Why I'm Not Blogging Part n/n
May. 30th, 2017 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrottieEvery site I blog on seems to die. atariage.com is doing fine for now but livejournal.com imploded like use.perl.org before it. I vaguely recall that there were several others I was trying to use. Text should really just go on slowass.net, with everything I can salvage from elsewhere there.
I peaked early.
http://rebeccmeister.dreamwidth.org has been blogging for me so I don't have to.
Feeling pretty private after a lot of difficult social interaction that I threw myself in to in the non-profit realm. Regardless of whether I was fucked over repeatedly by a revolving cast that my socially inept brain couldn't keep up with, I'm feeling fucked over and lied to by a revolving cast, so basically not telling anyone about anything going on in my life is a safety blanket.
I can't really talk shit about anything or anyone until I wrap up the Kickstarter. I'm in moral limbo.
I want to publish research results, not just opinions. Among them is ambitions with the Tempe Bike Count data and GIS data. Similarly, I want to talk about things I've learned from doing things, like finishing my Atari 2600 game. People in CA have graciously taken me in, and they're nice and cool people, but quiet spaces are virtually non-existant, and I'm having concentration/interruption PTSD from Tempe then here. Interruptions always seem to scale in proportion with my resolve to get things done. The other morning, I woke up at 4am with my brain busy with shit I really, really needed to get done. Yesterday was a holiday. Slightly earlier, client shit was seriously on fire, like potential massive critical data loss on fire, but I was essentially in middle of party. Trying to go to a coffee shop in CA, quite often I find that there are no seats in multiple coffee shops. It's easy to spend all of your time in CA just walking around. Going across the bay is far worse. People guard the restrooms in coffee shops to make sure you have a recent receipt or you're not allowed to pee. If you're there too long without buying something, you're asked to leave. I was told that programmers in coffee shops in SF got recruited but everything I've seen suggests a hostility quite opposite of that. Programming is time consuming and concentration dependent. Merely 9 hours in the day with normal holidays enforced is too little time. Other programmer on project was probably doing 14 hour days with fewer forced vacations. Then I wind up in a battle to even hold on to a project to pay the bills but I can't really blog about (with a few "Microsoft SQLServer needs to burn in hell" Tweets lobbed out anyway), nevermind doing other things. Lack of quiet means not getting interesting things done so I have nothing to talk about. I think other programmer on project is likely the major bread winner, but CA costs more, and I'd have to have those 14 hours a day to move into major breadwinner role, so there's a chicken and egg problem there. Cowork spaces in Tempe were all hijacked by an individual who went there to have a captive audience to narrate the banalities of their life to at high volume. I don't know what they're like here, but the libraries blow and the cowork spaces cost a heck of a lot more.
In Tempe, towards the end, I was sleeping opportunistically when it was loud; it was easier to sleep through an impromptu party that formed at 3:30pm than to try to code through it. So I'd more or less stay up all night and take advantage of the lack of quiet after TV and yelling stopped at night, nap a bit in the morning, then wing sleep and work during the day. That let me grind on classes, work, and non-profit stuff, but if you don't hang out and do nothing enough with your roommates, you're not building that social goodwill.
I've been trying to reserve judgement on California, but I've decided that everyone here is just all tweaked out. LA is worse, but a lot of that spilled over to the Bay. There's a contractor working on a house across the street who comforts himself by setting off his car alarm repeatedly during the day. His car is right by the house he's working on, yet he keeps setting the alarm off, opening the car door, looking satisfied as it goes off, fucking around with his car for a bit, sitting in it, getting out a minute or ten later, then turning it off. Or looking over lovingly at his beat up old Honda while he's working, reaching in to his pocket, pulling out his car keys, and hitting the panic button, then turning it off. Maybe there's some developmental disability there, but it reminds me of taking Amtrak through LA, where everyone has to have their phone's message alert on max volume even though they barely set it down for even a second. The lonely disconnectedness of living in a place with so many people where it's so hard to connect with other human beings pushes people into a bizarre peacocking behavior. Californians can't cope with silence.
Unrelated, but everything is full here, too. The BART train system is at capacity, but Californias are so used to things being at capacity that they don't even wonder what life would be like if there was enough capacity. Being full is normal. The state and national parks here are full. Roads and parking is full. Grocery stores pack in so there's no room to move. No one reads labels on things; you'd get annihilated. You have to get into a slow moving current of people and grab things you recognize as they go past. So people generally stay in and watch TV rather than going out to bars that are physically at capacity and have insanely expensive beers anyway. I wrote a long time ago that the LA airport gave me flashbacks to _Stand on Zanzibar_, but Berkeley has shades of it.
The one thing in life that really stresses me out is not really having a plan. I was thinking I'd take classes at UMN online and get a degree -- they have a Health IT thing that looked like a fun mix of biology and CS prereqs I'd already done at UMN TC ages ago. That would potentially make me employable in hospital IT, which I had done before. Hospitals have a special quality of going far out of their way to avoid chemical pesticides. Bolted on fees that far exceeded tuition itself and Tempe ending for me aborted that. Being good enough at a cool enough technology again that I could telecommute is looking unlikely.
Speaking of pesticide, San Francisco has a serious pesticide problem, which is unsurprising given that inequality is driving squalor.
There are certainly a lot of possibilities and opportunities, but with fewer of them viable for me and not being marketable, it's too real of a possibility that nothing viable pans out before I run out of time.
So I guess the last and major reason I'm not blogging about stuff is tech is a big part of it, but I'm not really part of that any more.
