but I’m not trying to be some internet micro-celebrity.
Elation is the goal of most of my projects, mostly whatever brings me joy. By day I hack for my employer, by night I hack for me - but I’ve been doing a lot more for me than I used to, and not just to advance my career3. I just want to make cool stuff and share it with people, often online. I have dreams of having gallery shows of my art or live performances of my music, but I don’t work towards that, I have no interest in being famous, I just want to find the others. I can’t spend all day looking for them, maybe being online will help them find me. There’s plenty of like-minded individuals out there to bring wildly different things to the table.
The point is, while I spent so long ignoring people to hone my skills with computers, I’ve been coming to the computer more and more to be with other people on a level deeper than follower/followee. I don’t want to “make content” I want to create and innovate, and despite what we’ve been told about great figures from history4, it’s impossible to do that all alone.
I don’t want to regale you with trite cliches, but I’d like to leave you with this thought: Sometimes things become cliches because they’re true5. Nothing exists in a vacuum, find the others and try to create joy.
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This time the rod that holds the bulb completely snapped off inside the lever and if I can’t find the same exact assembly as before I’m going to have to replace the whole thing again. Our hard water eats this cheap chromed metal like it’s sugar. Whatever happened to quality products? ↩
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Or worse, being perceived to be wrong when I’m not. ↩
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Whatever that means. ↩
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Even some of our greaters admit they only did it by “standing on the shoulders of giants,” or reminding us that “no man is an island.” ↩
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Or at least true enough. ↩