Soon, I’m going to issue a challenge. The “Don’t Buy Shit” Challenge. I’ll write more about that tomorrow, but for now you need to understand what has prompted that challenge.

I’ve bought “some” fountain pens. I’ve talked about this new hobby of mine before and I’ve mentioned it several times on the podcast, but it’s worse than I want to admit.

I now have at least two dozen fountain pens. Now, none of these were overly expensive, at least when you learn that some pens can cost thousands of dollars, but they are not 10 cent Bics either.

Times are dark. There’s war (I’d call it a stupid war, but all wars are stupid, this one just happens to be more idiotic than most), and a horrible economy. There’s all sorts of horribleness going on around the world. It is very hard to watch or read the news and not be super depressed about everything.

Now the rest of this post is going to sound really trite, but we’re all in this together and there are still happy and good things happening in the world.

I have an odd situationship when it comes to audiobooks. I used to swear by them. I still enjoyed actually reading the words, but when I worked out in the public, I would almost always have an audiobook playing in the background.

But now I work from home, and I don’t use my audiobooks as much as I used to. (On a side note, I also don’t listen to podcasts as often as I used to either).

You may have noticed a lack of content from me lately. My Internet has been super unreliable for ages, and these last two weeks it has been even worse. And it’s not like it has been down. Instead we’ve been having these periods (almost every day) where our upload speed goes down to nothing.

The way the internet works is, packets are exchanged between you and the server you’re trying to visit. That means both ways. And with no upload speed, or very little, it was almost impossible to get anything done.

Got myself in an odd thought spiral tonight while listening to some oldies. What would the world be like if Buddy Holly had lived? What would the world be like if Hank Williams Sr. had lived?

There are so many artists out there that died long before their time, men and women who were genre defining artists. Elvis may be the biggest name there. If he’d stayed away from the drugs? He might still be alive today (though he would be in his 90s). Think of how music would have changed if he’d been whole and healthy for another 50 years?

Discord has ruined itself for me. I actually liked Discord a lot, which feels like a minority opinion most days. I liked it because I have cultivated an awesome community on there with almost 2500 wonderful souls. The TLC Discord server is one of the highlights of my day. Even if I’m only lurking, I still interact with people damn near every single day of the week.

And then Discord decided they needed to verify ages. I get that it wasn’t really their choice (even if they’re implementing it in places where those laws don’t reach), but it drove a lot of people off of the platfrom. Other niches probably didn’t notice as much a drop off, but Linux and FOSS enthusiasts are probably the type to care about this sort of thing.

I have a long history of adoring long books. When I first started reading, I quickly moved away from kids books to what I charmingly called “chapter books, mama”. I read my first Tom Clancy book in fourth grade. Why did I choose it? Because it was big.

There was something in my brain that was quite impressed with myself for reading a book that was almost too heavy for me to carry.

A few days late just means there is more to cover, right?

Programming and Scripting

This week I worked on my homepage quite a bit. I added a ListenBrainz widget and fixed quite a few bugs that have been bugging me for a while.

I also worked on Mattrix, but I’m thinking about scrapping it. Between Claude and me, we’re pretty stuck on the encryption thing. It either needs to be refactored or I’m just going to give up.

The NVMe in my big HP Workstation died yesterday. I’m not sure why other than it was cheap and used from eBay. I, however, decided to treat this as an opportunity instead of crying in my beard.

Something I’ve planned for a while now, but had been putting off, is a significant refactoring of my home lab. My setup consisted of a huge HP workstation with a Xeon processor and 128GB of ECC RAM. It was entirely overkill for what I used it for, and it was costing some serious money to keep running around the clock.