I do want to talk about my experience with UoPeople and I'll try to find time for that. Maybe some day I'll talk about seriously harebrained schemes to find quiet.
... that was the last hour odd of my day there before roommates started to coagulate in an exovocally reaction.
I peaked early.
http://rebeccmeister.dreamwidth.org has been blogging for me so I don't have to.
Feeling pretty private after a lot of difficult social interaction that I threw myself in to in the non-profit realm. Regardless of whether I was fucked over repeatedly by a revolving cast that my socially inept brain couldn't keep up with, I'm feeling fucked over and lied to by a revolving cast, so basically not telling anyone about anything going on in my life is a safety blanket.
I can't really talk shit about anything or anyone until I wrap up the Kickstarter. I'm in moral limbo.
I want to publish research results, not just opinions. Among them is ambitions with the Tempe Bike Count data and GIS data. Similarly, I want to talk about things I've learned from doing things, like finishing my Atari 2600 game. People in CA have graciously taken me in, and they're nice and cool people, but quiet spaces are virtually non-existant, and I'm having concentration/interruption PTSD from Tempe then here. Interruptions always seem to scale in proportion with my resolve to get things done. The other morning, I woke up at 4am with my brain busy with shit I really, really needed to get done. Yesterday was a holiday. Slightly earlier, client shit was seriously on fire, like potential massive critical data loss on fire, but I was essentially in middle of party. Trying to go to a coffee shop in CA, quite often I find that there are no seats in multiple coffee shops. It's easy to spend all of your time in CA just walking around. Going across the bay is far worse. People guard the restrooms in coffee shops to make sure you have a recent receipt or you're not allowed to pee. If you're there too long without buying something, you're asked to leave. I was told that programmers in coffee shops in SF got recruited but everything I've seen suggests a hostility quite opposite of that. Programming is time consuming and concentration dependent. Merely 9 hours in the day with normal holidays enforced is too little time. Other programmer on project was probably doing 14 hour days with fewer forced vacations. Then I wind up in a battle to even hold on to a project to pay the bills but I can't really blog about (with a few "Microsoft SQLServer needs to burn in hell" Tweets lobbed out anyway), nevermind doing other things. Lack of quiet means not getting interesting things done so I have nothing to talk about. I think other programmer on project is likely the major bread winner, but CA costs more, and I'd have to have those 14 hours a day to move into major breadwinner role, so there's a chicken and egg problem there. Cowork spaces in Tempe were all hijacked by an individual who went there to have a captive audience to narrate the banalities of their life to at high volume. I don't know what they're like here, but the libraries blow and the cowork spaces cost a heck of a lot more.
In Tempe, towards the end, I was sleeping opportunistically when it was loud; it was easier to sleep through an impromptu party that formed at 3:30pm than to try to code through it. So I'd more or less stay up all night and take advantage of the lack of quiet after TV and yelling stopped at night, nap a bit in the morning, then wing sleep and work during the day. That let me grind on classes, work, and non-profit stuff, but if you don't hang out and do nothing enough with your roommates, you're not building that social goodwill.
I've been trying to reserve judgement on California, but I've decided that everyone here is just all tweaked out. LA is worse, but a lot of that spilled over to the Bay. There's a contractor working on a house across the street who comforts himself by setting off his car alarm repeatedly during the day. His car is right by the house he's working on, yet he keeps setting the alarm off, opening the car door, looking satisfied as it goes off, fucking around with his car for a bit, sitting in it, getting out a minute or ten later, then turning it off. Or looking over lovingly at his beat up old Honda while he's working, reaching in to his pocket, pulling out his car keys, and hitting the panic button, then turning it off. Maybe there's some developmental disability there, but it reminds me of taking Amtrak through LA, where everyone has to have their phone's message alert on max volume even though they barely set it down for even a second. The lonely disconnectedness of living in a place with so many people where it's so hard to connect with other human beings pushes people into a bizarre peacocking behavior. Californians can't cope with silence.
Unrelated, but everything is full here, too. The BART train system is at capacity, but Californias are so used to things being at capacity that they don't even wonder what life would be like if there was enough capacity. Being full is normal. The state and national parks here are full. Roads and parking is full. Grocery stores pack in so there's no room to move. No one reads labels on things; you'd get annihilated. You have to get into a slow moving current of people and grab things you recognize as they go past. So people generally stay in and watch TV rather than going out to bars that are physically at capacity and have insanely expensive beers anyway. I wrote a long time ago that the LA airport gave me flashbacks to _Stand on Zanzibar_, but Berkeley has shades of it.
The one thing in life that really stresses me out is not really having a plan. I was thinking I'd take classes at UMN online and get a degree -- they have a Health IT thing that looked like a fun mix of biology and CS prereqs I'd already done at UMN TC ages ago. That would potentially make me employable in hospital IT, which I had done before. Hospitals have a special quality of going far out of their way to avoid chemical pesticides. Bolted on fees that far exceeded tuition itself and Tempe ending for me aborted that. Being good enough at a cool enough technology again that I could telecommute is looking unlikely.
Speaking of pesticide, San Francisco has a serious pesticide problem, which is unsurprising given that inequality is driving squalor.
There are certainly a lot of possibilities and opportunities, but with fewer of them viable for me and not being marketable, it's too real of a possibility that nothing viable pans out before I run out of time.
So I guess the last and major reason I'm not blogging about stuff is tech is a big part of it, but I'm not really part of that any more.
I do want to talk about my experience with UoPeople and I'll try to find time for that. Maybe some day I'll talk about seriously harebrained schemes to find quiet.
... that was the last hour odd of my day there before roommates started to coagulate in an exovocally reaction.
