Category: Uncategorized

In an effort to organize my thoughts, I’ll break this down into three categories: updated thoughts about my mom’s condition, reflections from the job search, and other. Updated thoughts about my mom’s condition I don’t think it would be wise for me to cash out my 401k to pay off my mom’s medical debt. This […]

Things haven’t been great lately, but while talking some of this out with friends can be helpful, some things are simply easier to write. I’m going to try to organize these thoughts, but they could still be scattered. The day before my first certification test in December, less than a week before Christmas, I got […]

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to scan several dozen old mining catalogs, bulletins, and pamphlets and have uploaded them to the Internet Archive. But the thought of doing more makes me sick. It started with trying to build a PVC scanning rig in a manner made popular by David Landin, known frequently as […]

For all of the positive things I can say about taking a year off, there’s one negative thing that has become abundantly clear to me: I suck at time management. I don’t completely know what goes into this. On the one hand, I really despise the obsession with productivity that reduces the value of people […]

My inbox recently reached 1,000 emails. This is unprecedented, as I’ve always cleaned my inbox around the 500-700 email mark. But I let it get out of hand this time. Cleaning this stuff is no joke. Behind every email, behind every file, is the latent fear that losing access to this one piece of information […]

I feel like half the battle of life is just turning up, and the other half is finding the way forward. This isn’t a very philosophical understanding, but it feels pretty real to me. After 9 or 10 month of voluntary unemployment, I’ve finally made the decision to shift careers. Despite being a software developer, […]

I’ve been using Linux Mint on my new (used) laptop for the past week, and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with it. Desktop tooling and options have expanded dramatically over the past five to seven years, or maybe Mint was always this customizable and I didn’t know because I was using Ubuntu in […]

I’m trying to do my civic duty and fill out my ballot for this year’s Colorado election, but it’s a royal pain in the ass, even after dragging my feet for a solid week or so. Some elections only have one or two items, but this year it’s a laundry list of drugs, alcohol, and […]

Corporations are not your friends. You are a number to them, with potential dollar signs. And I don’t personally care that we no longer walk to the bakery and talk to Bertha and ask how the kids are doing – I often prefer the cold system of exchange we have, because I usually just want […]

Busyness is rarely just caused by our immediate necessary actions – busyness, I think, has an awful lot to do with the cognitive load that we place on ourselves. Having quit my job early this year, it’s never ceased to amaze me how I still feel busy on a regular basis, even though I have […]