"Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."

--Unknown

Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of debugging was involved (as one might reasonably expect), culminating with the microSD card in my weather station tanking with terminal corruption (such that the card's on-board controller permanently locked it read-only). I'm fairly sure this was due to the card being used outside; enclosure aside the thermal cycling of the natural day/night cycle probably wrecked the silicon. I've since replaced it with an industrial-grade …

"The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless."
--Alan Moore

I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately.

In the month or so since my last post I've been basically keeping my head above water and trying to live as productive a life as possible. It's easier than it sounds, oddly, but it costs a lot …

This isn't easy for me to write because it involves my mental health.  So, if it's not your bag feel free to skip this post.

Helping my mom since her cancer diagnosis has left me in this peculiar state where I don't actually know what I'm feeling.  I call it "running on wires," as in, the silicon I'm connected to is running me, and the organics are off doing... something, maybe.  My therapist calls it alexithymia, and reading about it that's as good a word for it as any.

I've been fighting with clinical depression for most of my life …

A couple of days ago I finally got around to posting about what's kept me offline and not particularly feeling up to doing anything, in a nutshell being inundated with everything going wrong in the world (as if this is different from any other year; with life comes suck and fail. It happens.) Then, during my daily newscrawl in which I keep an eye on happenings in the world and look for things that might be sneaking up behind me (the work of a sysadmin is never done), I noticed some things popping up with synchronistic regularity. A couple of …

Marvin Minsky once said that the human mind operates at only one tenth of its full capacity because the rest is taken up by the operating system's overhead. I always thought that was kind of a funny statement. When you get right down to it, nobody's really sure how the brain functions, or even how the mind operates inside of the 2.8 pounds of matter behind your eyes. People have variously been stabbed in the head (ye gods), lost a full quarter of brain mass in accidents, and even had entire hemispheres surgically excised and gone on to live …