Thoughts from inside a church.
1/24/2016 5:21:52 PM
I'm writing my annual blog entry.
I’ve come to realize that since The Big Change my relationship (symbiosis?) with the computer has been severed… This entry serves as acknowledgement that I'm attempting to reignite my writing voice.
In the corporate cage there was this balance that the computer and the handheld had. It doesn’t matter what kind of handheld I mean either. Android, IOS, phone, tablet. All of these devices served as companions to my digital journey, but the personal computer was my companion & primary interface, not a 3 inch slab. I don't write on handheld devices* Now most of my hand and eye time is with with tools, the handheld is my R2 unit. I think as a writer and explorer this new interfacing with the interweb is both disjointed and less than what I had before. And my personal relationship with the PC has suffered. Technical work is going along fine, but part of me is the computer. Part of how I express myself is in the qwerty, can be found in stream of conscious, I have lost that.
Truth be told though this all started a few years ago. Times have changed and who I was in the digital spectrum back then is not appropriate in this day and age. I don't think I could get away with living my life outloud, like I used to.
Protege r200-s2031 circa 2007
So this is how I find myself rocking a 1.3ghz Toshiba Portege with five hundred and twelve meg of ram, running windows XP. This lady has a modem jack, a physical switch to turn off wireless-which is off and nearly (?) ten year old battery that gives me maybe seventy minutes of use. It weighs a pound and a half, is about the size of a eleven inch macbook. I’m going to try to use this device to write without distraction-in small spurts. I find it really hard to take out my Vaio or Air to casually write, without getting lost in the web, picture editing or other fuckery. I think I’ve lost some part of myself and it is has something to do with my new life, gear and living situation. This will be part of what I attempt to explore in this new batch of writing.
*I don't write on handhelds much, but editing seems to be functional.
Miscellaneous...
This machine I’m working from is dual boot (high geekiness,) so in addition to Windows XP, It also has a linux distro called peppermint. This Linux install used to be a pretty positive build for lean computers, though I think its time has come to pass and the team is no longer updating Peppermint. I still like Peppermint for setting up an old machine, when you have low expectations and low requirements.
Other equipment that I’m using for this penny in time-traveling gear “retro fit” is a fourth gen ipod photo, it’s 30gb. I don’t know what I’m doing with it. I broke it and two other ipads out so that I could revive them and make some use of them in the home stereo system. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but these old totems all tie into an era and this span of technology is in theory cross related in my memory, which could aid in my work on the old tech.
To that end… Each generation destroys the tech of the past. We find ourselves in this rush to assume the latest and greatest; progress is merciless. It works for moving us forward and in some way, it provides opportunities for the old timers to exit the low end of commoditization and become valuable again, the old stuff never completely goes away. It still brings no reason to the ipod. I’ll see if there is anything I can do with it.
1/24/2016 8:15:11 PM
Ok I totally worked out the ipod and what to do with it. While I’m deep scanning drives that I come across, I’m going to slowly build a greatest hits ipod that I can press play on and be ok with every song. In the past I’ve gotten stuck on wanting to have complete albums, which I think was a puritanical thing, not wanting to submit to the “buy the song” movement. Ten plus years later though the single and the album have their respective places. A lot of performers don’t really have an album I them. The new Missy Elliot WTF song is just fine by itself, it does not require other songs and really does make you want to go back to her back catalog. And I hated that Ryan Adams Taylor Swift cover album he did-too Andy Kaufman for my tastes. It is definitely intended as a album, not a single song though. This is Ipod will just be a curated “Every song is good to hear” kinda player. I feel kinda liberated.
Also, Toshiba provided the microdrives that powered the full sized iPods, this drive happens to be the same kind of miniature hard drive that runs in my laptop. I might need to line up donor parts now if I'm going to be using this little laptop regularly
Toshiba Microdrive
In The Gutters...
February 2nd 2014
I consider myself a tenderfoot. I'm on my 3rd house remodel, but there is still so much to know and learn. I am probably a hybrid of sorts, in each of the house projects I've managed the remodel and also done much of the unskilled labor. In between that I've painted, caulked, nailed and participated in other parts of what it means to rehab a house. But no matter what I learn it seems like there is so much more to know.
I am not a Carpenter. A day after closing though I found myself DIYing a eighteen foot length of gutter. This was my first gutter. I figured I was going to ruin the gutter. I figured I'd try to do one thing that day and gutters were the priority, so I started there. Gutters aren't hard. They come in six and ten foot lengths, you have to cap the ends, they have to be predrilled and glued. If you're joining lengths together they have to be riveted and glued. It's not horrible or complicated, but you can do a good or bad job. I did a bad job on That first day.
There is something about the process of carpentry, you have to think out what you're doing but once you get started you can only focus on the thing you're doing, you can't think ahead, you can't rush, you just have to go about your action and do it right. The first day, whatever you're doing is a sacrificial lamb, you will butcher whatever you touch. On that particular day I butchered that gutter.
But the first day for me is an agreement of sorts. I know I have to journey into a place where I can't think about a dozen things. I have to get my mind around executing on just one thing.
So while project managing is nothing but multitasking, doing good carpentry is one thing. I'm not good at one thing. My job is nothing but a constant juggle of fires and emergencies. Carpentry is just executing on one thing, then move on to the next.
So I knew my mind would drift and I knew I would have to give some offering to the gods and I did. I find the work side of doing houses to be both immensely satisfying and incredibly daunting.
TheP10Project Phase 2
We bought house number 2!
This time out we're going to try to reach past managing the build and doing grunt work. This time we're going to do much of the work and remodeling ourselves. We're going to envision and do it ourselves.
There is so much potential when you own a home. And so many of us do nothing more than decorate the interior, maybe plant annuals. I'm glad to say we got time on our hands and we're ready to build some sweat equity.
You have so much you have to do when you own a home, or it will come slowly down around you. The worse part is that slow decline. We steep in decay and rot, till it seems to far gone to save.
So we've found a six hundred and thirty square foot cottage. She's a diamond in the rough. Because of her age condition, and the era she was built in we're going to work to freshen the space, we don't want to gut her. We're going to try to celebrate her origin and modernize her amenities, while we're at it we hope to give the neighborhood a face lift.
In the first thirty days we're going to replace the roof, overhaul the HVAC, maybe replacing flooring and update the exterior. It's ambitious, but we need to do it, we got a renter coming and a 2nd inspection.
