Tag: life

  1. Orienteering in life.

    14 June 2023

    "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 …

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  2. Laid off?

    23 January 2023

    If you've been following the news lately, undoubtedly you've heard one way or another that massive rounds of layoffs have been taking place. I got caught in one of them.1

    If you're younger than I am you may never have been laid off before. That's okay.

    I've been laid off a few times in my career, so here are a few things to keep in mind if this is your first goat rodeo.

    I can't tell you "don't panic" because you might have very good reasons for feeling panic. I'm certainly not going to judge you for it and …

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  3. 2023 did not get off to an auspicious start.

    17 January 2023

    I try very hard not to pay too much attention to mercury in retrograde, mostly because I think it's a bad idea to name names too often because Things tend to hear them.

    Who am I kidding. I have a calendar that charts mercury in retrograde out to 2030.ev that warns me ahead of time. I just wish I could get the odd warning of what might be coming down the line.

    You might recall that during the final days of 2020.ev my car was totalled and hauled away as abandoned. Well, on the 4th of January my …

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  4. 2022 is almost in the can.

    22 December 2022

    As I write this we're just a week or so shy of Christmas. It's been, to put it mildly, one hell of a year. Enough so that I've pretty much coasted into holiday break on fumes (again) and, probably against my better judgement, I'm trying to come up with something (anything, really) to write. If I were smart I'd give it another couple of days to relax and get my head straight. Maybe read some books or something to let the organics rest and wiring cool down.

    Of course, taking my adderall also helps.

    Work is... well, work. Things take …

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  5. Almost, but not quite jury duty.

    06 September 2022

    Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice. Nothing in this post or my site in general are legal advice. I am not a lawyer. I just want to reassure folks who might be nervous about jury duty.

    A couple of weeks ago I got one of those little cards in the mail that said that I had been tapped for jury duty. Since I moved to the Bay Area about a decade ago, I get them every couple of months so it wasn't really a big deal. However, this was the first time that I actually had to go …

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  6. Life in a rudderless world

    15 August 2022

    "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 …

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  7. There probably never will be a back to normal.

    14 July 2022

    "Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
    --Mal Reynolds, Firefly

    I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental health has been forcing me to choose between being able to get essential stuff done (read: work) and, well, anything else. Come the end of the (work) day, all I have the compute cycles to do is goof off with a side of doomscrolling (because when I don't I get blindsided by The Next Damned Thing). Mostly, seeing the world operate on Covid Standard Time is disheartening and the …

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  8. Life in Pittsburgh.

    17 June 2022

    For reasons I don't quite understand I always equated growing up with situations where you can walk into someplace to do something, talk to someone, and immediately have a real conversation about life where you live. I was struck by this when I went to the car dealership to sell my mom's car the other day. While at the dealership talking to the salesman we chatted about where we were from (the yinzer shibboleth of "I'm from Pittsburgh," "Oh - where at in Pittsburgh?" "I'm from X." "I'm from Y, great to meet you!"), which lead to who we knew, when …

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  9. The end of an era.

    02 May 2022

    I flew back to Pennsylvania about two weeks ago to wrap up my mom's estate.

    I'm really not sure how else to put it. It's short, to the point, but nothing at all like simple.

    Lyssa and I flew back on two different days: I got us set up in a hotel and tried to sleep off the jetlag because I flew out at 0700 from California. Lyssa flew out just before midnight a day later. As it turned out we both slept all day and night because we just didn't have it in us to do anything else.

    We …

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