Blog
On Tools
I recently re-read The Anarchist’s Tool Chest (2nd edition) by Chris Schwarz. I resonate with the ethos. Buy good tools (good != new) and use them to build something.
Read moreAddicted to Easy
If I describe someone as “lazy”, what is the image that comes to mind? Is it a 300 pound man sitting on his couch with a coke and bag of chips? Lately, I have thought about being mentally lazy. In his great book, Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about our addiction to comfort. What about comfort of the mind? We have the internet to feed us information until we explode with anxiety. “Experts” on countless podcasts to tell us how to think, move, and connect. Are we addicted to easy?
Read moreLinux Discovery
I have a lot of respect for engineers who can navigate a Linux system without looking up commands or constantly referencing man pages. I am not one of those people.
Bashisms
Some random details on setting up modern bash on macOS.
A Useful Meeting
Seems the Pareto Principle can be applied to meetings. The first 80%, tend to be a waste of time and could have been an email. But 20% of emails/messages, should have been a meeting. Deep troubleshooting (the engineer’s version of Deep Work) across multiple services/technologies should be weighted towards real time when possible. Three to four people is about the max, not twenty people on a call. This gives introverts the opportunity to speak up and decreases distractions. It is a lot harder to wander off and start checking your email when the chances your input is needed go from one in twenty to one in four. I have countless examples (looking at you IPsec tunnels) of miscommunications or misunderstandings that required multiple exchanges to resolve. A great example follows…
Read moreUsing Soupault
AKA “How I Setup This Site v2”
Read moreWhat Does Not Change
I recently read Same as Ever. Great book, definitely recommend it. I’m not going to review the book here, but it did highlight focusing on things that do not change. So I’ve started thinking, “What will not change in my life?” With AI being the cranman of modern technology, what will not change even if AI changes everything else?
Read moreWhy I Created This Site
My first post was on How I Setup This Site. More for my future reference than anything. But thoughts and experiences behind why I created this site are much more interesting. God knows there are enough blogs to fill insert large area/geographic structure here. This site is not a recipe to share or a new way of accomplishing your top 10 goals this year. This site is the result of several realizations, the most influential being that writing is thinking.
Read moreHow I Setup This Site
You would think that parenthetical doesn’t make a difference, more on that to come.
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